Regressions and tests performed on data from Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) 2004 survey show that personal or household experience of bribery is not a good predictor of perceptions held about corruption among the general population. In contrast, perceptions about...

Over the past quarter century, an unprecedented and often unanticipated wave of democratization has spread over large parts of the world. While some skepticism is reasonable regarding both the level and durability of many of the new experiments of democratization, the direction and scope of...

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the...

A well-known model in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors who are able to affect the behavior of their followers. Hence, opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they can exercise this power by influencing their followers choice of...

Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: there are many examples of reforms that started off successfully but nevertheless lost public support, and vice versa. We show that learning dynamics can rationalize this apparent paradox, the reason being that the process of...