It is generally accepted that in established democracies, citizens' perception of political corruption is corrosive of support for the government and even the regime. What is less clear is that perceived corruption has the same effect in authoritarian regimes, where democratic norms of official...

U.S. leaders interpret the attacks on September 11, 2001 as acts of war against western civilization. They find that exceptional security measures are necessary to protect the liberal democratic way of life. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework that places post-9/11 exceptionalism...

Deindustrialization is regularly invoked in studies of advanced capitalism, yet a consideration of both its historical causes and its differential impacts on political outcomes in countries over time remains elusive. Adopting a historical institutional approach, this paper seeks to link the...

Much of the recent literature on civil war treats explanations rooted in political and economic grievances with considerable suspicion, and many empirical studies conclude that there is no relationship between ethnic diversity or measures of inequality and political violence to support such...

What does governance mean for the World Bank (WB) and how far does the organization influence the world community with this concept? The World Bank primarily focused on economic aspects of governance in the 1980s and progressively moved to its political dimensions in the end of 1990s. The paper...

In the last few years, numerous econometric studies have unearthed evidence of donor influence over the geographic distribution of funds from international financial institutions (IFIs). Scholars are now beginning to use quantitative methods to delve into the details of donor influence to...

This paper examines the variation in state response to ethno-nationalist secessionism. When faced with independence movements, states respond either with violent repression, or with peaceful concessions. I argue that a state’s vulnerability to external security threats drives its response. If...

Does democratic governance expand wealth and prosperity? There is no consensus about this issue despite the fact that for more than half a century, rival theories about the regime-growth relationship have been repeatedly tested against the empirical evidence, using a variety of cases, models and...

I use the Tragedy of the Commons dilemma to analyze a core difficulty in explaining the emergence of dilemma-solving institutions: On the one hand, institutions must induce individuals to act differently than they would in the absence of the institution in question (or the institution would fail...

We suggest a new approach to narrowing the field in elections, based on the deservingness of candidates to be contenders in a runoff, or to be declared one of several winners. Instead of specifying some minimum percentage (e.g., 50) that the leading candidate must surpass to avoid a runoff...