Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an...

In this paper, I test the effects of religious norms on the provision of public goods. My evidence is drawn from public goods experiments that I ran with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox...

In Switzerland, two key church institutions the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations power to shape human...

This paper empirically studies the voting outcomes of Egypt's first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success in the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist vs. secular voting. We identify three dimensions that affect voting outcomes at...

We study the selection of the political elite in an autocratic state. Using detailed CV data on potential politicians in the German Democratic Republic, we track and quantify the position of individuals in the state hierarchy over time and exploit exogenous connections between individuals that...

Autocratic regimes can use carrots and/or sticks to prevent being overthrown by protests. Carrots, i.e. resource allocation, reduce the probability of protests, but cannot help to end them. Sticks, i.e. repression, reduce the probability that protests overthrow the regime, but also decrease its...

Since the early 1980s a wave of liberalizing reforms has swept over the world. While the stated motivation for these reforms has usually been to increase economic efficiency, some critics have instead inferred ulterior motives and a desire to enrich certain (already rich) people at the expense...

Blockchains have enabled innovation in distributed economic institutions, such as money (e.g. cryptocurrencies) and markets (e.g. DEXs), but also innovations in distributed governance, such as DAOs, and new forms of collective choice. Yet we still lack a general theory of blockchain governance....

This paper introduces excluding outlier voters (EOV) as a general mechanism for revealing true preferences in social choices, and for discouraging voters from strategic voting and manipula-tion. This mechanism is general in that it can be implemented with any voting system. The paper...

The idea of an identifiable school of thought denoted as Virginia political economy was in play at least as early as 1963, and it is reasonable to conclude that this identifier began to take shape some years earlier. It is common though not universal to identify a school of thought...