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...

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...

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...

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...

Monitors report that many elections around the world are flawed by problems of corruption and violence – sometimes both. These malpractices are deeply troubling for electoral integrity and liberal democracy. Do they also serve as critical barriers to women's representation in elected office...

What has driven the worldwide adoption and subsequent revision of gender quota policies? This study argues that this phenomenon can be best understood as exemplifying ‘glocalization' – with policies adopted due to a combination of changing international discourses and regional diffusion...

Rising support for populist parties has disrupted the politics of many Western societies. What explains this phenomenon? Two theories are examined here. Perhaps the most widely-held view of mass support for populism -- the economic insecurity perspective -- emphasizes the consequences of...

The concept of trustworthiness can be understood to involve an informal social contract where principals authorize others to act on their behalf in the expectation that the agent will fulfill their responsibilities, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty. When evaluating the trustworthiness...

During recent years, U.S. states have often diverged by adopting either more lenient or stricter electoral procedures. What have been the consequences of these laws for the risks of voter suppression or voter fraud? Heated partisan debate surrounds this question. To consider new evidence, the...