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), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then...

This article emphasizes the similarities between such diverse instances of public-spirited suicide as the Islamic martyrs of yesterday and today, the anarchists, the Japanese kamikaze of World War II, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, and the Christian martyrs under the Roman Empire. It tries to...

This paper places genocide or mass murder in a continuum of actions that a ruling power can take to remove an unwanted group from a society; that is, it views extermination as a means to an end, and it assumes that perpetrators are rational in the sense that they will choose the combination of...

This paper attempts to explain the puzzling features of the Italian political system up to 1992 by means of an economic model of a democratic Nomenklatura, in which the normal operation of a democratic system is distorted by the self-perpetuation of a ruling elite - `Nomenklatura' - which...

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...

type="main" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>This paper sets forth a theory of competition between exclusive religions as an entry deterrence game, in which the incumbent may find it profitable not to accommodate but to deter the competitor's entry by precommitting to sufficient capacity expansion in the event of entry....</p>

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12045-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This article sets forth a theory of competition between exclusive religions as an entry deterrence game, in which the incumbent may find it profitable not to accommodate but to deter the competitor's entry by precommitting to sufficient capacity...</p>