2021
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Strategic Replacements and Popular Support: Political Consequences of Authoritarian Replacement of Elected Officials (Forthcoming JOP)
This paper presents a game-theoretic model to analyze a hybrid form of governance, combining competitive local elections with the central government's unilateral power to intervene and replace elected officials. The equilibrium analysis highlights the implications of the central government's trade-off between local officials' competence and their partisan affiliation. I show that the key consequences of this trade-off include 1) strategic retentions of underperforming opposition incumbents and 2) replacements of pro-regime incumbents, even when their expected competence exceeds that of their electoral replacements. I demonstrate, then, that this institutional framework induces a higher proportion of replaced opposition officials compared to co-partisans of the regime and encourages the population to electorally support candidates affiliated with the central government party in prior open-seat elections. The observed local electoral performance of the regime, under the influence of this hybrid institution, consistently surpasses its true popularity, even in the presence of competitive elections.
2023
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Advice and Competence (AJPS, 2024)
We develop a theory of policy advice that focuses on the relationship between the competence of the advisor (e.g., an expert bureaucracy) and the quality of advice that the leader may expect. We describe important tensions between these features present in a wide class of substantively important circumstances. These tensions point to the presence of a trade-off between receiving advice more often and receiving more informative advice. The optimal realization of this trade-off for the leader sometimes induces her to prefer advisors of limited competence -- a preference that, we show, is robust under different informational assumptions. We consider how institutional tools available to leaders affect preferences for advisor competence and the quality of advice they may expect to receive in equilibrium.
2024
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Verifiable Advice from a Conservative Agency
The strategic context of bureaucratic advice to policymakers often takes the form of a disclosure game in which the sender has an ideal action. We characterize conditions under which this game has sequential equilibria in which the sender adopts a non-monotonic disclosure strategy, implying partial disclosure. Further, multiple sequential equilibria exist under some conditions, including a fully revealing equilibrium and multiple partially revealing equilibria that vary in extent of disclosure. We show that these equilibria are strictly rankable by actors' welfare, as well as by their relative robustness to belief perturbations. We show that for sender preferences that are sufficiently close to the expected value of the state, the most robust equilibrium is partially revealing and in that equilibrium, the sender's disclosure sets are increasing in the preference divergence between the sender and the receiver.
2022
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Repressions and Information
2022
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Promotion Dynamics and Identity Influence in Hierarchical Bureaucratic Systems
In this game-theoretic model, I study the dynamic interactions between principals, supervisors, and bureaucrats within hierarchical bureaucratic systems. I explore these interactions under two distinct institutional promotion frameworks and examine how bureaucrats' social identity influences their career advancements. I demonstrate that when bureaucratic promotions are success-oriented, and a bureaucrat is promoted solely based on her performance, supervisors who value promoting bureaucrats with whom they share a social identity (in-group bureaucrats) tend to assign tasks to these in-group bureaucrats. This preference arises because every task assignment unveils bureaucrats' true competence, and targeting in-group bureaucrats improves their career prospects. However, under a failure-averse promotion rule where a bureaucrat is promoted when she does not fail the assignment, and one bureaucrat's failure contributes to another's advancement, supervisors may disproportionately assign tasks to out-group bureaucrats to indirectly advance the careers of in-group bureaucrats. Furthermore, I demonstrate that while failure-averse promotion rule can enhance the overall efficiency of the bureaucracy by encouraging supervisors to assign tasks in a way that maximizes successful task completion, it can also make it more challenging for the principal to design a supervisor retention scheme that guarantees equal task assignment compared to a success-oriented promotion rule. As a result, the contrast between equality and efficiency is more pronounced under the failure-averse promotion rule compared to the success-oriented promotion rule.
2020
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The Cost of the Information: Flexibility-Information Trade-off
When confronted with exogenous and unexpected economic shocks, the regime redistributes the burden of the imposed costs between political elites and the general public. In non-democracies, this governmental chore is toughened by the need to learn the preference of citizens, as communications between the general public and the governing body are imped by a lack of fair elections. The Leader of the regime, thus, may decide to share some of its decision-making power by co-opting independent officials in order to acquire information about voters' preferences necessary for the Leader's survival. I construct a formal model where I describe conditions that will encourage the Leader of a non-democratic country to co-opt both independent and loyal officials in a legislative body. I show that the Leader allocates more decision-making power to more independent officials when, counterintuitively, officials loyal to the Leader are more eager to enforce policies the Leader favors. When loyal officials are policy-oriented, learning voters' preference becomes the Leader's main priority, encouraging him to delegate power in exchange for knowledge.