Reinterpreting Authoritarian Populisms: The Elitist Plebeian Vision of State

Eye guidance in natural vision: reinterpreting salience.

Models of gaze allocation in complex scenes are derived mainly from studies of static picture viewing. The dominant framework to emerge has been image salience, where properties of the stimulus play a crucial role in guiding the eyes. However, salience-based schemes are poor at accounting for many aspects of picture viewing and can fail dramatically in the context of natural task performance. T...

Institutions and Bribery in an Authoritarian State

Scholars have suggested that corruption could serve as a substitute for property-protecting institutions in developing countries, but very few empirical studies have been conducted to test this theory. Most existing studies on the determinants of corruption are cross-national, rely on perception-based measures, and focus on economic development, regime type, and market structure as explanatory ...

State Capacity and the Environmental Investment Gap in Authoritarian States

Reinterpreting the Kernel

The reduced game relevant for the consistency of the prekernel is used to reinterpret this solution concept in a way that makes it independent of interpersonal utility comparisons. Based on this reinterpretation, a non-cooperative model is presented that yields in stationary equilibria the prekernel (kernel) for the class of monotonic transferable utility games. Next, we apply the same non-coop...

The Content of Authoritarian Constitutions

“What is the difference,” went an old joke in the Soviet Union, “between the Soviet and U.S. Constitutions? The Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of speech; the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom after speech.” The joke captures the common intuition about the function (or dysfunction, rather) of constitutions in authoritarian regimes. Many other examples abound: citizens of North Korea m...