Using rare surnames to track the descendants of two formerly elite groups in Japan – the Samurai, and the Kazoku of 1869-1946 – we estimate social mobility rates in Japan 1900-2012. We would expect that the dramatic social changes of Meiji Japan 1868-1946, and postwar Japan 1946-2012, would create substantial social mobility. However, we find high rates of persistence of the descendants of the ...

Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elites mount coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters may have more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the likelihood of elite participation is increasing in their networ...

Many political scientists and policymakers argue that unmediated events—the successes and failures on the battlefield—determine whether the mass public will support military excursions. The public supports war, the story goes, if the benefits of action outweigh the costs of conflict. Other scholars contend that the balance of elite discourse influences public support for war. I draw upon survey...

Exploration of the search space through the optimisation of phenotypic diversity is of increasing interest within the field of evolutionary robotics. Novelty search and the more recent MAP-Elites are two state of the art evolutionary algorithms which diversify low dimensional phenotypic traits for divergent exploration. In this paper we introduce a novel alternative for rapid divergent search o...

In this chapter I argue that in preindustrial societies where resources were difficult to monopolize and physical coercion was not an option, ideology provided a significant source of social power. This avenue toward social power was especially important in the prehispanic Andes, and the establishment and negotiation of that power was often through ritual feasting involving politically charged ...

Our analysis begins with the puzzle: how did Botswana develop a legalrational state? We suggest that three key interlinked factors were important. First, during the pre-colonial period the Tswana developed local states with relatively limited kingship or chiefship and with a political structure that was able to integrate people of other ethnic groups such as Kalanga. Second, facing the onslaugh...

For the peasants in rural China, the harvest season is the occasion when several different worlds – the business world of large companies, the entrepreneurial world of middlemen, local elites and peasant households – are compressed into the same social space, thereby inducing intensive economic and social interactions and crystallizing social relations among villagers, local elites and markets....

Quality-Diversity algorithms, among which are the Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites (MAP-Elites), have emerged as powerful alternatives to performance-only optimisation approaches they enable generating collections diverse and high-performing solutions an problem. However, often limited low-dimensional search spaces deterministic environments. The recently introduced Policy Gradien...

Public opinion often depends on how elites choose to frame issues. For example, citizens’ opinions about a Ku Klux Klan rally may depend on whether elites frame the event as a free-speech issue or a public safety issue. Past research has focused largely on documenting the size of framing effects in uncontested settings. By contrast, there has been little research on framing in competitive envir...

This study uses data on campaign contributions and methods of network analysis to investigate the significance of interlocking directorates for political cohesion among corporate elites. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) regression, the author shows that social ties formed through common membership on corporate boards contribute more to similarity of political behavior than commonaliti...