Using the literature on the political business cycle as a point of departure, this paper investigates whether incumbent politicians manipulate the enforcement of tax collection prior to elections, in order to win votes. ...

An extensive literature demonstrates a relationship between gender and corruption, with women be-ing less involved in corrupt transactions than men. There are two major ways of explaining this cor-relation; one emphasizes ...

Gradual processes of democratization and autocratization have gained increased attention in the literature. Assessing such processes in a comparative framework remains a challenge, however, due to their under-conceptualization ...

Network structures constrain and enable political actors. Nonetheless, few models of decision making in international politics take network relations into account. We formulate and test a network model of decision making ...

Domestically, democracy or democratization has not proved as successful in bringing about preferred economic and social consequences as has “good governance” and quality of government. Within the field of international ...

The literature studying citizen responses to exposed political corruption is rapidly growing. While some studies explore how information credibility and group identities can reduce the electoral impact of the exposure of ...

While scholars have long argued that political uncertainty leads governments to enact organizational structures that insulate agencies from future control by opposing groups, they have paid less attention to what governments ...

Democracies do not take up arms against each other. This axiom has attained the status of a mantra in the field of international relations. As previous research has shown, however, the truth of this statement is highly ...

Empirical studies of the relationship between GDP per capita and country-level CO2 emissions tend to focus on the direct effect of per capita GDP growth, rarely taking political institutions into consideration. This paper ...

I discuss and analyze the vast variation in development outcomes among autocracies, focusing on economic growth. I highlight plausible explanations of this variation pertaining to features of the leader, institutions, or ...