We examine the link between the threat of violence and democratization in the context of the Great Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in 1832. We geo‐reference the so‐called Swing riots, which occurred between the 1830 and 1831 parliamentary elections, and compute the number of...

This paper suggests a new approach to analyzing the causes of franchise extension. Based on a new dataset, it provides a detailed econometric study of the Great Reform Act of 1832 in the United Kingdom. The analysis yields four main results. First, modernization theory receives limited support....

Retrospective questions from recent surveys let us estimate rates of church attendance among children and their parents in ten Western democracies throughout most of the 20th century. We combine these time series with standard sources to test competing theories of religious change. Although our...

The growth of the modern regulatory state is often explained in terms of an unambiguous increase in regulation driven by the actions of central governments. Contrary to this traditional narrative, we argue that as governments increased state capacity, they often strove to weaken the autarkic...

This paper uses a competitive neural network model to examine whether the separation of monetary policy and banking supervision has an impact on inflation. Our results show that countries with similar organizations of banking supervision and monetary policy indeed have similar levels of...

In an effort to understand the determinants of economic growth in an emerging economy, we analyze the effects of institutional reforms, wars and political events on the risk level of the Israeli stock market between 1945 and 1960. We find that the anticipation of wars did not have any effect but...

The economic theory of defense has traditionally described public safety as achieved through investments that deter adversaries. Deterrence is, however, ineffective and pre-emptive defense is required when a population of intended victims confronts supreme-value suicide terror. A moral dilemma...

This article analyzes whether the much-touted independence of the Conseil Constitutionnel (CC), the French Constitutional Court, is genuine. We construct a data set that comprises all the rulings of the CC between 1959 and 2006, taking into account the composition of the CC as well as the...

This paper provides a political-economy explanation for the separation of monetary policy from banking supervision by examining whether this institutional arrangement serves the platforms of the Conservative or of the Liberal parties, which are assumed to favor a stable price level and...

This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...