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I address the role of social mobility in political transitions. I develop a political economy model of regime transitions that incorporates social mobility as a key feature of the economy capturing the political attitudes toward redistribution. I show that social mobility facilitates democratization by reducing the conflict over redistribution between the rich and the poor. Furthermore, it facilitates democratic consolidation by reducing the likelihood of a coup under democracy. On the other hand, social mobility helps to keep an authoritarian regime stable by reducing the likelihood of mass movements against political elites. 3 Figures, 1 Appendix, 43 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2005.]

The 'audience cost' literature argues that highly-resolved leaders can use public threats to credibly signal their resolve in incomplete-information crisis bargaining, thereby overcoming informational asymmetries that lead to war. If democracies are better able to generate audience costs, then audience costs help explain the democratic peace. We use a game-theoretic model to show how public commitments can be used coercively as a source of bargaining leverage, even in a complete-information setting in which they have no signaling role. When both sides use public commitments for bargaining leverage, war becomes an equilibrium outcome. The results provide a rationale for secret negotiations as well as hypotheses about when leaders will claim that the disputed good is indivisible, recognized as a rationalist explanation for war. Claims of indivisibility may just be bargaining tactics to get the other side to make big concessions, and compromise is still possible in equilibrium. Adapted from the source document.

Many game-theoretic models of crisis bargaining find that under incomplete information, an initial offer is either accepted, or war occurs. However, this finding is odd in two ways: (a) empirically, there are many cases of an agreement being peacefully reached after a number of offers and counteroffers and (b) theoretically, it is not clear why a state would ever leave the bargaining table and opt for inefficient war. We analyze a model in which, as long as the dissatisfied state is not too impatient, equilibria exist in which an agreement is peacefully reached through the offer-counteroffer process. Our results suggest that private information only leads to war in conjunction with other factors that are correlated with impatience, such as domestic political vulnerability, exogenous obstacles to the ability to make counteroffers rapidly, and bargaining tactics that create incentives to strike quickly or that lock the actors into war. Adapted from the source document.

We use a formal bargaining model to examine why, in many domestic & international bargaining situations, one or both negotiators make public statements in front of their constituents committing themselves to obtaining certain benefits in the negotiations. We find that making public commitments provides bargaining leverage, when backing down from such commitments carries domestic political costs. However, when the two negotiators face fairly similar costs for violating a public commitment, a prisoner's dilemma is created in which both sides make high public demands which cannot be satisfied, & both negotiators would be better off if they could commit to not making public demands. However, making a public demand is a dominant strategy for each negotiator, & this leads to a suboptimal outcome. Escaping this prisoner's dilemma provides a rationale for secret negotiations. Testable hypotheses are derived from the nature of the commitments & agreements made in equilibrium. 1 Table, 3 Figures, 1 Appendix, 32 References. Adapted from the source document.

According to a leading rationalist explanation, war can break out when a large, rapid shift of power causes a credible commitment problem. This mechanism does not specify how inefficient fighting can resolve this cause, so it is an incomplete explanation of war. We present a complete information model of war as a sequence of battles and show that although opportunities for a negotiated settlement arise throughout, the very desirability of peace creates a commitment problem that undermines its likelihood. Because players have incentives to settle as soon as possible, they cannot credibly threaten to fight long enough if an opponent launches a surprise attack. This decreases the expected duration and costs of war and causes mutual deterrence to fail. Fighting's destructiveness improves the credibility of these threats by decreasing the benefits from continuing the war and can eventually lead to peace. In equilibrium players can only terminate war at specific windows of opportunity and fighting results in escalating costs that can leave both players worse off at the time peace is negotiated than a full concession would have before the war began. Adapted from the source document.

We analyze the process of democratization in a polity with groups that are divided along ethnic as well as economic lines. We show that: (i) the presence of ethnic minorities, in general, makes peaceful democratic transitions less likely; (ii) minorities suffer from discriminatory policies less in democracies with intermediate levels of income inequality; and (iii) in new democracies with low levels of income inequality, politics is divided along ethnic lines, and at greater levels of inequality economic cleavages predominate.