The Middle East is the most terror-prone region of the world. It is almost exclusively governed by autocratic regimes that often explicitly refer to Islam to justify some of their policies. In this paper, we analyse government reactions to terrorist events in the states that are members of the...

In many modern nation states, both rich and poor, traditional law to this day plays an important role. Given the almost universal prevalence of traditional law, it is surprising how little we know about it. This is the first study that tries to take stock of traditional law from a cross-country...

Understanding corruption is at the heart of treating the dysfunctionality of many countries' public sectors. Yet, most corruption research suffers from one common problem: There is no "objective" measure of public-sector corruption for a cross-section of countries. Most studies on the...

No other religion's role in politics is as controversial as that of Islam – at least in Western societies. It has been claimed that Muslims are more likely than others to voice opinions that conflict with core elements of a free society, such as capitalism, constitutional democracy, and the...

Federalism is a constitutionalized version of multi-tier governance. Proponents of veto-player theory argue that a high number of veto players leads to a high degree of policy stability. Compared to states with a unitary structure, federal countries, in which at least one sub-central level of...

Constitutional Economics - the analysis of constitutions drawing on the economic approach - has made important progress over the last two decades. The factors determining whether a constitution is complied with, however, have received only little attention. This is surprising, as a huge gap...

Many years ago, Emmanuel Todd argued that differences in family organization - specifically the rules of inheritance, the number of generations living under one roof, and endogamous marriage - are reflected in the organization of the state. He also argued that different family types lead to...

This paper shows that courts are not only a crucial part of the rule of law in the conventional sense but that they can also serve an important function in revealing information regarding the performance of lower level governments to the central government, and thereby improve their performance....

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused thousands to die and millions to lose their jobs, it has also prompted more governments to simultaneously to declare a state of emergency than ever before. States of emergency usually imply the extension of executive powers that diminishes the powers of...

The civil war in Syria has been raging since 2011. We ask whether civil war experience affects voluntary cooperation and its coordination by means of peer punishment. To answer that question, we ran experiments with Syrians and Jordanians, and use a victimization index to measure the individual...