The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust.
The organization of public-sector unions and the emergence of merit employees as a powerful interest group underscores one of the great inherent dilemmas of bureaucratic autonomy. On the one hand, the...
The local Creole elites came to support independence in Mexico and Peru only because Ferdinand VII back in Spain agreed to accept the liberal constitution of 1812; independence for them was thus meant...
The failure to find adequate funds to finance deficits caused the Spanish Crown to declare bankruptcy in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647, 1652, 1660, and 1662.14 These bankruptcies were not f...
The fact that La Follette had to use machine tactics to beat the machine suggests that machines themselves are in some way intrinsic to politics—that is, all political leaders must assemble coalitions...
The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue has b...
Should we then regret the fact that Latin America has not seen more violence over the past two centuries, either in the form of massive interstate wars or social revolutions? It goes without saying th...
Philip Rieff, who argued that the decline of a shared moral horizon defined by religion had left a huge void that was being filled by psychologists preaching a new religion of psychotherapy.
Mental models and rules are intimately intertwined, since the models often suggest clear rules for societies to follow. Religions are more than theories; they are prescriptive moral codes that seek to...
Many people today inside and outside the region are aware that many regimes, particularly in the Arab world, are cruel dictatorships unconstrained by any sense of higher law or justice.6 Westerners of...
Lorimer for his part was contemptuous of the municipal reformers, calling them hypocrites who were using the reform cause as a means of increasing their own power and influence.
Joseph Stalin was said to have contemptuously asked, How many divisions has the pope?
Friction-Free Economies Why is it necessary to turn to a cultural characteristic like spontaneous sociability to explain the existence of large-scale corporations in an economy, or prosperity more gen...
Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have an alternative label for neopatrimonialism, what they call a limited access order, in which a coalition of rent-seeking elites use their political...
Christian freedom was an inner condition of the spirit, and not an external condition of the body.
But the late seventeenth century does provide an important model of how patrimonialism can be reversed that has some relevance to present-day anticorruption efforts. All of the elements that came toge...
Between economic growth and stable democracy The correlation between development and democracy was first noted by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in the late 1950s, and ever since then there hav...
And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other ext...
Diversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather, that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasiz...
Verily, men gave themselves their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himsel...