The surge in "unconventional" oil projects such as Alberta's Tar Sands in the last decade signals a shift in global production from relatively accessible conventional reserves to "frontier" oil. This paper examines one aspect of the oil/environment tension – the environmental regulatory system surrounding the tar sands – by adopting...
To analyze institutional dynamics, it is first necessary to determine when change has occurred, when not, and the nature and magnitude of change. If social institutions are defined in terms of rules, then a change of rules forms the core of institutional change. A number of complications arise from the...
Are the lending programs of the International Monetary Fund bad for democracy? The conventional wisdom is that the implementation of IMF conditional lending programs triggers cycles of austerity, social protest, and government repression that result in democratic backsliding. We present evidence which suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. We...
This essay discusses the role of the ulama (Islamic scholars) in the 2007 Nigerian elections. Based on interviews and the political activities and statements of the twelve members of the ulama, most of whom are from Kano, the author observes four areas of consensus among these scholars: 1) The compatiblity...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute adjudication. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to International Courts (ICs) mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts...
In order to make informed policy recommendations, development research faces two broad challenges: first, to identify and estimate the effects of interventions where they have occurred, and second to build and test theories about the effects that a related intervention would be hypothesized to exert in a different context. I...
This paper examines the relationship between a party'’'s descriptive representation of women and its ideological proximity to female and male voters. I find that male and female voters are both objectively closer to parties with more females in their delegations. However, males are more likely to subjectively assess parties with...
In this paper, Morgan and Orloff survey the contemporary study of states in the social sciences. They begin by tracing the history of scholarship on the state. The authors identify six main clusters of research on states that emerged through the effort to “bring the state back into” history and...
This Handbook provides resources that help explain and contextualize the intersecting crises that destabilized Mali in 2012-2013. These crises included a rebellion by Tuareg separatists, a coup by junior officers, and violence carried out by Muslim militants. In addition to an overview of the crisis, the Handbook contains historical timelines,...
This is the introductory chapter of my forthcoming book with the same title. The three primary objectives of this book are to reveal the paradigm shift of the contemporary international judiciary, conceptualize how new–style international courts (ICs) contribute to international politics, and normalize our understanding foremost as courts, and second...