International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

We exploit three natural experiments in Argentina in order to determine if legislative malapportionment is the cause of the biases existing in the country's federal tax sharing scheme. We find that legislative malapportionment has had no significant effect on the federal tax sharing scheme...

This paper discusses and proposes random selection as a component in decision-making in society. Random procedures have played a significant role in history, especially in classical Greece and the medieval city-states of Italy. We examine the important positive features of decisions by random...

We explore the effect of oil import price shocks on political outcomes using a worldwide dataset on elections of chief executives. Oil import price shocks cause a reduction in the odds of reelection of incumbents, an increase in media chatter about fuel prices, and an increase in non-violent...

Populist movements increasingly challenge liberal Western market democracies. Populism can be explained only in part by phenomena like globalization and digitization producing winners and losers in economic terms. Growing feelings of alienation from the market-democratic system and the perceived...

The Internet has significantly expanded worldwide, changing our relationship with the world, and the way we communicate, educate, and inform ourselves. Africa, despite having a very low number of fixed-broadband subscriptions for 100 inhabitants, has not escaped the Internet phenomenon, as the...