Rent seeking is an attempt to distort prices in order to achieve a contrived transfer. Where rent seeking is on the rampage, there is a serious distortion of incentives. Investing resources in distributional struggles and political conflict looks rewarding, whereas increasing or improving output...

It has been proposed that preponderance of power is favorable to the prevention of war, whereas relative equality of power is conducive to war. Here, the “preponderance promotes peace†proposition is applied to dyads. The author modifies this proposition by claiming that only...

In this article we attempt to replicate the hypothesis tested by Rummel and others that external and internal conflict are unrelated. We do this using data for 125 nations for the years 1966-1967. As did Rummel, we use exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis; in addition, we also...

Propositions about determinants of political violence at the cross-national level are derived from rational action theory and tested across the entire population of independent states in the mid-1970s. The data support two rational action hypotheses: Rates of domestic political violence are...

Do political decentralisation and inter state competition favour innovation and growth? There has long been a lively debate surrounding this question, going back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This book is a new attempt to test its veracity. The existing literature tends to assume that the...

Most quantitative researchers had agreed that regime type and war involvement are not significantly related to each other until Rummel recently challenged this consensus. According to Rummel, libertarian or democratic states are less intensively involved in foreign conflict and tend to...

Contemporary Western political culture is characterized by three achievements and ideas: (1) the limitation of government or the rule of law; (2) some institutional separation of the economy and of science from government and religion; and (3) popular participation or democracy. The first two...