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...
Cognitive rigidities may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own self-interest. In the United States, many working-class voters support candidates promising to lower taxes on the wealt...
Clientelism is an efficient form of political mobilization in societies with low levels of income and education, and is therefore best understood as an early form of democracy.
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...
As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the...
As Sunil Khilnani demonstrates in The Idea of India, the notion of India as a nation-state was something that was invented under British rule.4 Prior to Britain’s arrival, the subcontinent was a hodge...
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...
إن أولئك الذين درسوا تكرار قيام و سقوط دول كبيرة معينة في الماضي، و قارنوها بقيام و سقوط الدول الكبيرة في التاريخ المعاصر، ليسوا مخطئين في إشارتهم لأوجه التشابه، غير أن تكرار ظهور أنماط تاريخية معينة...
While Koreans also are relatively group-oriented, they also have a strong individualistic streak like most Westerners. Koreans frequently joke that an individual Korean can beat an individual Japanese...
The promotion of self-esteem enabled not human potential but a crippling narcissism, indeed, a narcissism that he felt had come to characterize American society as a whole.
The concept of amoral familism, whose code he describes as Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise. Cooperation
It diverts attention from older and larger groups whose serious problems have been ignored. A significant part of the white American working class has been dragged into an underclass, comparable to th...
With justice and moderation the people will produce more, tax revenues will increase, and the state will grow rich and powerful. Justice is the foundation of a powerful state.
When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes.
What Rousseau asserts, and what becomes foundational in world politics in the subsequent centuries, is that a thing called society exists outside the individual, a mass of rules, relationships, injunc...
We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a r...
We are taking the time to consider the Hungarian case for a simple reason: to show that constitutional limits on a central government’s power do not by themselves necessarily produce political account...
This is, in effect, the essence of politics: the ability of leaders to get their way through a combination of authority, legitimacy, intimidation, negotiation, charisma, ideas, and organization.
These groups began agitating against corruption through reports and publicity about the backgrounds of candidates published in sympathetic newspapers; they sought to professionalize government by maki...
There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions and demand either to abolish them (as in the case of the Federal Reserve) or to open up their internal deliberations to television and public s...