Most modern welfare states offer an extensive array of services and benefits that are wholly or partly financed by tax revenue. One missing link in explaining the long-run sustainability of such comprehensive welfare states could be the already-existing stock of trust. Indeed, our cross-country...

Why does bureaucratic corruption occur in the EU system? Several examples suggest that bureaucratic corruption exists and that the Commission’s anti-fraud agency, OLAF, is not a fully independent authority. We thus develop a novel interpretation of the principal-supervisor-agent model to cope...

In this paper we analyze whether social capital can emerge endogenously from a process of preference evolution. We define social capital as preferences that promote voluntary cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We investigate how the endogenous preferences depend on the amount...

The paper extends and empirically tests Gordon Tullock's public choice theory of the nature of autocracy. A simple model of the relationship between constitutional rules governing succession in autocratic regimes and the occurrence of coups against autocrats is sketched. The model is applied to...

We conduct an empirical analysis of data relating measures of economic and political freedom to the occurrence of transnational terrorism 1996–2002. We use binary logistical regression models to predict the probablities that a country will experience transnational terrorist attacks and that a...

We investigate the possible explanations for variations in aggregate levels of participation in large-scale political demonstrations. A simple public choice inspired model is applied to data derived from the annual May Day demonstrations of the Danish labor movement and socialist parties taking...

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (<CitationRef CitationID="CR56">1982</CitationRef>) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its...</citationref>