Blogs are probably most associated with the high profile postings of a few highly popular bloggers who debate or comment on major news stories, but for each ‘A-lister’ there are numerous faceless bloggers who write about their own daily lives and/or interests. Hence it is interesting to investigate the extent to which an event with extensive media coverage, such as the London attacks, is reflec...

This article forges an explicit link between an objective measure of political constraints and variation in cross-national growth rates. It derives a new measure of political constraints from a simple spatial model of political interaction that incorporates information on the number of independent branches of government with veto power and the distribution of preferences across and within those...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption and determines whether electoral competition can eliminate political corruption. We obtain some strikin...

Legitimacy is always considered an important concept among basic topics of political science; since it has been already posed as the prerequisite of acceptability for exercising of power in the societies through history. Accordingly, all of the political philosophies made efforts to establish an intellectual apparatus that enforces the fundamentals of governance, dealt to some extent with the i...

Transaction-cost politics views economic policymaking as a political process constrained by asymmetric information and limited commitment possibilities. This paper examines some implications of this perspective for less-developed countries considering policy reform. It emphasizes that success requires reform of the rules and institutions which govern the strategic interaction of the participant...