Citizens' political participation in protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens' protests, determining the cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests, and allowing a...

This study aims to investigate the demographic, social, and economic drivers of rising abstention and populist electoral success in Italy in 2018. The Italian case is unique in the euro area because, in the political elections of 4 March 2018, two parties usually identified as left-wing and...

Why do some democratic governments react weakly to terrorism, while apparently similar regimes react harshly? More generally, what are the determinants of governments' reaction to terrorism? And, what are the determinants of terrorism and of its dynamic? In this paper we focus on domestic...

The literature on the functioning of autocracies has not analyzed the consequences of the fact that policies have multiple dimensions and that these dimensions are perceived with different bias by people. This fact is obviously more striking in autocracies where the public perception of...

There are two main categories of antiterrorism policies - active and defensive. Active measures target the terrorists directly, and by weakening their ability to operate, are a sort of public good. On the other hand, defensive measures try to protect a potential target. Unilateral defensive...

Outcomes observed in laboratory experiments on contests are often not consistent with the results expected by theoretical models, with phenomena that frequently occur like overbidding or persisting oscillations in strategic choices. Several explanations have been suggested to understand such...

The aim of this paper is to provide a specific point of view on the protests that have characterized the Arab countries from December 2010 and are still going on. To understand some of the reasons behind these events, I propose a sequential game with asymmetric information on the likelihood of...

This paper deals with the problem of specifying a general learning model, the rationality of which is not situation dependent. I propose a very general model of adaptive learning suitable to study learning problems in games with imperfect monitoring, such as extensive form games. In this context...

This paper provides a general framework for analysing rational learning in strategic situations in which the players have private priors and private information. The author analyses the behaviour of Bayesian rational players both in a repeated game and in a recurrent game when they are uncertain...

This paper provides a genera1 framework to analyze rational learning in strategic situations where the players have private information and update their private priors collecting data through optimal experimentation. The theory of statistica1 inference for stochastic processes and of Markovian...