I examine how different distributions of ownership and governance rights in firms affect the optimal organization of cross-functional project teams for knowledge-intensive work. I analyze multi-method data from two competing automated manufacturing equipment engineering firms with contrasting formal power structures, one a worker cooperative with ownership and governance rights distributed acro…
Federal agencies and universities in the U.S. promote interdisciplinary research because it presumably spurs transformative, innovative science. Using data on almost 900 research-center–based scientists and their 32,000 published articles, along with a set of unpublished papers, we assess whether such research is indeed beneficial and whether costs accompany the potential benefits. Existing res…
Economic transitions in countries that move from state planning and redistribution to market exchange create business opportunities but also uncertainty, because many interdependent factors—modes of exchange, types of products, and forms of organizations—are in flux. Uncertainty is even greater when the country’s political institutions remain authoritarian because the rule of law is weak and st…
How CEOs think and feel about time may have a big influence on their firms’ strategies. We examine how two distinct CEO temporal dispositions—time urgency (the feeling of being chronically hurried) and pacing style (one’s pattern of effort over time in working toward deadlines)—each influence corporate entrepreneurship, a key strategic behavior. We propose that CEOs’ temporal leadership—how the…
We examine how directors’ political ideologies, specifically the board-level average of how conservative or liberal directors are, influence boards’ decisions about CEO compensation. Integrating research on corporate governance and political psychology, we theorize that conservative and liberal boards will differ in their prevailing beliefs about the appropriate amounts CEOs should be paid and,…
This article examines the impact of the secret ballot on the market for votes at parliamentary elections in the 19th-century United Kingdom. I use a formal model of an exchange between a candidate and a voter to predict the impact of the secret ballot on bribe prices, the marginal effect campaign spending on candidates’ electoral prospects, and election turnout. I test these predictions against…
The secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy. We contend that the historical process of modernization caused the switch from open to secret ballot with the underlying mechanism being that income growth, urbanization, and rising education standards undermined vote markets. We undertake event history studies of ballot reform in Western Europe and the U.S. states during the 19th and 2…
This article introduces a collection of papers that explore two understudied but critical questions of enduring concern for the study of democratization. Was the secret ballot driven by the same forces that drove the rise of democracy more generally? Did the secret ballot end electoral fraud, or was its effect merely endogenous to economic modernization more generally? This article provides his…
A new electoral design for subnational congress elections in China allows me to investigate the informational utility of authoritarian elections. Authoritarian regimes are notoriously bad at solving the moral hazard problem in the voter’s agency relationship with politicians. Borrowing from the literature on political selection, I theorize that authoritarian elections can nonetheless solve the …
Consultative authoritarianism challenges existing conceptions of nondemocratic governance. Citizen participation channels are designed to improve policymaking and increase feelings of regime responsiveness, but how successful are these limited reforms in stemming pressure for broader change? The article develops a new theoretical lens to explain how common citizens perceive the introduction of …