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WHEREAS THE OLD COLD WAR REALISM POSTITED AN "A PRIORI" LIMITATION OF POWER TO STATES, A NEW REALISM WILL HAVE TO BEGIN BY BREAKING THROUGH INHERITED PRECONCEPTIONS TO ENQUIRE WHERE POWER LIES IN THE PRESENT ENLARGED COMPLEX OF FORCES. THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES WHAT CIVILIZATION ACTUALLY IS AND TAKES AN INVENTORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. IT SUGGESTS THAT A MODEL OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE HAS BEEN THAT OF A WEAK CENTER IN A FRAGMENTED WHOLE AND THAT THE ALTERNATIVES MAY BE EITHER A CONFLICTUAL ANARCHY OF REALPOLITIK OR A REGIME OF DOMINANCE BY ONE CONCENTRATION OF WORLD POWER.

Designing a social protection system is of course not only a technical exercise but a very political affair. A systems approach to social protection is shaped by the political elites and the respective coalitions of change, the political institutions as well as the political system of a country. This explains why also seemingly similar countries in terms of their risk profile, poverty situation and economic situation can adopt very different social protection systems or make very different progress with respect to social protection expansion. Not only are the established welfare states of the Global North but also the nascent social protection systems in the Global South a testimony of this variety.

Defence date: 9 December 2019 ; Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Mattozzi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Andrea Ichino, European University Institute (Co-supervisor); Prof. James M. Snyder, Jr., Harvard University; Prof. Tommaso Nannicini, Università Bocconi ; In the first chapter, I study whether the introduction of primary elections induces more or less political polarization. Before 1976, only representatives from Indiana had to pass through the primaries, whereas the reform introduced primaries for Indiana's US senators too. Using a difference-in-differences, I show that primaries deliver less-polarized politicians and account for one-fifth of the pre-reform average ideological gap between parties. I interpret the results in the light of a conceptual framework in which primaries lower the cost of participating in candidate selection procedures, giving incentives to participate to moderate voters as well. The second chapter is coauthored with D. Iorio and A. Mattozzi. We use a newly collected dataset from 63 democracies, and we construct the tenure accumulated by the ruling party while in office. We merge these data with fiscal policy indicators. We find an expenditure elasticity of 0.061 and a deficit elasticity of 0.055 over the period 1972-2014. Our findings point into the direction of a honeymoon effect: the older is the coalition of parties, the more divisive tend to be the available policy choices, which require costly transfers in the form of public expenditure to keep coalition members together later on. In the third chapter, I exploit newly collected data on ties between local politicians in Italy from 1985 onwards, to study the relation between cross-party connections and future career prospects. Exploiting a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that ruling coalition members connected with the runner-up are twice as likely to be promoted to the council in which the runner-up leads the opposition. The effect of connections with the leader of the rivals disappears when I consider appointments to boards of state-owned enterprises. These findings suggest that connected politicians act as political brokers and smooth the relationship between government and opposition. ; 1. Political Polarisation and Primary Elections 2. Good Old Spendthrift. The Fiscal Effects of Political Tenure 3. 'Keep Friends Close, But Enemies Closer': Connections and Political Careers

This dissertation studies the determinants of political institutions and their impact on economic development in various historical contexts. The first chapter asks: Why did the Catholic Church's power decline earlier in Northwestern Europe than in the East and South? I argue that differential demand for collective security in the face of the possible invasion by the "infidels" was an important factor in the Church-state relations. Catholic states had to cooperate to achieve military success and, therefore, delegated legal and fiscal authorities to the Church. To measure the Church's political power, I have assembled a novel dataset on appointments of bishops between 1198 and 1517. I find that in the dioceses located closer to the "infidels," bishops were differentially more likely to be selected by the pope or cathedral chapters than by secular rulers.The second chapter examines the economic origins of discrimination against Jewish entrepreneurs in the Russian Empire. Several changes in government policy between 1889 and 1894 freed large amounts of domestic private capital that now had to be reinvested in the equity market. I explore the relationship between anti-Jewish restrictions in the equity market, that began in 1890, and capital intensity of manufacturing industries. Using the RUSCORP database of all manufacturing corporations created in 1891–1902 and novel data on all Russian factories in 1890, I find a positive association between capital intensity and the probability of restrictions.In the third and final chapter, I study the role of labor mobility restrictions, that existed under serfdom, in shaping economic development. In the Russian Empire, twenty-three million people, who were serfs in 1858 and were not allowed to move to cities, were freed by 1870. I develop a structural model of rural-urban migration incorporating restrictions on mobility, features of the countryside and cities, and the travel costs. I estimate this model using novel detailed data on peasants, cities, and railroads in 1811–1910. The estimated parameters suggest that construction of railroads was the single most important factor explaining rural-urban migration. This is likely because allocation of rural labor was not efficient historically, independently from the impact of serfdom.

Political economy - the original name for economics in its entirety - has in recent years witnessed a semantic broadening to include some of the preoccupations of classical economics. This intriguing collection of contributed work is concerned mainly with developments in the neo-classical tradition and examines the role played by rational choice in the decision-making processes of firms and the State. With contributions from leading scholars including Tony Addison, Bruno Frey and Alan Rugman, this book is an important addition to the field of Political Economy and should become essential reading for all economists as well as policy makers.

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. In the first chapter, I examine a voting model where two political parties have fixed positions on a unidimensional policy space but where the implemented policy is the convex combination of the two positions and study the effects of opinion polls on election results and social welfare. Voters are completely agnostic about the distribution of preferences and gain sequential and partial information through series of opinion polls. Voters' behavior is driven in part by regret minimization. The mass of undecided voters decreases monotonically with the number of polls, but may not necessarily disappear. Voters who remain undecided have centrist ideologies. Finally, social welfare is not necessarily increasing in the number of polls: having more polls is not always better. Features of the model are con firmed by empirical evidence. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Agustin Casas and Guillermo Diaz, we evaluate the effect of an institutional provision designed to increase accountability of local officials, and we show that its implementation can lead to a distribution of power within the legislature which is not consistent with voters' true preferences. The cause of this inconsistency is the ballot design which asymmetrically affects the officials listed on it. We analyze the case of the Lima's 2013 city legislature recall referendum and show that the design of the referendum ballot had adverse and signifficant effects on the composition of the Lima's city legislature. We also show that the election results with more \neutral" ballot designs would have been signifficantly different, and the composition of the legislature would have been more representative of voters' true preferences. More specifically, we use our results to simulate the outcome of the election with a random order of candidates. Even though the voters' fatigue is still present, it affects all parties equally, obtaining a more faithful representation of the voters' preferences. Finally, the third chapter is a joint work with Marco Serena. For small electorates, the probability of casting the pivotal vote drives one's willingness to vote, however the existence of costs of voting incentivizes ones abstention. In two-alternative pivotal-voter models, this trade-off has been extensively studied under private information on the cost of voting. We complement the literature by providing an analysis under complete information, extending the analysis of Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice. 41, 7-53]. If the cost of voting is sufficiently high at least for supporters of one of the two alternatives, the equilibrium is unique, and fully characterized. If instead the cost of voting is sufficiently low for everyone, we characterize three classes of equilibria and we find that all equilibria must belong to one of these three classes, regardless of the number of individuals. Furthermore we focus on equilibria which are continuous in the cost of voting. We show that this equilibrium refinement pins down a unique equilibrium. We conclude by discussing an application of our findings to redistribution of wealth. ; Polling in a Proportional Representation System / Christos Mavridis. -- The last shall be the first: failed accountability due to voters fatigue and ballot design / Christos Mavridis, Agustin Casas and Guillermo Diaz. -- Costly voting under complete information / Christos Mavridis, Marco Serena ; Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Economía ; Presidente: Pablo Amorós González; Secretario: Fracisco Marhuenda Hurtado; Vocal: Orestis Troumpounis

This book addresses energy research from four distinct International Political Economy perspectives: energy security, governance, legal and developmental areas. Energy is too important to be neglected by political scientists. Yet, within the mainstream of the discipline energy research still remains a peripheral area of academic enquiry seeking to plug into the discipline's theoretical debates. The purpose of this book is to assess how existing perspectives fit with our understanding of social science energy research by focusing on the oil and gas dimension.