Previous research, which has focused mostly on pre-1990 dynamics, has shown that sanctions have a negative impact on the level of democracy in targeted authoritarian countries. Given this finding, it is puzzling that democratization has become the most common goal of sanctions issued against...

The survival of eight monarchies during the "Arab Uprisings" of 2011 has put center stage the fundamental question about the durability of this subtype of authoritarian regime. Seen from a broader historical perspective, however, the idea that monarchies have an inherent advantage in retaining...

Although much attention is paid to the Caspian region with regard to energy issues, the domestic consequences of the region's resource production have so far constituted a neglected field of research. A systematic survey of the latest research trends in the economic and political causalities of...

The informal sector (IS) plays a significant role in developing countries viz. the provision of employment, income and supplying ignored markets. However, working and employment conditions within the sector are still poor. Its expansion and changing structures have thus drawn the attention of...

This article aims to evaluate to what extent the Argentine Senate was able to fulfil its constitutional function of controlling the Executive's prerogative to nominate judges between 1983 and 2006, as well as to examine the factors that influenced the exercise of this role. To do so, the paper...

This paper builds on institutional analysis to generate new conclusions about the economic viability of federalism. It does so by suggesting that Weingast´s seminal model of marketpreserving federalism falls short of accounting for the poor fiscal performance of multitiered systems in the...

Conventional wisdom holds that ethnicity provides the social cleavage for voting behav-iour and party affiliation in Africa. Because this is usually inferred from aggregate data of national election results, it might prove to be an ecological fallacy. The evidence based on individual data from...

It is generally acknowledge that a higher degree of party and party system institutionalisation is positively correlated with the consolidation of democracy. It is, thus, useful to compare different levels and types of insititutionalisation. In this article the distinction made by Levitsky...

Scholars of institutional design attribute large importance to the choice of new institutions. The comparative analysis of how Rwanda and Zambia crafted their new electoral systems and the systems of government regards procedural, structural and rational choice variables which may influence the...

The institutionalization of political parties is said to be important for democratic development, but its measurement has remained a neglected area of research. We understand the institutionalization of political organizations as progress in four dimensions: roots in society, level of...