Democratization is a learning process. When citizens in new democracies still consider democracy as economic tool instead of a principle, domestic economic fluctuation steers democratic legitimacy. However, why do citizens attribute economic performance to regime type rather than incumbent party? This article proposes that people would compare the performance of different regimes in the same er...

It has recently been argued that apparent peace between democracies may be the result of political similarity rather than joint democracy, and that there may exist an “autocratic peace” which is similar to the democratic peace. If political similarity generally is the cause of peace rather than joint democracy specifically, then the democratic peace is merely a statistical artifact that follows...

Two experiments investigated the tendency of groups with members under high (vs. low) need for cognitive closure to develop an autocratic leadership structure in which some members dominate the discussion, constitute the "hubs" of communication, and influence the group more than other members. The first experiment found that high (vs. low) need for closure groups, as assessed via dispositional ...

This paper is an empirical analysis of the likelihood of failure of inflation stabilization programs. Logit models are estimated on a dataset of 39 programs implemented in 10 countries since the late 1950s, in order to determine which economic and political variables affect the probability of failure of stabilizations. Besides the well-known effects of real exchange rate appreciation, decreasin...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson’s [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from international financial institutions can trigger political transitions which would not otherwise have taken place. We test this unexplor...