This paper investigates the impact of political leaders' migration experience on the quality of their leadership. We build up an original database on the personal background of 932 politicians who were at the head of the executive power in a developing country over the 1960-2004 period. We put...

We present a new aggregation method - called SVM algorithm - and use this technique to produce novel measures of democracy (186 countries, 1960-2014). The method takes its name from a machine learning technique for pattern recognition and has three notable features: it makes functional...

In "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Robert D. Woodberry (2012) claims that the emergence of stable democracies around the world was influenced by conversionary Protestantism. While Woodberry's historical analysis is exhaustive, the accompanying empirical evidence suffers from severe...

Democracy usually is identified by the right to vote. However, in recent times voting procedures have been criticized, as they seemingly do not guarantee that all parts of the population have an adequate voice in the established political process. We suggest invigorating an old but nearly...

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. Nondemocratic regimes need the use of force in order to remain in power, but this creates a political moral hazard problem; a strong military may not simply work as an...

The implications political regimes upon trade policy are going to be praxeologically deduced and used in order to provide an alternative historical interpretation of protectionism and free trade throughout Western history, starting from the Middle Ages right up to the creation of the WTO/GATT....

This paper reassesses the political reaction in the United States to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in terms of economics and evolutionary biology. The fact that war and its threat were ever-present in human evolution resulted in two social propensities that render society vulnerable...

This paper investigates the impact of political leaders' migration experience on the quality of their leadership. We build up an original database on the personal background of 932 politicians who were at the head of the executive power in a developing country over the 1960-2004 period. We put...

Whomever paid for the Mars trip (and related preparations) will get to determine who will govern Mars, and how? Or, will that be the case? For example, on what principles of governance? Is it going to be a democracy (whatever that may have meant), dictatorship of spacesuits, or inmates of the...

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...