Existing work on propaganda finds that its extremeness and effectiveness vary in sometimes puzzling ways in response to major environmental factors such as repression, diversion, and crisis. Formal models of propaganda generally examine these factors in isolation, rendering a comprehensive understanding difficult; moreover, they often impose rationality assumptions at odds with experimental findings. I propose a behavioral game-theoretic model of propaganda in which, consistent with psychology research, citizens are cognitively constrained and their skepticism toward propaganda is endogenous. These cognitive constraints generate a trade-off for the propagandist between motivating extreme action through extreme statements and triggering citizen skepticism. I then incorporate repression, diversion, and crisis into the model. I synthesize, and explain, empirical findings on the relationships between these factors by showing how each affects both the citizen's level of skepticism and the propagandist's calculus.

How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economic opportunities in West Germany increased, the number of East German exit prisoners – political prisoners arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally – also rose. The study's causal identification strategy exploits occupation-specific differences in the changing economic opportunities between East and West Germany. Using differential access to West German television, it also sheds light on the informational mechanism underlying the main finding; cross-national data are leveraged to present evidence of the external validity of the estimates. The results highlight how global economic disparities affect politics within authoritarian regimes.

A standard view of elections is that parties should choose moderate platforms to maximize their probability of winning. However, some parties embrace more extreme positions. These parties often feature an energized activist group that is optimistic about the party's probability of winning – contradicting the standard view. We build and analyze a game‐theoretic model of electoral competition that simultaneously explains the prevalence of extreme platforms and activists' biased beliefs. We show that the activists' interests and role within the campaign induce them to optimally misperceive the interests of the electorate because such a bias shifts the party's equilibrium policy platform closer to the activist faction's ideal point. We also find that even though the more optimistic an activist faction, the more it learns from electoral defeat, the divergence between activist and elite beliefs may worsen after a loss.

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