We present findings that document one way in which a society’s culture can affect political outcomes. Examining an annual panel of democratic countries over six decades, we show that severe economic downturns are more likely to cause political turnover in countries that have lower levels of generalized trust. We find no such relationship in non-democratic countries or on irregular leader turnov...

We describe a new method of reduced Google matrix which allows to establish direct and hidden links between a subset of nodes of a large directed network. This approach uses parallels with quantum scattering theory, developed for processes in nuclear and mesoscopic physics and quantum chaos. The method is applied to the Wikipedia networks in different language editions analyzing several groups ...

The election of extreme political leaders is often associated with changes in political institutions. This paper studies these phenomena through a model in which the median voter elects a leader anticipating that he will impose institutional constraints— such as constitutional amendments, judicial appointments, or the implicit threat of a coup— that in‡uence the behavior of future political cha...

We present findings that document one way in which a society’s culture can affect political outcomes. Examining an annual panel of democratic countries over six decades, we show that severe economic downturns are more likely to cause political turnover in countries that have lower levels of generalized trust. We find no such relationship in non-democratic countries or on irregular leader turnov...

This paper explores the political dynamics by which a health reform leader state--Florida--engineered an ambitious reorganization of state health agencies as an expected prelude to bolder policy measures before the end of 1994. Demographic and fiscal pressures spurred the state to action, but its success at innovation demands a political explanation. This narrative highlights Florida's patient ...

Silvio Berlusconi has dominated Italian political life since he was first elected prime minister in 1994. He has been the third longest-serving prime minister of Italy, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti, and, as of May 2011, he was the longest-serving current leader of a G8 country. This political longevity is often difficult to understand for foreign political analysts. The former I...

Post-authoritarian Indonesia has shown some sub-national political leaders fell from power before their first term while others have survived through it. I argue that the durability of these leaders is influenced by two factors: strategy of extraction and populist policy. Sub-national leaders need to extract in order to collect resources and in turn finance political strategies to maintain thei...