Does voter turnout affect policy outcomes? This long-standing question has been re-visited recently with close empirical scrutiny. These studies, however, commonly suffer from a problem of omitting variables correlated with both causal and outcome variables; specifically, immeasurable political...

Does reapportionment in a legislature affect policy outcomes? We examine this question from a comparative perspective by focusing on reapportionment associated with the electoral reform in Japan. First, we show that the reform of 1994 resulted in an unprecedented degree of equalization in...

A successful post-conflict reconstruction is characterized by a self-sustaining liberal political, economic and social order that does not rely on external support. It is argued that the extent of reconstructed orders is constrained by their institutional prerequisites. These prerequisites - a...