Are Jews special, or do too many people just think they are?

Understanding how and why political institutions differ between the US and Latin America is, then, key to understanding the larger puzzle of the latter region’s lagging development.

The victory of Darfurian rebel forces over the Sudanese army in a couple of engagements last week has led to the expulsion of UN representative Jan Pronk from Khartoum for writing about it on his blog. These battles should remind us that if the conflict in Darfur is genocide, it is also quite different from […]

The victory of Darfurian rebel forces over the Sudanese army in a couple of engagements last week has led to the expulsion of UN representative Jan Pronk from Khartoum for writing about it on his blog. These battles should remind us that if the conflict in Darfur is genocide, it is also quite different from […]

This past week I spent three days in Kiev, as a guest of the Economics Education and Research Consortium (an economics program that is about to transform itself into the Kiev School of Economics), and Expert Magazine, a Russian-language journal that had a role in publishing a new Russian edition of my book Trust.  Viktor […]

This past week I spent three days in Kiev, as a guest of the Economics Education and Research Consortium (an economics program that is about to transform itself into the Kiev School of Economics), and Expert Magazine, a Russian-language journal that had a role in publishing a new Russian edition of my book Trust. Viktor […]

This is a link to the presentation I gave to a plenary panel “The Clash of Cultures and American Hegemony” (this wasn’t my title) at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Philadelphia on Sept. 1.  Sam Huntington was supposed to be on the panel but was not able to participate; other panelists were […]

While people have focused on the difficulty of building democracy in the Middle East, they should not assume its gains are consolidated elsewhere in the world. Asia was the model for how rising incomes and a growing middle class would support democratic consolidation, but Thailand’s Sept. 19 military coup shows how stable democracy needs more […]

While people have focused on the difficulty of building democracy in the Middle East, they should not assume its gains are consolidated elsewhere in the world. Asia was the model for how rising incomes and a growing middle class would support democratic consolidation, but Thailand’s Sept. 19 military coup shows how stable democracy needs more […]

Shinzo Abe’s election as leader of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) this past week and his imminent installation as Junichiro Koizumi’s successor as prime minister is something Americans should look forward to with mixed feelings. Koizumi was a mold-breaking leader, bringing the Japanese economy out of the doldrums, reforming the postal savings system, and smashing […]