Societies in Western civilisation enforce their rules through formal institutions such as secularism (SES), whereas in less developed civilisations often rely on informal institutions such as religion (RES). The present paper attempts to explain the determinants of societies’ choice between...

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes, but the causality between trust and institutions is debated. Using new data from a representative sample of 2,668 Swedish expatriates (surveyed in the SOM Institute's Swedish Expatriate Survey 2014), we use variation in time...

A game-theoretic model for the description of political parties' competition in Ukraine is constructed. The system of assumptions, which is formed the basis of the model, is obtained. The electoral situations in Ukraine, as examples, are described by utilizing the proposed model. A set of...

One of the attributes most consistently highlighted in the literature on frontier society is the tendency to spontaneous social organisation. However, despite the resilience of the ‘frontier thesis' within sociology and political science, it has not been subject to a rigorous empirical...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the question of institutions has been propelled to the top of the economic agenda. If the empirical literature has well documented the general relationship between institutions and development, attention is now being concentrated on the actual nature of the...

Modern economics includes two fundamentally different fields, each labelled ‘Cultural Economics’. The first type ‘Cultural Institutions’ deals with a specific sector of the economy and society, namely institutions in the performing arts, visual arts, and other forms of cultural industry....

This article explores the heterogeneous effects of liberal institutions on economic performance depending on the existence of coherent cultural traits. The matching between cultural traits and institutions is what we refer to as cultural-institutional coherence. We study the role played by...

This paper finds evidence that more democratic political institutions increase trust. Second generation immigrants with ancestries from 115 countries are studied within 30 European countries. Comparing individuals born and residing in the same country, those whose father was born in a more...

This research advances the hypothesis that intergenerationally transmitted beliefs act as a mechanism through which pre-colonial institutions influence modern day attitudes towards state figures in African countries. To address the question empirically, I combine contemporary individual-level...