The encounter with insurgency violence in Iraq and Afghanistan has pressed the US Department of Defense to improve the US military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. It has been argued that this shift may constitute a turning point in the history of the US military, which until now has...

This paper shows that cross country differences in the generosity and the quality of the welfare state are associated with differences in the trustworthiness of their citizens. We show that generous, transparent and efficient welfare states in Scandinavian countries are based on the civicness of...

Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. In practice, initial randomization plans are almost always compromised. Multiple hypotheses are frequently tested. Significant effects are often reported with p-values that do not account for...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...