Perspectives on Politics

Taking Authoritarian Anti-Corruption Reform Seriously By Christopher Carothers, Stanford University Scholars generally assume that authoritarian regimes will not curb corruption because autocrats benefit from it politically, use anti-corruption campaigns as excuses to purge rivals, and […]

Conceptualizing Criminal Governance By Benjamin Lessing, University of Chicago In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under […]

Reducing Unequal Representation: The Impact of Labor Unions on Legislative Responsiveness in the U.S. Congress By Michael Becher, Université Toulouse and Daniel Stegmueller, Duke University It has long been recognized that economic inequality may undermine […]

The Politics of Marriage Equality: Confrontational Interest Groups and Nonconfrontational Officeholders By Christopher Baylor, College of the Holy Cross The passage of marriage equality in Rhode Island offers insight into the role of organized groups […]

The EU’s Enfants Terribles: Democratic Backsliding in Central Europe since 2010 By Elisabeth Bakke, University of Oslo and Nick Sitter, Central European University In the academic literature, Hungary and Poland are often cited as paradigmatic […]

The Diffusion of Urban Medieval Representation: The Dominican Order as an Engine of Regime Change By Jonathan Doucette, Aarhus University How do representative institutions diffuse from one polity to another? I investigate the effect of […]

Lord, Peasant … and Tractor? Agricultural Mechanization, Moore’s Thesis, and the Emergence of Democracy By David J. Samuels, University of Minnesota, and Henry Thomson, Arizona State University Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. […]