Blogs are probably most associated with the high profile postings of a few highly popular bloggers who debate or comment on major news stories, but for each ‘A-lister’ there are numerous faceless bloggers who write about their own daily lives and/or interests. Hence it is interesting to investigate the extent to which an event with extensive media coverage, such as the London attacks, is reflec...

This paper studies legislative negotiations between two parties whose political power changes over time. The model has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium, which becomes very tractable when parties can make offers frequently. This tractability facilitates studying how changes in political power affect implemented policies. An extension of the baseline model analyses how elections influence leg...

Some US states have introduced measures to increase voter participation. I develop a formal model of elections to study how these measures affect political outcomes. I find that at high enough levels, measures to increase turnout lead to candidates converging at the median voter’s ideal point, as candidates switch from choosing policies that motivate their partisan base to competing over centri...

perspective of either political economy or political culture, which leaves the study of East Asian political systems highly underdeveloped. This paper seeks a political explanation of the emergence, characteristics, changes and future prospects of East Asian political regimes. They reveal the common nature of unipolar power in each of three forms-the one-party regime, one-man rule, and the olig...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights, or repression of different groups), and how these dynamics interact with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power and in economic structure. We focus on Markov Voting Equilibria, which require that economic and polit...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights or repression), and how this dynamics interacts with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power and changes in economic structure (e.g., social mobility or other changes affecting individuals’preferences over different type...

Cognitive abilities rise steeply from infancy to young adulthood and then are either maintained or decline to old age, depending on the specific ability. This pattern suggests corresponding continuities of mechanism and process, but it is striking that the fields of cognitive development and cognitive aging make little contact with each other's methods and theories. In this review we examine re...

We studied the developmental trends of temperament and character in a longitudinal population-based sample of Finnish men and women aged 20-45 years using the Temperament and Character Inventory model of personality. Personality was assessed in 1997, 2001, and 2007 (n = 2,104, 2,095, and 2,056, respectively). Mean-level changes demonstrated qualitatively distinct developmental patterns for char...