We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, thus making democracies last longer. This gives governments in unstable democracies an extra motive to form FTAs. Hence, greater democratic insta...

Floridi’s work, although diverse and multifaceted, portrays a solid coherence across his different lines of work. Among his wealth of interests and results, we highlight his recent work on information logics, on the ethics of information technology, and his rigorous (and vigorous) philosophical analysis of recent technological trends and developments in information technology. In the present ar...

BACKGROUND In this paper, the hypothesis that the spatial distribution of hospital beds is more even in countries with socialist or social democratic governments than in countries with conservative or Christian democratic governments was tested. To avoid the confounding influences of historical and institutional differences between countries, we used the Federal Republic of Germany as a case st...

1 How the Military Shapes Dictatorships 1 Barbara Geddes UCLA All governments depend for their survival on the cooperation of the military. Although democratic regimes in industrialized countries have developed formulas for insulating most aspects of government from military influence, finding ways to insure the support of the armed forces has challenged both democratic and authoritarian govern...

This article examines the political origins of antitrust enforcement in developing countries. I consider how the organization and political influence of business affects governments’ commitments to competition policy institutions. The analysis predicts cross-class coalitions with contending regulatory preferences. An alliance of incumbent producers and affiliated labor groups (“insiders”) oppos...

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the...

Citizens living in nations throughout the world seem to have lost a great deal of confidence in their governments. They are no longer confident that governments can shield them from war or terrorism launched from without, or ethnic violence and crime launched from within. They fear that widespread corruption has undermined government’s capacity to secure basic civic rights such as the right to ...

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the extent social media is enabling e-democracy in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The study conducts an interpretative case study approach interviewing active social media users, political actors, civil servants, civilians, civil society actors and tertiary students. The study also conducts a content analysis of popular “political social media” Facebook pages i...