In November 2014, Vladimir Putin declared that he had no intentions to become Russia's president-for-life. In spite of Putin's assurances, this public statement has inevitably sent an alarming signal to society. In November 2014, a court of justice seized the company Bashneft from Vladimir...

The state spending structure – correlation on pure and mixed public goods reflects the making of fundamental choices about state functions. Are pure public good "defense" normal quality provision compatible in Long Run with heavy spending on social sector (i.e. compatible with mixed public...

Ratings of institutional quality are widely known and used in academic literature. Among such ratings are some whose compilation procedure took decades to perfect. Dozens of assessments have been accumulated, pertaining to a large and growing list of countries. These ratings use expert...

Modern approaches to immigration policies in most developed countries make the problems of adaptation for new arrivals more severe. Protracted failure to adapt among immigrants (and even of their descendants) turns into recurrent problems vis-à-vis the law, and even extends into large scale...

Scientists are human. As such, they are prone to bias based on political and economic interests. While conflicts of interest are usually associated with private funding, research funded by public sources is also subject to special interests and therefore prone to bias. Such bias may lead to...

Government interventions into the traditional functioning of the family became an important factor in the recent family crisis in developed countries (fewer marriages, more divorces, and lower birth rate). This hypothesis has been tested statistically for the period from 1800 to 2010 with data...

In the main paper we propose two new indicators of de facto constitutional constraints. The indicators are based on the presence or the absence of easily observable political events. This makes the proposed measures relatively objective and easy to verify relative to the most widely used...