In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part paper surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus is on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parti...

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people’s private lives. In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the eme...

Past research using self-report questionnaires administered to ordinary citizens demonstrates that value priorities differ as a function of one’s political ideology, but it is unclear whether this conclusion applies to political elites, who are presumably seeking to appeal to very broad constituencies. We used quantitative methods of textual analysis to investigate value-laden language in a col...

On conventional measures, modern Sweden has rapid social and economic mobility. Analyzing surname distributions among Swedish elites attorneys, physicians, university students, and academicians this paper shows that conventional measures greatly overstate underlying social mobility rates. The Swedish elite of 1700 is still an elite, and is becoming average only slowly. The b measuring status pe...

Artifacts of cold-hammered native gold have been discovered in a secure and undisturbed Terminal Archaic burial context at Jiskairumoko, a multicomponent Late Archaic-Early Formative period site in the southwestern Lake Titicaca basin, Peru. The burial dates to 3776 to 3690 carbon-14 years before the present (2155 to 1936 calendar years B.C.), making this the earliest worked gold recovered to d...

Traditional Medicare is being threatened from two political directions. The current Republican coalition, on the right, simply dislikes social insurance in principle. It seeks privatization for its own sake. Another perspective, centrist and well established among political and economic elites, worries that the program is "unaffordable," whatever its basic merits. Defenders of traditional Medic...

Amid the frenzied consumption of villas, clothing, technology, and services characteristic of up-scale living in Amman, the most conspicuous of the conspicuous consumers are popularly identified as wealthy Palestinians who entered Jordan in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This presentation will focus on these “returnees” to Jordan – some of whom had never lived in Jordan pri...

The discussion focuses on three themes. One is the divergence between positions of business associations and concerns of individual entrepreneurs regarding several determinants of investment. Another issue is under what conditions economic growth can be achieved under democracy; why market reforms have generated little private investment in many cases, and which government policies and politica...

B acteria are highly plastic: a single genotype can display a range of phenotypes in response to different environmental conditions. Strikingly, there can be phenotypic variation even in the absence of environmental variation due to the stochastic nature of gene expression (Raj & van Oudenaarden, 2008). As a result, cells in bacterial populations typically differ from each other in their molecu...

There is a growing literature on news media representations of alcohol-related issues. However, current scholarship has neglected critical political economic frameworks to interpret media coverage of alcohol. This paper presents such a framework that conceives of news organisations as corporations that share the values and interests of political and economic elites. The media are thus expected ...