Advances in information technology now make it possible for non-government entities, or governments themselves, to establish and run a national parallel paperless monetary system at very low cost and launch it on very short notice. The workings of such a system is described and discussed. Such systems may ameliorate the dire state of affairs in the hardest hit eurozone countries, and increase t...

Development agencies are endeavouring to think and act more politically, but they typically overlook people’s politics in the process. This is true also of the scholars and consultants who advise on and advocate politicallyinformed programming.2 Despite there now being a range of approaches to politically-informed programming, overwhelmingly the political actors thought to matter are elites and...

Geopolitics is about how the world is understood politically at the planetary scale. It is simultaneously a term that refers to great power rivalries and the knowledge and representational practices that legitimate that mode of rule. Now in the face of climate change the premises for thinking about human politics have been dramatically changed, even if many political elites and scholars have ye...

Utilizing data from the power corporation of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, we study the politics of electricity theft over a ten year period (2000–09). Our results show that electricity theft is substantial in magnitude. The extent of theft varies with the electoral cycle of the state. In years when elections to the State Assembly are held, electricity theft is significantly great...

Political elites often discuss racial/ethnic outgroups in a critical light. I claim this discourse raises the salience of group identity while impugning its worth, thus inducing differential political reactions among high and low identifying group members. Specifically, high identifiers will engage in political efforts that restore their identity’s positive value by displaying ingroup favoritis...

We provide a dynamic theory of endogenous constitutions by relating the emergence of political institutions to different development patterns. These scenarios give rise to different constitutional designs depending on the relative power and interests of the different population groups during the transition. We focus in particular on efficiency and redistribution aspects the public sector. Const...

We study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program. While governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture, centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption, owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance. Decentral...

In the past few years, a body of ideas based on political economy theory has been built up by North and Weingast, Olson, Przeworski, and Acemoglu and Robinson. One theme that emerges from this literature concerns the transition to democracy: why would dominant elites give up oligarchic power? This article addresses this question by considering a formal model of an authoritarian regime, and then...