We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de fa...

Arrangements for sharing political power serve three purposes: to give all relevant groups access to important political decisions; to partition the policy process, thereby granting groups relevant autonomy; and to constrain holders of political power from abusing authority. A new global dataset of political power sharing institutions, 1975–2010, is introduced here, disaggregated these along th...

The power to promote wellness, resist oppression, and foster liberation is grounded in psychological and political dynamics. Hitherto, these two sources of power have been treated in isolation, both for descriptive and prescriptive purposes. As a result, we lack an integrative theory that explains the role of power in promoting human welfare and preventing suffering, and we lack a framework for...

The emergence of discursive institutionalism as a fourth institutionalism in political science was predicated on the success ideational scholars enjoyed in arguing that 'ideas matter' (Schmidt 2008). To defend the emphasis on ideas as an explanatory factor in political analysis, the first generations of ideational scholarship took pains to demonstrate and theorize that indeed ideas do matter, a...

The concept of power is a core term in political science, and an important one for other social sciences as well. According to Elster it is “the most important single idea in political theory, comparable perhaps to utility in economics” (Elster 1976, 249). Indeed political science can be conceived mainly as the study of power phenomena (Mokken and Stokman 1976, 47). Yet the discipline seems to ...

Much of the empirical work and the conceptual discussion of the impact of institutions on economic development either implicitly or explicitly assumes that institutions persist. Although Acemoglu et al. (2001) provide evidence that constraints on the executive persist, many aspects of institutions change frequently. Less-developed countries cycle between democracy and dictatorship and often cha...

This paper studies legislative negotiations between two parties whose political power changes over time. The model has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium, which becomes very tractable when parties can make offers frequently. This tractability facilitates studying how changes in political power affect implemented policies. An extension of the baseline model analyses how elections influence leg...