Traditional international relations theory holds that states will join only those international institutions with which they generally intend to comply. Here we show when this claim might not hold. We construct a model of an authoritarian government's decision to sign the UN Convention Against...

Existing experimental and quasi-experimental results have demonstrated that both anticorruption initiatives that provide information and/or authority to the recipients of government programs – so-called “bottom-up” interventions – and initiatives that rely on government agencies for...

There are many stories of democracy but little consensus over which variables robustly determine its emergence and survival. We apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of 59 factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over 3 million regressions. The most robust determinants of...

In a two-player proactive response game the level of proactive activity and the choice of terrorist target is endogenized. The targeted government first chooses its measures to weaken the terrorists, and the terrorists then choose the type of event—normal or spectacular. Unlike previous...

Elections affect both the probability of successful ratification and the terms of international trade agreements; domestic politics in its simplest form shapes international negotiations. Without elections, the extent of protection in a trade agreement increases with the degree of divided...

This paper presents a game-theoretic model of suicide terrorism containing three agents: the terrorist leader; a targeted government; and potential terrorist supporters. Supporters join the terrorist group if they gain more from their participation than from their economic opportunities....