Arturas Rozenas

Office Insecurity and Electoral Manipulation

Why do governments manipulate elections at varying levels? This paper argues that variation in electoral manipulation can in part be explained by the fundamental trade-off between an incumbent’s desire to signal his popularity and his risk of losing elections. Incumbents with a secure office do not need to convince the opposition of their wide support and avoid electoral risks by manipulating elections. Insecure incumbents, however, want to generate a strong signal of their popularity and adopt a riskier strategy of electoral uncertainty. Measuring office insecurity through the incidence of economic crises, coup threats, and protests, I document robust evidence supporting this proposition in a panel of autocracies and transitional democracies using a variety of measures and statistical designs. Politically insecure incumbents are more likely to hold elections, to tolerate electoral competition, and ultimately to lose in the very competition they permit.

The Political Legacy of Violence : The Long-Term Impact of Stalin's Repression in Ukraine

Political scientists have long been interested in how indiscriminate violence affects the behavior of its victims, yet most research has focused on short-term military consequences rather than long-term political effects. We argue that large-scale violence can have an intergenerational impact on political preferences. Communities more exposed to indiscriminate violence in the past will—in the future—oppose political forces they associate with the perpetrators of that violence. We document evidence for this claim with archival data on Soviet state violence in western Ukraine, where Stalin’s security services suppressed a nationalist insurgency by deporting over 250,000 people to Siberia. Using two causal identification strategies, we show that communities subjected to a greater intensity of deportation in the 1940s are now significantly less likely to vote for “pro-Russian” parties. These findings show that indiscriminate violence systematically reduces long-term political support for the perpetrator.

Strategies of Election Rigging: Trade-Offs, Determinants, and Consequences

Ideally, elections should peacefully allocate political power and remove bad leaders from office. We study how the electoral mechanism performs when the government can rig elections by manipulating the electoral process ex ante and by falsifying election returns ex post. The extent to which elections contribute to peace and accountability depends on how incumbents trade-off between the two strategies given the institutional constraints. An option to falsify election results without being exposed increases the risk of conflict even if that option is not realized in equilibrium, but an option to use ex-ante manipulation reduces the risk of conflict. Imposing constraints on one strategy of election rigging when the incumbent can substitute it with another leads to perverse trade-offs: Constraining ex-ante manipulation raises the risk of conflict, but may improve accountability. Making ex-post falsification more difficult to hide improves the prospect of peace, but worsens accountability.

How Autocrats Manipulate Economic News: Evidence from Russia's State-Controlled Television

Conventional wisdom says that autocrats manipulate news through censorship. But when it comes to economic affairs -- a highly sensitive topics for modern autocrats -- the governments ability to censor information effectively is limited, because citizens can benchmark the official news against their incomes, market prices, and other observables. We propose that instead of censoring economic facts, the media tactically frames those facts to make the government appear as a competent manager. Using a corpus of daily news reports from Russias largest state-owned television network, we document extensive evidence supporting this prediction. Bad news is not censored, but it is systematically blamed on external factors, whereas good news is systematically attributed to domestic politicians. Such selective attribution is used more intensely in politically sensitive times (elections and protests) and when the leadership is already enjoying high popular support -- consistent with the existing theories of information manipulation.

From ballot-boxes to barracks: Votes, institutions, and post-election coups

The military often intervenes in politics shortly after elections. This might be because election results reveal information about the ease with which a coup can succeed. Would-be coup perpetrators use this information to infer whether the incumbent can be removed from office without provoking popular unrest. We argue that the informational content of elections depends on the electoral rules that translate votes into outcomes. In electoral systems that incentivize strategic voting, election returns are less informative about the distribution of political support than in electoral systems that incentivize sincere voting. An extensive battery of statistical tests shows that vote-shares of election winners do not predict coup attempts in plurality systems, which encourage strategic voting, but they do predict coup attempts in non-plurality electoral systems, which do not encourage strategic voting. Thus, incumbents who have performed well in elections face a lower risk of coup attempts, but only in institutional environments where voting results are highly informative about the distribution of political support. We apply this logic to illuminate the decisions of the military to intervene into politics during the famous failed 1936 coup in Spain and the successful 1973 coup in Chile.

Literacy, Information, and Party System Fragmentation in India

A rich theoretical literature argues that, in contradiction to Duverger’s law, the plurality voting rule can fail to produce two-party system when voters do not share their common information about the electoral situation. We present an empirical operationalization and a series of tests of this informational hypothesis in the case of India using constituency- and individual-level data. In highly illiterate constituencies where access to information and information sharing among voters is low, voters often fail to coordinate on the two most viable parties. In highly literate constituencies, voters are far more successful at avoiding vote-wasting—in line with the informational hypothesis. At a microlevel, these aggregate-level patterns are driven by the interaction of individual information and the informational context: In dense informational environments, even low-information voters can successfully identify viable parties and vote for them, but in sparse informational environments, individual access to information is essential for successful strategic voting.

Ruling the Ruling Coalition: Information Control and Autocratic Governance

It is widely agreed that durable authoritarian rule requires power-sharing institutions. But how do autocrats rule once such institution are established? We analyze formally how an autocrat distributes access to information inside his coalition to preserve and consolidate his power. We identify a fundamental trade-off between the durability and the extent of power. Collective governing bodies like the parliament or the cabinet of ministers create a common information environment in which the risk of an internal coup or an external uprising is small, but there are no opportunities to consolidate power. A ruler who faces a low risk of external uprising will forge informational asymmetries in order to divide his coalition and consolidate power, at the risk of losing it all. The model illuminates the varia- tion in the authoritarian styles-of-rule and explains why rulers try to subdue power-sharing institutions despite their commonly purported value.