When the leader of an autocratic regime loses power, one of three things happens. Someone from the incumbent leadership group replaces him, and the regime persists. The incumbent leadership group is replaced by democratically elected leaders. Or the incumbent leadership group loses control to a different group that replaces it with a new autocracy. Scholarship exists on the first two kinds of t...

This paper argues that trade and capital account reforms within autocracies underlie the primacy of foreign currency procurement. A longitudinal comparison of four countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan) in the Middle East and North Africa region shows a historical sequencing of reforms. In the 1960s and 1970s, the foreign exchange scarcity was managed primarily by rising restri...

This study examined the issues on the gagging of Nigerian press with obnoxious laws and it investigated the rate at which the Nigerian media had been prevented from expressing opinion freely by dictatorial leaders who enacted draconian laws to suppress facts and figures. Also, the study identified the major activities of Nigerian press in fighting authoritarianism and in upholding the philosoph...

This paper proposes a new approach by combining the Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) and socio-political process based Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). This approach tries to capture several people involved in community development characteristic. People live in different type of communities: Monarchy, Republic, Autocracy and Multinational. Leadership styles are different in each community. ...

Objectives. We seek to investigate the determinants of corruption in authoritarian polities. We hypothesize that corruption in nondemocratic settings will be greater where the ruling group is personalistic rather than a political party or a military clique and that it will be greater where rulers expect to remain in power longer. We construct a new operationalization of the selectorate theory a...

The processes described under the misleading term “privatization” have been part of a major social restructuring in both the political and economic spheres. Most notably, widespread state failures have resulted in significant changes in the form and functions of the state. This reform encompasses not only the collapse of state socialism, but also crises and radical reforms in developed capitali...

Control of relative timing is critical in ensemble music performance. We hypothesize that players respond to and correct asynchronies in tone onsets that arise from fluctuations in their individual tempos. We propose a first-order linear phase correction model and demonstrate that optimal performance that minimizes asynchrony variance predicts a specific value for the correction gain. In two se...

The prospect of water wars and conflict over water are ideas that are frequently dramatized in media and also studied by scholars. It is well-established that bona fide wars are not started over water resources, but conflict over water does exist and is not well understood. One would suppose, as scholars often do, that dyads composed of two democratic nations would be the best at mitigating con...

The recent Mexican presidential elections and the fiasco that followed demonstrate the difficulties involved in making a fledgling democracy successful. With its unique history of turmoil and bloodshed, corruption and autocracy, Mexico has a lot to prove to the world and itself if it is to create trust in its new political structure. Despite the government’s extensive preparations, the most rec...

Volatility and Growth: Governments are Key There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance mechanism of government size. Theoretically, the net growth e...