In the first half of the twentieth century, dramatic developments in physics came to be viewed as revolutionary, apparently requiring a complete overthrow of previous theories. British physicists were keen to promote quantum physics and relativity theory as exciting and new, but the rhetoric of revolution threatened science’s claim to stability and its prestigious connections with Isaac Newton....

The use of systematic and organized violence to effect political change is a generalized phenomenon around the world. Singer and Small (1994) put at 137 the number of civil wars that killed at least 1,000 during the period from 1820 to 1990. The death toll from civil wars fought after World War II has been estimated at a minimum of 16.2 million (Fearon and Laitin 2003). According to the data ga...

In addition to the internal risk of deposition, which is modeled using selectorate politics (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003), leaders risk being deposed by mass political movements such as revolutions. Leaders reward supporters with either public goods, which reward the whole of society, improve economic productivity, and increase the ability of revolutionaries to organize, or private goods. If ...

before the islamic revolution, iran, like other countries, was consisted of structures. the actions of pahlavi discourse invoked the tensions within these structures and led to the formation of gaps and conflicts in the structures. such circumstances raised structural imbalance that put pressure on social forces and promoted the view that current situation was unjust, inefficient and backward. ...

The self-limiting revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe offer an alternative paradigm of revolutionary change that is reminiscent more of the American struggle for independence in 1776 than the Jacobin tendencies that grew out of the French Revolution of 1789. In order to understand the contradictory impulses of the revolutions of 1989—the desire for a radical renewal and the concern for preser...

e institutional and path-dependency approaches used to explain innovation in Britain during the Industrial Revolution generate prediction errors when applied elsewhere. Here, innovation is modeled as a dynamic coordination game with multiple equilibria. Tests of the resulting propositions based on 116 successful inventions between 1700 and 1849 suggest that there were two distinct categories of...