An unfunded social security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute as much as expected. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy th...

An unfunded Social Security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy that is subject to mac...

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of di¤erent production factors, and political con‡icts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main capital form in economy evolves from land to physical capital and then to human capital, which enables their respective owners (landlords, capital...

Culturalists claim that political outcomes, such as respect for human rights, are deeply rooted in culture. Some have singled out Islam as particularly problematic. We assess whether Muslim societies suffer higher levels of political terror compared with others. Our results show that countries containing larger shares of Catholics, and those dominated by Catholics, fare the worst. The share of ...

Political geography has long played a prominent role in conceptions of political realignments. In this paper, I apply a spatial analysis to examine the political geography of voting during one of the principal political realignments in American electoral history, the 1928-1936 Democratic realignment. The spatial analysis challenges some of our common conceptions of this realignment. For example...

The purpose of this study was to examine more closely the assumptions of causality in research on communication and political knowledge. Although most communication theory suggests that communication causes learning, some have argued for the reverse causal direction or reciprocal causality. Others have confounded these concepts—in conjunction with political interest—in measures of political “so...

Research has documented a link between political violence and the functioning of individuals and communities. Yet, despite the hardships that political violence creates, evidence suggests remarkable fortitude and resilience within both individuals and communities. Individual characteristics that appear to build resilience against political violence include demographic factors such as gender and...

The assumption in the personality and politics literature is that a person's personality motivates them to develop certain political attitudes later in life. This assumption is founded on the simple correlation between the two constructs and the observation that personality traits are genetically influenced and develop in infancy, whereas political preferences develop later in life. Work in psy...

While technological change is a dominant social force, international political economists have not developed theories of the political foundations of technology adoption. We analyze a gametheoretic model of clean technology adoption and derive the following predictions. First, foreign countries should support clean technology adoption in countries with secure property rights and democratic poli...

This paper presents a political economy model of public standards in an open economy model. We use the model to derive the political optimum and to analyze different factors that have an influence on this political equilibrium. The paper discusses how the level of development influences the political equilibrium. We also analyze the relation between trade and the political equilibrium and compa...