The paper proposes a mechanism explaining how elections may stabilize an autocratic regime even if they are evidently unfree and unfair. Instead of being meaningless rituals, non-democratic elections can help the autocrats in managing and communicating the public information about the regime's...

In this paper I advance an explanation of the social origins of cocaine trafficking in Colombia in which two thresholds are distinguish. The first threshold occurs when the knowledge and the willingness for a specific criminal activity reproduce faster than the enforcement capacity of the...

This article explores Protestantism's inadvertent, historic role in dispersing elite power and spurring democracy. Economic and political elites typically hoard resources and perpetuate class distinction. Conversionary Protestants undermined this social reproduction because they wanted everyone...

The concepts of sovereignty and power provide a leitmotif in Krasner's contributions to international relations. The incisive and original insights of sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy” have helped illuminate important dilemmas in world politics. But how states manage dilemmas of...

Through new commentaries on the polemical Confucian classic, the Rituals of Zhou, Southern Song (1127-1279) political thinkers redefined good government through a fundamental re-interpretation of the ancient classics. They changed the constitutional schemes in the Rituals of Zhou and formulated...

This paper makes a contribution to the research agenda on institutionalizing ideas, a subject related to but different than establishing an idea's causal power. It treats idea institutionalization as the dependent variable and argues that the practices actors use to determine an idea's meaning...

Abstract: The future of international politics hinges on the behavior of the rising powers. Today, all eyes are on non-Western rising powers, most notably China and India. When the rising powers are examined as a class of states, two empirical trends emerge. First, these states are not pursuing...

The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza conceives of power as a capacity of bodies for affecting, and being affected by, other bodies. While this is in part a theory of power as capability, it completely departs from theories of power as domination. Power always involves a...

Political scientists and political theorists often take it for granted that democracy requires equality in political power among citizens. Extending this intuition to the question of what makes collective deliberation democratic, some suggest that deliberative fairness requires equality of...