The story of how the Angolan government was induced to begin creating checks and balances, from a starting point of massive corruption, is a case study in building institutions from scratch. A dysfunctional state has been driven by a combination of domestic and external pressure to take some initial steps toward accountability.
About the Author
John McMillan is the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is author of Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets (2003), has written extensively on economic reform, and is currently studying the subversion of democracy in 1990s Peru.
Italy has long mixed great local and regional diversity with a unitary approach to governance. In October 2001, however, Italian voters approved a series of changes to their country’s Constitution…
The “color revolutions” in the postcommunist countries cannot be attributed to diffusion alone. Structural factors offer a better explanation of why such revolutions have succeeded in some countries and not…
