Related papers: Statehood Without Capacity
In most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state-building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity.…
This paper proposes a model of tax compliance and fiscal capacity grounded in universalization reasoning. Citizens partially internalize the consequences of concealment by imagining a world in which everyone acted similarly, linking their…
Governance theory has quietly relied on a rough cognitive comparability between governors and governed. The assumption is load-bearing, and this paper tries to show why by making it testable. The vehicle is a six-dimension evaluation…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
We present an equilibrium model of politics in which political platforms compete over public opinion. A platform consists of a policy, a coalition of social groups with diverse intrinsic attitudes to policies, and a narrative. We…
While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges,…
We develop a statistical framework for wealth allocation in which agents hold discrete units of wealth and macrostates are defined by how wealth is distributed across agents. The structure of the economic state space is characterized…
The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…
This paper casts within a unified economic framework some key challenges for the global economic order: de-globalization; the rising impracticability of global cooperation; and the increasingly confrontational nature of Great Power…
We investigate the dynamics of wealth inequality in an economy where households have positional preferences, with the strength of the positional concern determined endogenously by inequality of wealth distribution in the society. We…
Economic complexity reflects the amount of knowledge that is embedded in the productive structure of an economy. It resides on the premise of hidden capabilities - fundamental endowments underlying the productive structure. In general,…
Why do division and cohesion often intensify together? This paper develops a static structural theory of relation maintenance based on minimal positional constraints. Rather than relying on utility-based or probabilistic models, social…
Many complex systems share two characteristics: 1) they are stochastic in nature, and 2) they are characterized by a large number of factors. At the same time, various natural complex systems appear to have two types of intertwined…
The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such…
Coalition forming is investigated among countries, which are coupled with short range interactions, under the influence of external fields produced by the existence of global alliances. The model rests on the natural model of coalition…
This short paper is a primer on the nature of state sovereignty and the importance of claims about it. It also aims to reveal (merely reveal) a strategy for working with vague or contradictory data about which states, in fact, are…
Political power in the international context can be characterized as a fluid-like substance that circulates through a network of nation states. States can possess it as a stock quantity, reflected by their material capacity or national…
The majorization relation has been shown to be useful in classifying which transformations of jointly held quantum states are possible using local operations and classical communication. In some cases, a direct transformation between two…
We show that a large effective number of commodities can be a source of equilibrium stability and uniqueness: expanding substitution opportunities strengthens aggregate substitution effects. We study finite dated-commodity exchange…