This paper models theocracy as a regime where the clergy in power retains knowledge of the cost of political production but which is potentially incompetent, quarrelsome, or corrupt. This is contrasted with a secular regime where government is contracted out to a secular ruler, and hence the...

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002). Extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then turns...