Non-state actors (NSAs) play an important role in violent conflicts, but unlike state actors they cannot (be forced to) sign international conventions tying their hands. The nongovernmental organization Geneva Call has stepped into this void and solicits NSAs to sign and allow monitoring of...

Recent scholarship has started to find more and more evidence that refugees in their plight also contribute to the spread of conflict across borders. Relatively little is known, however, about whether internally displaced persons (IDPs) lead through similar mechanisms to the spread of conflict...

In various studies, voting behavior in international organizations (most notably the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)) is used to infer the similarity of foreign policy preferences of member states. Most such measures ignore, however, that particular co-voting patterns may appear simply...

Bicameralism introduces additional complexities into the analysis of sophisticated voting by members of parliament (MPs). The paper proposes a general game-theoretical model to assess the conditions under which MPs may engage in strategic behavior. The implications suggest that these conditions...

An increasing number of studies comparing legislatures relies on analyses of roll call votes. These analyses are used to infer characteristics of the way in which the legislature works and how their members vote. These inferences are problematic, however, if not all votes in parliament are...

In the literature on civil conflicts federalism is often touted as a useful institution to address regional demands. Diversity in the groups present in a country is associated, however, also with a higher tendency for conflicts. In this paper we examine how the geographic distribution of groups...

With the adoption of new constitutions in Eastern and Central Europe containing numerous provisions allowing for referendums, cross-national comparative work on the policy effects of referendums across the European continent have become possible. This allows us to close an important gap in the...