In this paper we show that in highly unequal societies, different societal groups may support a rent-seeking dicator serving their interests better than the median voter in a democratic regime. Importantly, it is the stakes of dictator in the economy, in the form of capital ownership, that...

Democracy has been the primary focus of our efforts to understand the impact of domestic institutions on processes of international conflict. In this article, we examine how a particular nondemocratic regime type, postrevolutionary states, affects military capabilities and war outcomes. Drawing...

Scholars have long attempted to make distinctions among states based on regime type. Two of the most commonly used measures by both scholars and policymakers are the Freedom House Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties measures. Despite their popularity, little is known about...

This article aims to demonstrate that differences in the two major datasets can significantly affect the results of predictions of mass political killing. Mass political killing (such as Hitler's killing of some six million Jews, or the Rwanda genocide of 1994) has been studied for decades with...

Recent years have seen a surge of literature examining how political institutions influence the risk of civil conflict. A comparatively neglected aspect of this debate has been the heterogeneous impact of different forms of authoritarianism. In this article, I theoretically and empirically...

Tsebelis’ veto players theory predicts that legislative veto players constrain the executive’s political decisions because their approval is needed to implement policy change. This study extends the veto players argument into international conflict literature, specifically in...

Reporting bias – the media’s tendency to systematically underreport or overreport certain types of events – is a persistent problem for participants and observers of armed conflict. We argue that the nature of reporting bias depends on how news organizations navigate the...

The aid effectiveness principles have limits if the recipient is fragile. The problem of relevance exists if the recipient has an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. In situations of weak statehood and fragility, a large portion of aid would likely bypass the state because of high demand for...