Research on growing American political polarization and antipathy often studies effects on public institutions and political processes. Less attention has been paid to civil institutions like close familial ties. Using smartphone-tracking data and national precinct electoral results, we show time spent at Thanksgiving dinner fell by 20-30 minutes within politically divided families following th...

Abstract: This study examines how the historical state conditions long-run development, using Vietnam as a laboratory. Northern Vietnam (Dai Viet) was ruled by a strong, centralized state in which the village was the fundamental administrative unit. Southern Vietnam was a peripheral tributary of the Khmer (Cambodian) Empire, which followed a patronclient model with more informal, personalized p...

Political violence, coup d’état, civil wars and inter-state wars, all have fiscal dimensions (and sometimes fiscal causes). Who gets what—public employment and public spending—and who has to pay for it, are questions that raise fundamental issues about the distribution of society's resources. These can only be resolved peacefully by some form of social contract, resting on the foundation of eff...

Ambitious claims have been made about the development benefits of market-based policy instruments for climate mitigation. We examine the implications of forest carbon projects for different aspects of equity and development. We apply a Stakeholder Multi-criteria Analysis to explore the range of stakeholders, their roles, interests and perspectives, to a case study in Mexico. Two aspects of equi...

Introduction On his first day in office, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum urging that the ―[g]overnment should be transparent,‖ and that his administration would ―take appropriate action...to disclose information rapidly.‖ 1 This is just one of the many recent efforts to promote governmental transparency. Since around the 1990s, transparency— accessibility and availability of governme...

Increasing recognition of the value of practice-based or experiential knowledge in natural resource management justifies the creation of a new category of articles in Society & Natural Resources that we are calling Practice-Based Knowledge (PBK). The rationale for focusing on PBK is due to its key role in the emergence of hybrid governance institutions across state, market, and civil society, u...

B EFORE 1985, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa had seen their nominal wage bills expand. This was due, in large part, to a rapid increase in civil service employment—in some countries, the number of civil servants rose by as much as 10 percent a year. This expansion reflected the high degree of government intervention in the economy as well as the need to educate and provide health care to ...

During the last decade, there has been almost constant upheaval in the field of psychiatry ,as the courts have examined and found inadequate many of its procedures and institutions. Formerly, it seemed the legal system did not realize that psychiatry existed, now it appears the psychiatrist must be prepared to defend in court everything he or she does or does not do. Court cases concerning civi...