Much of recent international relations literature argues conflicts to achieve or to frustrate regional dominance will become more virulent in the future. In this context we examine different approaches in international relations theory regarding the role and importance which they attribute to...

Japan’s ruling party is a prime example of a dominant party. While dominant parties in other democracies around the world have lost their grip on power or have even disappeared altogether, the LDP is still going strong. What explains the success of the party? How did the LDP acquire its...

The article provides a critical discussion of the literature on “patrimonialism” and “neopatrimonialism” as far as the use in Development Studies in general or African Studies in particular is concerned. To overcome the catch-all use of the concept the authors present their own...

In the debate on authoritarian resilience, the importance of persuasion to regime legitimacy has been widely acknowledged, yet a conceptual framework explaining the role of persuasion is still lacking. Against this backdrop, we argue that the framing perspective (Benford and Snow 2000) provides...

India has long been regarded as a deal-breaker in international climate negotiations; it was at the summit in Copenhagen that India first abandoned its old strategic line and made a commitment to reduce carbon emissions voluntarily. This shift was accompanied by a proliferation of domestic...

Research on Chinese International Relations (IR) theory has produced a variety of discourses, including post-positivist analyses, contributions by area specialists and China watchers, and articles by Chinese IR scholars. These strands, however, hardly overlap or communicate with each other. To...

Subnational comparative research has received increasing attention as a method that is academically rigorous and offers in]depth knowledge about specific cases. However, the practical difficulties surrounding the selection of cases to be researched and compared are seldom discussed in a...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

Ethnically diverse societies have long faced the challenge of accommodating distinct and often conflictive normative orders within a single polity. Leaving the ideal of a single, ho-mogeneous legal order aside, many Latin American states have recently acknowledged the right of indigenous peoples...

Innovation is widely recognized as a key driver of sustainable economic development. Governments, international organizations, donors and investors are increasingly interested in evaluating the technological capabilities and innovative capacities in developing countries, but often lack...