This paper provides a theory of a parliamentary government system with proportional representation elections and policy-motivated parties and voters. In a symmetric, spatial model governments are majoritarian, they and their policies are durable, and voters elect minority parliaments in every period. A continuum of (Markov) political equilibria exist with policies that represent concessions to ...

ably yield a ragtag crew of Parliamentarians, as people who were offered up as cannon fodder are unexpectedly swept into office. The 2011 federal election proved no exception as political pundits were left mulling the incongruities and merits of an extremely diverse demographic mix of Members of Parliament (MPs). There were, for example, a record seven university students elected to office (inc...

It is a piece of idle senthentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, or prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application oflegal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in th...

This paper develops a theory of the interaction between appropriative conflict and economic growth. Appropriative conflict, as measured by the diversion of resources, is viewed as the cost of securing effective property rights. We identify conditions under which conflict rises or falls as the rate of economic growth improves. The main implication of the analysis is that if the quality of proper...

Cattle raiding, a longstanding practice among pastoralists in South Sudan, was historically governed by cultural authorities and ritual prohibitions. However, after decades of on-and-off integration into armed forces, raiders are now heavily armed, and military-style attacks claim dozens if not hundreds of lives at a time. Beginning with the emergence of the infamous Lou Nuer “White Army” in th...

Processing an abstract concept such as political ideology by itself is difficult but becomes easier when a background situation contextualizes it. Political ideology within American politics, for example, is commonly processed using space metaphorically, i.e., the political "left" and "right" (referring to Democrat and Republican views, respectively), presumably to provide a common metric to wh...

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and ci...