The Middle East is the most terror-prone region of the world. It is almost exclusively governed by autocratic regimes that often explicitly refer to Islam to justify some of their policies. In this paper, we analyse government reactions to terrorist events in the states that are members of the...

This paper explores the dynamics of press freedom around events that threaten or oust the incumbent regime of a country. While democracies on average grant the press more freedom, our theoretical starting point is that democracies and autocracies may have similar incentives to protect the power...

Previous studies of policy responses to economic crises argue that crises may lead to more interventionist policy but also cause deregulation. The empirical evidence in previous studies is equally mixed. The present paper argues that whether or not governments implement more or less...

Social trust has been identified as a catalyst for reforms. We take the literature further in two ways. First, we make a fine-grained analysis of mechanisms through which social trust enables liberalizing reforms - by strengthening the ability to overcome obstacles in the political process...

While previous research examines how institutions matter for general life satisfaction and how specific institutions embodying equal rights for gay people matter for the life satisfaction of gays, we combine these two issues to analyze how the latter type of institutions relates to general life...

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich certain (already rich) people at the expense...

This paper asks to what extent life satisfaction among immigrants remains similar to that in their country of origin and to what extent it adapts to that in their country of residence. We employ data from 29,000 immigrants in the European Social Survey to estimate the relative importance of...

This paper explores the dynamics of press freedom around events that threaten or oust the incumbent regime of a country. While democracies on average grant the press more freedom, our theoretical starting point is that democracies and autocracies may have similar incentives to protect the power...

Government debt is high in most developed countries, and while it may reflect short-term attempts to kick-start the economy in times of crisis through fiscal stimulus, the longer-term consequences risk being detrimental to investment and growth. This makes it important to identify factors that...

This paper explores the dynamics of press freedom around events that threaten or oust the incumbent regime of a country. While democracies on average grant the press more freedom, our theoretical starting point is that democracies and autocracies may have similar incentives to protect the power...