The COVID-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies.
Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global …

We examine the link between the threat of violence and democratization in the context of the
Great Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in 1832. We geo‐reference the so‐called …

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in
macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify …

We test the hypothesis that the extension of the voting franchise in Europe was related to the
threat of revolution. We contend that international diffusion of regime contention and …

We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves toward
democracy in sub-Saharan Africa and that these changes are often a result of concessions …

This research explores the effect of early industrialisation on human capital formation.
Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France …

The Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the
vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of …

We present a new aggregation method-called SVM algorithm-and use this technique to
produce novel measures of democracy (186 countries, 1960-2014). The method takes its …

This paper investigates how persistent changes in trust caused by the Great Recession have
affected how governments and citizens across Europe responded to the next global crisis …

We provide a test of the impact of voters' political ideology on economic growth and of the
role of preferences for government size as a transmission channel. We focus on France from …