Presidents’ positive role in US lawmaking is as ubiquitous as it is unclear. While a rich literature has identified many macro-level factors that constrain presidents’ policymaking potential, still unanswered is Richard Neustadt’s micro-level question: how can presidents influence legislation given the context and Congress they happen to inherit? Developing a game theoretic model in which the p…
Our theory studies why and when political parties choose to hold competitive primary elections. Party leaders can decide the nomination by granting resources and endorsements to a chosen candidate. Alternatively, they can delegate the candidate selection to the party’s rank and file by holding a primary election among multiple candidates. The benefit of a primary is to increase the expected val…
In spatial models of electoral competition, candidate quality is typically modeled as valence, a measure of general appeal assumed to be constant across voters. This paper introduces and formally models an alternative conception of candidate quality according to which candidates differ in their effectiveness, or likelihood of changing policy from the status quo. Although more effective candidat…
We analyze a simple dynamic model of the interaction between terrorists and authorities. Our primary aim is to study optimal counterterrorism and its consequences when large terrorist attacks lead to a temporary increase in terrorist recruitment. First, we show that an increase in counterterrorism makes it more likely that terrorist cells plan small rather than large attacks and therefore may i…
When is mobilization of group identity successful? Work on social movements suggests that frames that target group identity can mobilize groups. However, this work does not address when group mobilization using frames is likely to be successful. Recent work on source credibility finds that same-group sources are an important moderator of framing effects, and previous work on stakes of the decis…
This paper examines countries’ free-riding incentives in international environmental agreements (IEAs) when, first, the treaty is non-enforceable, and, second, countries do not have complete information about other countries’ non-compliance cost. We analyze a signaling model whereby the country leading the negotiations of the international agreement can reveal its own non-compliance costs throu…
The finagle point, the epsilon-core, and the yolk are all predictors of majority-rule decision-making in spatial voting models. These predictors each minimize a radius needed in some sense to alter preferences so as to achieve stability. Brauninger showed that the finagle radius is never smaller than the epsilon-core radius, and claimed that the finagle point is within the epsilon core. This ar…
An earlier version of this article was presented at the international workshop on ‘Global Effects and Local Dynamics of Intrastate Conflicts’, organised by the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Center for Advanced Study of International Development, Michigan State University, held in Jerusalem in May 2009. The author thanks the participa…
This article is an output of the project ‘Poverty and food security strategy for Yemen’ funded by the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MOPIC) of Yemen with support from the European Commission (EC) and the World Bank. The authors gratefully acknowledge comments from Khaled Saeed, Merna Hassan, Samed Albori and Abdulmajeed Al-Bataly (MOPIC), Damien Buchon, T. G. Srinivasan, Na…
This article discusses whether the poorest and most indebted countries receive aid in the form of grants rather than loans, by studying bilateral aid flows to low- and middle-income countries between 1975 and 2005. The empirical analysis finds no evidence that more indebted countries receive a higher grant component, but it does show that poorer countries receive a significantly higher grant co…
This article uses two CGE macro-micro models to analyse the distributional impact of the food crisis and policy responses in two neighbouring African countries, both of which are strongly dependent on agriculture. The approach captures structural differences at both the macro and micro level for household income and expenditure structures, and the results reveal differences for poverty impact a…
This article uses a transactions approach to examine the ability of governments to develop and sustain negotiated solutions to major economic challenges. Where actors are embedded in long-term, repeated interaction, have long time horizons, and invest in monitoring and enforcement technologies, effective political exchange is more likely. In good transactions environments, policy bargains will …
Why, when faced with similar conditions of weakening central control, do some institutions of state security fragment into autonomous agents of organized violence whereas others cohere around coercive rent seeking without challenging the central government? Focusing on Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, this article explains these divergent state security outcomes as a consequence of resource concentra…
The “party paradox” thesis claims that in the context of the legal corporate governance reforms of the 1990s, which aimed at adjusting national corporate governance systems to the “finance capitalism” of the Anglo-American type, center-left parties promoted proshareholder corporate governance reforms, whereas center-right parties opposed such reforms. Based on case studies of Switzerland, Swede…
What political institutions improve property rights? Building on the work of North and Weingast, this article argues that institutional checks on policy-making discretion (“veto players”) improve the property rights of investors regarding the value of the domestic currency. Veto players constrain the ability of policy makers to opportunistically pursue policy that may lead to a depreciated dome…
In his influential edited volume Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid suggests that long-term slave-based systems of production were absent from agriculture in Southeast Asia, and had an ambiguous presence at best in other areas of economic activity. The argument he presents suggests that indigenous slavery in the region merged into a ‘kind of serfdom or household mem…
This study of Timor and the surrounding islands between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries provides evidence that, after the demise of the Portuguese Estado da India, an ‘informal’ or ‘shadow’ empire persisted but in uniquely localised ways. It describes the emergence of the ‘black Portuguese’ community known in Timor and the Solor archipelago as the Topasses. Their singular identity was ba…
This paper deals with the consequences of the increasing commercialisation of the rice industry in west Indramayu from the mid-1880s to the late 1930s. Instead of prosperity as a result of growing rice for sale in a free market, local peasants found their survival being threatened by traders who had them bound to a vicious cycle of debts and who acquired much of the rice they produced. The rice…
Much research has sought to understand why mixed communities in Indonesia have been torn apart by violent conflict. By contrast, little is known about how people live together successfully in the mixed, low-conflict communities that exist in abundance throughout the Indonesian archipelago. This paper explores the inter-communal relations in the multiethnic, Christian-Muslim coastal village of O…
This paper reads the debates of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council to trace the political contentions over policies affecting the Chinese community in Malaya. These contentions brought the Straits Chinese unofficials to engage the racial ambivalence of British rule in Malaya, in which the Straits Chinese was located as both a liberal subject and an object of colonial difference. Contra…