Constitutional architects usually include in constitutional texts an unamendable clause known as constitutional entrenchment. A constitutional entrenchment serves different purposes such as, shielding and preserving high valued constitutional norms and distancing the state from past autocratic practices. The study of constitutional entrenchment has attracted great attention in recent years sinc...

What factors have promoted and retarded the spread of the internet globally? The internet is one example of the diffusion of technology. Much as other technologies, the internet has diffused unevenly across countries, raising concerns over a “digital divide.” My main proposition is that its spread has been driven by neither technological nor economic factors alone. Rather political factors exer...

Leader changes induce changes in the pattern of protection and of filings of disputes at the WTO. Additionally, political institutions play an important modifying role. We offer a model that explains changes in trade policy and dispute onset induced by shifts in the sectors represented in government when leaders change. Democratic leaders are more likely to initiate WTO disputes than autocrats....

The purpose of this paper is to focus first on the literature that links leadership to employee wellbeing within the field of organizational behavior, and then turn the attention to a survey on healthcare professionals’ perceptions of the leadership style in three Italian hospitals. The classification of leader behavior is based on the sharing of decision making between leader and follower in t...

This study has two main goals: (a) to compare the relationship between transformational leadership and other important leadership styles (i.e., democratic versus autocratic or relations- and task-oriented leadership) and (b) to compare the effects of transformational leadership and the other styles on some important organizational outcomes such as employees' satisfaction and performance. For th...

Studies of political economy in recent years have placed emphasis on the operating characteristics of political and economic institutions. The premise of this work is that constitutional features of the political economy provide a structure of institutional incentives inducing equilibrium behavior and practices by optimizing agents. At both the theoretical and empirical levels there are compari...

How can a democratic culture develop among people who have lived for decades in an autocratic system? We examine this issue in the unified Germany, which provides a unique case, but for this very reason a particularly instructive one. German unification integrated two communities with a common history until the end of the Second World War. For a period of 50 years thereafter they lived in two d...

This paper studies state failure and governance in two conflict-states in the Middle East: Iraq and Somalia. Iraq is currently undergoing a social experiment under which a new form of government is being constructed after the passage of autocratic rule. The government envisaged is a consociational democratic state designed a priori as a political mechanism for the redistribution of resources, m...

Over the past two decades, Western political leaders have scripted a more ethical foreign policy, wherein far greater weight is given to protecting the rights and freedoms of extraterritorial citizens. Using the example of arms exports to developing countries, the present paper exposes the organized hypocrisy underlying countries’ self-declared ethical turn. We show that the major Western arms ...