We challenge the widely accepted proposition that democratic leaders are more accountable than autocratic leaders. We argue that a winning coalition's abilities to monitor and sanction a leader increase as its size decreases. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that autocratic leaders are more accountable than democratic leaders due to the monitoring and sanctioning advantages of smaller coalitions relative to larger coalitions. Many international relations scholars hold that the conventional wisdom explains important variation in leaders' behavior during crisis bargaining and in the outcomes of international disputes.We evaluate our theory and the conventional perspective by examining rival predictions regarding leaders' ability to avoid incurring audience costs by conducting crisis negotiations and making concessions outside their coalitions' view. A reassessment of US-USSR diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a favored case of the

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Judicial confirmations are often the subject of political debate. Recently, much of the discussion has focused on the Trump administration's and Republican senators' success in nominating and confirming federal judges. Irrespective of this success, consistently growing caseloads continue to overburden many federal district courts, leading to unnecessary cost and delay. This essay surveys the current judicial capacity crisis in many district courts and Congress' struggles to resolve it. It then turns to short-term solutions that courts have used to alleviate their expanding burdens and highlights the federal courts' most successful short-term solution: the federal magistrate judge system. This essay then introduces the origins and modern structure of the federal magistrate judge system and argues that, until Congress is able to pass substantive judgeship legislation, an ambitious expansion of this program would best serve struggling district courts.