We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting...

Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, going from the Arab Spring to UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. Beyond all political consideration of consequences in terms of freedom of expression, the present paper adopts a social simulation...

This paper develops a simple model to show how social insurance affects the desire to revolt against property rights. It then tests for the effect of social insurance on revolt by introducing a panel data set derived from surveys across 200,000 randomly sampled individuals from the 1970s to the...

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). In this paper, we study its role in mobilization. We assume that social media allow potential participants to observe the individual participation decisions of others, while...

This paper develops a model to show how social insurance affects revolt against property rights and the consequences for the optimal design of the welfare state. It then tests for the effect of social insurance on revolt by introducing a panel data set derived from surveys across over 200,000...

A fundamental question for economists is whether more income reduces the chance of revolt. To provide answers a large literature has used aggregate level data on actual conflict. This paper takes a different approach by using micro-data sets based on surveys of revolutionary support across...

Despite the extensive literature on armed conflict, little is known about the medium- and long-term effects of electoral violence on children’s health. This paper shows that electoral violence of low scale yet recursive nature has a detrimental impact on the height of children and adolescents...