"The theory of the "enabling condition" explains how favorable political conditions can facilitate economic upgrade. Through a case study comparison involving five single party, authoritarian regimes, it concludes that China's unfavorable political situation augurs ill for its ambitions to build...

This research explores the origins of the variation in the prevalence and nature of political institutions across globe. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variation in the inherent diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of Homo...

Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an...