The role of domestic politics is investigated, using a model to show how domestic opposition during a crisis can reveal to a rival state private information about the incumbent. In particular, the public nature of democratic competition results in the institutionally induced credibility of the message.
Fluctuations in the price of oil and the contemporaneous political changes in oil-producing countries have raised an important question about the link between oil rents, political institutions, and civil liberties. This article presents a simple model of the relationship between resource income and political freedom and, using an instrumental…
As many crises do not evolve into full scale conflict, and almost all conflicts end short of war, an important question is how states manage uncertainty? This thesis investigates the relationships between uncertainty, rhetoric, alliances, and combat. The thesis consists of four articles. Much ado about nothing? Diplomacy, war, and the incentive to…
It is well known that during a crisis, unitary rational states have an incentive to misrepresent their true resolve and willingness to go to war. This theoretical result has been taken to imply that diplomacy, interpreted as pre-bargaining communication, can have no effect on the way crises play out. This paper shows an intuitive way that…
International institutions that include an escape clause generate more durable & stable cooperative international regimes & are easier to achieve ex ante. The escape clause is endogenous in a model of repeated trade-barrier setting in the presence of symmetric, two-sided, political uncertainty. They permit, along the equilibrium path, countries to…
International institutions that include an escape clause generate more durable and stable cooperative international regimes and are easier to achieve ex ante. The escape clause is endogenous in a model of repeated trade-barrier setting in the presence of symmetric, two-sided, political uncertainty. They permit, along the equilibrium path,…
The analysis of lab data entails a joint test of the underlying theory and of subjects' conjectures regarding the experimental design itself, how subjects frame the experiment. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing such conjectures. We use experiments of decision making under uncertainty as a case study. Absent restrictions on subjects'…
The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme…
Researchers face two major problems when applying ideal point estimation techniques to state legislatures. First, longitudinal roll-call data are scarce. Second, even when such data exist, scaling ideal points within a single state is an inadequate approach. No comparisons can be made between these estimates and those for other state legislatures…
Political and social polarization are a significant cause of conflict and poor gover-nance in many societies, thus understanding their causes is of considerable importance. Here we demonstrate that shifts in socialization strategy similar to political polarization and/or identity politics could be a constructive response to periods of apparent…
Electoral clientelism and vote buying are widely perceived as major obstacles to economic development. This is because they may limit the provision of public goods. In this paper, we review the literature on clientelism and vote buying and propose the use of field experiments to evaluate empirically the consequences of these phenomena. We provide…
Income inequality and political polarization have both increased dramatically in the United States over the last several decades. A small but growing literature has suggested that these two phenomena may be related and mutually reinforcing: income inequality leads to political polarization, and the gridlock induced by polarization reduces the…
Political theorists from Machiavelli to Huntington have denied the possibility of popular government arising out of the chaos of civil war, instead prescribing an intermediate stage of one-man rule by a Prince, Leviathan, or a military dictator. Based on recent empirical evidence of post-civil war democratization in El Salvador, Mozambique, and…
We model the transition from a chaotic status quo to a more orderly political regime as a two-stage game involving two warring factions & the citizens. The warring factions move first & decide the form of government by (1) inviting an external arbitrator, (2) choosing the people as arbitrator, ie, democratizing, or (3) maintaining the status quo…
