This paper develops a model to analyze economic performance under different political regimes. An “oligarchic” society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights but also tends to erect significant entry barriers against new entrepreneurs. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on producers, but tends...

The evidence for successful postwar democratic transitions is not encouraging: since 1989, the international community has launched 19 major peacebuilding operations. These operations were reasonably successful in securing peace, but much less successful in establishing a democratic regime. Five years after the operations began, only two countries qualified as liberal democracy; also, no recent...

This article contributes to the debate concerning the identification of politically relevant cases of corruption in a democracy by sketching the basic traits of an original liberal theory of institutional corruption. We define this form of corruption as a deviation with respect to the role entrusted to people occupying certain institutional positions, which are crucial for the implementation of...

Article history: Received 7 August 2014 Received in revised form 23 February 2015 Accepted 17 March 2015 Available online 11 April 2015 The relationship between cognitive ability and stated political preferences in the United States is examined with data from the General Social Survey, which includes a brief vocabulary test (Wordsum) as a measure of verbal ability. Since the 1970s, liberal and ...

of the report This report on the Russian democratic prospect in the contexte of civilization strugglespresents the cultural factors of the regime transformation in that country. It is generallyestimated that the democracy in Russia will fail, because there are too many obstacles to it. Tothem belong, first of all, the perplexity of many the Russians, being in an awkward position...

Collective decisions are ubiquitous in complex democratic societies. Elections, referenda, decisions in legislatures, committees, multimember courts, expert panels, and boards of companies or other organizations are all examples. In such decisions, disagreement is equally ubiquitous. People disagree with each other on many levels. They disagree not only on what choices should be made but also o...

This paper investigates the dynamics of corruption at the top (i.e., by politicians). For this purpose a dynamic, politico-economic framework is developed and analyzed. A particular feature of this investigation is an analytical characterization of the dynamic properties of the system. This allows one to interpret these properties in terms of economic and institutional parameters. As an example...