Congruence between the policies implemented by elected representatives and voters’ policy preferences is fundamental to representation and democratic accountability. Can we anticipate a closer alignment between voters’ policy preferences and the policies explicitly adopted by elected representatives on the more electorally significant issues? We address this question using a simple game theoretic model, where we demonstrate that greater salience of a particular issue in elections leads to less congruence between the policies implemented by elected representatives compared to voters’ policy preferences on that very issue. This finding carries significant implications for the connection between electoral salience and representation on valence issues, and has particular relevance for understanding the democratic foundations of security and counterterrorism policies.

How will advances in digital technology affect the future of human rights and authoritarian rule? Media figures, public intellectuals, and scholars have debated this relationship for decades, with some arguing that new technologies facilitate mobilization against the state and others countering that the same technologies allow authoritarians to strengthen their grip on power. We address this issue by analyzing the first game-theoretic model that accounts for the dual effects of technology within the strategic context of preventive repression. Our game-theoretical analysis suggests that technological developments may not be detrimental to authoritarian control and may, in fact, strengthen authoritarian control by facilitating a wide range of human rights abuses. We show that technological innovation leads to greater levels of abuses to prevent opposition groups from mobilizing and increases the likelihood that authoritarians will succeed in preventing such mobilization. These results have broad implications for the human rights regime, democratization efforts, and the interpretation of recent declines in violent human rights abuses.

Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily through preventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized security agencies with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizing and threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyze the moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agent relationship between rulers and their security agents in charge of preventive repression. The model distinguishes two types of moral hazard: “politics,” through which the security agents can exert political influence to increase their payoff by decreasing the ruler’s rents from power, and “corruption,” through which the agents can increase their payoff by engaging in rent-seeking activities that do not decrease the ruler’s rents from power. The surprising conclusion is that both the ruler and the security agent are better off when the only moral hazard problem available is politics rather than when the agent can choose between politics and corruption. We also show that the equilibrium probability of ruler’s survival in power is higher when politics is the only moral hazard available to the agent. These findings lead to our central conclusion that opportunities for corruption undermine authoritarian rule by distorting the incentives of the security agencies tasked with preventing potential threats to an authoritarian ruler’s grip on power.

The institution of judicial review is an important mechanism of holding thegovernment legally accountable, nevertheless questions remain about itsproper role in a separation of powers system. This article analyzes theeffect of judicial review on the policy-making process from an expertiseperspective. It shows that the exercise of non-expert judicial review caninduce more informed policies and that non-expert courts have incentives toexercise judicial review in a manner consistent with institutional concernsfor expertise. In addition to its importance as a mechanism of legalaccountability, our analysis underscores another virtue of judicial review:legal review of governmental policy by non-expert courts can improve theamount of information available for policy making. The article contributesto a literature on the scope and legitimacy of judicial review and hasbroader implications for understanding the effect of institutional checksand balances on the quality of policy making.

This article builds upon the observation that political rulers have to rely upon administrators to implement their policy decisions to uncover two mechanisms by which legal limits, understood in terms of fundamental human rights, can be self-enforcing. We show how the effectiveness of such legal limits depends on administrators’ expectation that rights violations might be costly in the future, when the current ruler’s grip on power ends. We also show how the effectiveness of legal limits depends on administrators’ expectation about each others’ actions when asked to execute an illegal policy, which allows for the possibility that human rights laws might induce compliance by making a particular behavior salient. The analysis contributes to a general understanding of the mechanisms by which law can effectively limit the arbitrary power of the government.

I develop a game-theoretic model of an interaction between an antiterrorist agency and a terrorist organization to analyze how the probability of a terrorist attack varies when the level of privacy protections changes. I derive two implications. First, privacy and security from terrorism need not be in conflict: when accounting for strategic interactions, reducing privacy protections does not necessarily increase security from terrorism. Second, and more important, the antiterrorist agency will always want less privacy. The very agency whose expertise affords it disproportionate influence on policy making will prefer a reduction in privacy protections even when that reduction harms security from terrorism. The analysis has implications for understanding the relationship between government powers and civil liberties in the context of terrorism prevention and times of emergencies more generally.