Since 2001, hundreds of academic studies have examined the “political resource curse,”
meaning the claim that natural resource wealth tends to adversely affect a country's …

Scholars continue to disagree about the relationship between economic development and
democracy. I review the history of the debate and summarize patterns visible in data …

In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new
model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into …

The postcommunist countries were amongst the most fervent and committed adopters of
neoliberal economic reforms. Not only did they manage to overcome the anticipated …

Recent development in the resource curse literature highlights that one of the channels
through which the curse may occur is the tendency of resource wealth to weaken …

How does democracy emerge from authoritarian rule? Certain influential theories contend
that incumbents deliberately choose to share or surrender power. They do so to prevent …

The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the
nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a …

Since the collapse of Communism, Russia and some other post-Soviet states have
attempted to pursue socioeconomic reforms while relying upon the political institutions of …

The fixed-effects estimator is biased in the presence of dynamic misspecification and omitted
within variation correlated with one of the regressors. We argue and demonstrate that fixed …

Authoritarian regimes become more likely to democratize when they face little choice or little
risk. In some cases, the risk of democratization to authoritarian incumbents is so low that …