Social Science Job Candidate

Why do governments hold elections that bare no credibility? What explains variation in repression levels across non-democratic elections? While the literature has suggested many explanations to account for the occurrence of non-democratic elections, it has not yet provided a theory that would ex¬plain both the incidence of such elections and the variation in their degree of competitiveness. In this paper, we build an informational model of non¬democratic elections explaining when elections may stabilize an autocrat's rule and when they may fail to do so. We argue that to achieve stability, elections must yield a sufficiently high vote-share for the incumbent and be optimally repressive. The degree of optimal repression is shown to increase in the incumbent's expected popularity. The model is then applied to explain some stylized facts about non-democratic elections and to derive a set of novel re¬search hypotheses about the effects of non-democratic elections, variation in electoral repression, and fraud technology. Further, we test two such hypotheses empirically. First, employing an original dataset on political arrests in the Soviet Union, we study how elections affect the dynamics of political dissent. We find that even if elections present no choice, they reduce the expression of anti-government sentiments. Second, using several cross-national datasets, we find that (counter-intuitively) politically secure autocrats hold more repressive elections than those who are insecure. Thus, autocrats hold unfree and unfair elections not because they are afraid of strong competition but rather because they do not believe that such strong competition exists.