The rise of life expectancy in Europe has been a very uneven process, both in time and space. This paper aims to identify instances in which major political conditions are likely to have influenced the rise of life expectancy, focusing on formation and dissolution of states and supranational blocs and on differences between political regimes (democratic vs. authoritarian non-communist and commu...

The article examines the role of European left parties in politics their countries and Union. author main types parties, program goals electorate. Modern left-wing terms ideological orientation are mostly representatives social democrats, Greens, democratic socialists communists, which roughly corresponds to party coalitions existing Parliament, with exception communists Marxist-Leninist type p...

the last decade of the twentieth century saw the rise of a great number of regimes that cannot be easily classified as either authoritarian or democratic but display some characteristics of both—in short, they are semi-authoritarian regimes. They are ambiguous systems that combine rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy, the existence of some formal democratic institutions, and respect for a...

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) led the corporate attack on labor organization and government regulation in the early twentieth century. Yet NAM’s deep distrust of coordination, in fact, developed years into its organizational life: at its inception, NAM organizers sought mechanisms to coordinate economic and political business activity, and held policy positions that resembled ...

Despite comprehensive reform (Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act) and recent review (Phillips Review in 2007) of party finance in Britain, public opinion of party finance remains plagued by perceptions of corruption, undue influence from wealthy donors, carefree and wasteful spending and, more generally, from the perception that there is just ‘too much money’ in politics. In this ...

odels of bilateral contracting, such as the canonical holdup model, typically assume that third parties are not available. Given this assumption, the equilibrium outcome is not first-best efficient if contracts can be renegotiated. To be more specific, suppose an architect and a builder must cooperate to build a building. The quality of the building will depend on three things: the quality of t...

The communist norm requires that scientists widely share the results of their work. Where did this norm come from, and how does it persist? Michael Strevens provides a partial answer to these questions by showing that scientists should be willing to sign a social contract that mandates sharing. However, he also argues that it is not in an individual credit-maximizing scientist’s interest to fol...

Excerpt] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published 150 years ago in London in February 1848, is one of the most influential and widely-read documents of the past two centuries. The historian A. J. P. Taylor (1967, p. 7) has called it a "holy book," and contends that because of it, "everyone thinks differently about politics and society." And yet, despite its enormous influence in the 20th...

The Afghan resistance sees its struggle more in terms of a "holy war" (jihad) than as a war of national liberation. In a country in which reference to the "nation" is avery recent phenomenon, where the State is perceived as exterior to society and where allegiance belongs to the local community, Islam remains the sole point of reference for all Afghans. It is only in the southern Pushtun tribal...