Economists generally assume the existence of sufficient institutions to sustain a market economy and tax the citizens. However, this starting point cannot easily be taken for granted in many states, neither in history nor in the world of today. This paper develops a framework where "policy choices", regulation of markets and tax rates, are constrained by "economic institutions", which in turn r...

Since the publication of Donald Horowitz’s Ethnic Groups in Conflict, there has been an increasing convergence on the classification of ethnic identities among comparative political scientists. But there is no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification – and the definitions that individual scholars propose do not match their classifications. This article proposes a definitio...

Building a lattice-based taxonomy over a text corpus with formal concept analysis (FCA) methods requires preliminary text processing that would enable construction of a context. We consider several natural language processing methods aimed at automatic attribute acquisition from texts. In particular, we derive attributes of three types: frequent words, latent topics and named entities. Afterwar...

Although the risk of expropriation for foreign direct investment (FDI) has fallen substantially since the 1970s, political risk continues to be of concern to MNCs in many countries. I ask whether domestic political checks and balances and international legal instruments that aim to protect FDI enable governments to commit credibly to avoid future policies that diminish the value of sunk FDI. Ut...

Formal political institutions have been assigned two roles in democratization theorizing: as contingent effects of strategic interaction and as predictable bases for democratic consolidation. These roles might be reconciled if we assume that institutions become persistent once in place. But patterns of behavior surrounding these institutions do not appear to conform to the expectations of path ...

We present findings that document one way in which a society’s culture can affect political outcomes. Examining an annual panel of democratic countries over six decades, we show that severe economic downturns are more likely to cause political turnover in countries that have lower levels of generalized trust. We find no such relationship in non-democratic countries or on irregular leader turnov...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the political, social and economic background of the divergence of Belarusian and Ukrainian transitions. We focus on Belarus in order to find explanation for questions such as why could Lukashenko remain the authoritarian leader of Belarus, while in Ukraine the position of the political elite had proved less stable and collapsed in 2004. On the theoretical fr...

Tourism has become a very important and dynamic sector both in the world economy and particular in the developing countries. Its growth affects not only the activities directly linked to tourism but also other sectors. Tourism is already an important sector in some developing countries and will become so for others. Developing countries have been fast growing in tourism industry terms in the wo...

The central objective of this paper is to develop a transparent, consistent, selfcontained, and stable country risk rating model, closely approximating the country risk ratings provided by Standard and Poor’s (S&P). The model should be non-recursive, i.e., it should not rely on the previous years’ S&P ratings. The set of variables selected here includes not only economic-financial but also poli...

Quantification of historical sociological processes have recently gained attention among theoreticians in the effort of providing a solid theoretical understanding of the behaviors and regularities present in socio-political dynamics. Here we present a reliability theory of polity processes with emphases on individual political dynamics of African countries. We found that the structural propert...