Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non-military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defense. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national...

Does democratic governance expand wealth and prosperity? There is no consensus about this issue despite the fact that for more than half a century, rival theories about the regime-growth relationship have been repeatedly tested against the empirical evidence, using a variety of cases, models and...

The standard explanation of electoral reform is offered by rational choice accounts. These regard the choice of rules as an elite-level issue, dominated by partisan interests bargaining within the legislature, where citizens are usually marginalized and powerless. Such accounts may help to...

Why do Arab states lag behind the rest of the world in gender equality? Social structural, cultural, and institutional accounts offer alternative perspectives. This study critiques the "petroleum patriarchy" thesis, presented in Michael Ross’s “Oil, Islam and Women” (2008), which claims...

This paper examines the impact of descriptive representation in comparative perspective. The goals are to establish (1) whether descriptive representation mobilizes attitudinal and behavioral indicators of civic engagement; (2) whether the strength of any such relationship differs for women and...

Concern about how American elections work has risen since 2000 and has been exacerbated by events during the 2016 campaign. To understand these issues, the first section examines several major challenges facing U.S. elections, including deepening party polarization over electoral procedures, the...

Proponents argue that using technology to modernize the process of casting a ballot, especially the implementation of remote electronic voting (e-voting), could boost electoral participation. E-voting is thought to be a particularly important reform designed to encourage turnout among younger...

New evidence gathered by the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) has just been released in an annual report, The Year in Elections 2014, and the third release of the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI_3) dataset, available from Dataverse. The project compares the risks of flawed and failed...