Textbook accounts of the Anglo-French trade agreement of 1860 argue that it heralded the beginning of a liberal trading order. This alleged success holds much interest from a modern policy point of view, for it rested on bilateral negotiations and most-favored-nation clauses. With the help of...

Going beyond historical and rational choice institutionalism, this article elaborates the core of a new theory that can account for the discontinuous, disproportionate, and frequently wavelike nature of institutional change. Cognitive-psychological findings on shifts in actors' propensity for...

To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program...

Latin America had long been the one region in the world without major ethnic parties, but in recent years a couple of inclusive ethnic parties have registered important electoral victories. A substantial literature maintains that ethnic parties win by mobilizing their base through exclusionary...

Existing literature emphasizes the disorganizing or weakening effects of economic liberalization on civil society, whereby free-market policies are said to demobilize and depoliticize collective actors. the article evaluates the effects of economic liberalization on large-scale societal...