I study a model where Information Technology, while typically increasing overall inequality, is likely to harm some people at intermediate and high levels of the distribution of income but to benefit people at the bottom. Within a given occupation it may harm some workers while benefitting others; and it may either reduce or increase the proportion of knowledge workers in employment. In my mode...

Robert M. Hartwell, in his path-breaking article on the transformation from the eighth to the sixteenth century, defined this transition as the demise and re-absorption of “a semihereditary professional bureaucratic elite” into “a multitude of local elite gentry families,” which it had hitherto coexisted with. Since Hartwell maintained that those local gentry elites had dominated the local scen...

A common conclusion of studies on Central America’s democracies and political economy is that the weakness of institutions and the strength of elites are a main reason for the region’s problems. Recently, a set of studies have attempted to scrutinize these elites in detail, focussing on their strategies and resources. The purpose of this article is to reflect upon what these studies can tell us...

Research Highlights and Abstract Building on recent efforts to bridge the elites/events dichotomy in the wartime opinion literature, we test the explanatory power of, and offer a theoretical extension to, the elasticity of reality hypothesis using the case of British support for the war in Afghanistan from 2001 through 2010. Marshaling an array of aggregate, individual-level and experimental su...

Introduction While national character is a subject that has intrigued social scientists for many years, it is rarely considered in theories of international behavior. The major reasons seem to be that: (a) the study of national character is fraught with conceptual confusions and meth-odological difficulties; (b) many social scientists question whether modern, complex, culturally-mixed nations c...

The local turn in good governance theory and practice responded to critiques of the ineffectiveness of state management and the inequity of privatization alternatives in natural resource management. Confounding expectations of greater effectiveness from decentralised governance, including community-based natural resource management, however, critics argue that expanded opportunities for elite c...

The literature on "ethnic conflict" tends to focus solely on external sources of such conflict. But this unquestioning focus on ethnic conflict as due to factors in the relationship between "ethnic groups” or their elites may at times be misleading. Drawing on a critique of conflict theory as developed in the field of international relations, I point out the conceptual and methodological proble...

Using surnames we follow the socio-economic status of elites and underclasses in England all the way from 1066 to 2011. Paradoxically we find two things. The first is that England does not have, and never had, a persistent ruling elite. Social mobility in the long run for the indigenous English and western European migrants has been complete. The second, however, is that mobility rates are much...