Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development communities in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a 'political settlement'. At its most ambitious, 'political settlements analysis' (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions...

Although in recent years growing interest has been shown by social scientists and international organizations regarding the production of well-being indicators that go beyond GDP, the comparative political economy of developed countries has rarely investigated this topic. This was largely due to...

In this paper we empirically examine whether public facilities like providing primary school, medical clinics, electricity etc help incumbents to stay in power. Specifically, we analyze the parliamentary election outcomes in 483 constituents in rural India from 1971 to 1991. This study is based...

Collective decision making problems can be seen as finding an outcome that is closest to a concept of consensus. 1 introduced Closeness to Unanimity Procedure as a first example to this approach and showed that the Borda rule is the closest to unanimity under swap distance a.k.a the 2 distance....

The well-known swap distance (Kemeny (1959); Kendall (1938); Hamming (1950)) is analyzed. On weak preferences, this function was characterized by Kemeny (1959) with five conditions; metric, betweenness, neutrality, reducibility, and normalization. We show that the same result can be achieved...