The emergence of anti-democratic movements is a central puzzle to social science. We study a novel and rich dataset covering Swedish municipalities during the interwar years and find a strong link between the presence of a military garrison and the emergence of fascist parties. We interpret...

This study investigates the effect of participative political institutions (PPIs) that emerged in many central European cities from the late 13th century. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on newly compiled long-run data for the existence of different types of PPIs in 104 cities in...

The emergence of anti-democratic movements is a central puzzle to social science. We study a novel and rich dataset covering Swedish municipalities during the interwar years and find a strong link between the presence of a military garrison and the emergence of fascist parties. We interpret...

On 23 June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a historic referendum. This paper is a reflection on the wider implications of the result, the adequacy of deciding such technical matters through direct democracy means, and the problems related to the...

This paper presents an overview of Slovakia’s democratic development from 1918 to 2012, based on data from key indices and their constituent indicators from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. It analyzes the historical development of the five Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) principles...

Robert Michel's main work is "Political parties. A Sociological Study on the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy", issued in 1911, which is an analysis on the internal organization evolving dynamics of the German Social-Democrat Party (SDP), to which the author was intensely attached for...

In the present essay we introduce the concept of macroculture as a complex of mutually supporting values, norms and beliefs in various areas of human activity, like religion, war, politics, sports etc. in a model. Then, we analyse how some macrocultures that are favorable or the...

This paper starts with the observation that almost all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that military interests are able to coordinate on status-preserving institutional change prior to democratization and therefore prefer political...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Taking account of the potential simultaneity between terror and decentralization, our results show that expenditure...

We study a version of a canonical model of attacks against political regimes where agents have an expressive utility for taking political stances that is scaled by the salience of political decision-making. Increases in political salience can have divergent effects on regime stability depending...