This paper provides a general framework for analyzing political (in)stability in comparative political systems. It distinguishes different subgroups of a society, some of which have a potential for pursuing a redistribution of wealth in its broadest sense via constitutional or non-constitutional...

We develop a simple model of an insurrection market based on a kleptocratic politico-economic institutional setting, within which a certain government elite holds both all central government position and all productive assets. The kleptocratic setting provokes the appearance of insurrection...

In the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, monetary policy played a subordinate role, there were no capital-market institutions and the banking system was single-tier. All this has to be changed in the transition to a market economy. The example of Hungary, which abolished the...

We assess Gordon Tullock's work on dictatorship and revolutions using a common analytic framework that captures the dynamics of mutually reinforcing perceptions within a potentially rebelling subgroup of a population. We can reconstruct all of Tullock's central findings but we also find him...

We hypothesize that, in certain regime types, winning coalitions have an incentive for helping a deprived population solving the collective action problem that may otherwise restrain them in revolting against an incumbent. Recent selectorate literature holds that members of a winning coalition...

The theory presented in this paper explains democratic transitions on the basis of rentmaximizing political leaders that aim at improving the credibility of post-constitutional policy making by way of introducing a decentralized democratic politico-institutional structure. They face an incentive...

We explore the supply side of the market for suicide bombers. While the strategic edge of suicide attacks for certain terrorist organizations has been thoroughly explored, the motivation of the suppliers remains quite mysterious. Following a review of existing theoretical approaches and...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...