I’ve promised to write about the surveillance drone that I’ve been building over the past couple of months. I have always wanted to have my own drone that could send back a live video feed. This is partly inspired by products like the AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, which is currently in use by the US military, […]

I have, to put it mildly, been somewhat astonished at the heated reaction that my blog post “Do Institutions Matter?” has provoked, culminating in a letter from the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, to The American Interest complaining about my piece and contesting various points in it. I’m now one of the few […]

My earlier blog post on Hungary’s new constitution has elicited a large and often angry response from some Hungarians, and now the Hungarian State Secretary for Communication, Zoltán Kovács, has written a critical letter to The American Interest that you can read here.   I will be responding to all of this in a few days, […]

I’m beginning a new project at Stanford/CDDRL called “The Governance Project.” The intention is to focus on conceptualizing and measuring governance, and applying those measures to two specific countries, China and the United States.The beginning point of the project is definition of governance that excludes the degree to which governments are either democratic or subject […]

Over the past decade the mantra in both development studies and comparative politics has been “institutions matter”—that is, you aren’t going to get economic growth or other human development objectives in the absence of institutions like rule of law, transparent and accountable governments, low levels of corruption, and the like.The empirical basis for this assertion […]

I have been reading Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species at the recommendation of David Sloan Wilson, who has been one of the leading proponents of group selection (or more properly, multi-level selection) in evolutionary theory over the last few years.  (These are people who took issue with the views of Richard Dawkins and many older […]

This is a continuation of the extract of the talk I gave at the University of Geneva in Nov. 2011 on “European Identities.” This part deals with the failure to create an identity at a European level:Let me turn to nation building at the EU level. When we pass from the level of these individual […]

I’m reproducing the transcript of parts of a talk I gave in Geneva last November at the Latsis Foundation Prize Ceremony on “European Identities.”  This excerpt deals with how different European countries have dealt with Muslim immigrant assimilation, and the second excerpt will discuss the lack of identity at a European level.Let me then move […]

In this campaign season, a lot of Republican candidates, particularly Newt Gingrich, have been talking about American Exceptionalism. When Gingrich says that President Obama doesn’t understand how exceptional the United States is, he means this in only a positive sense: that we are freer, more entrepreneurial, or have been a greater force for good in […]

Much of my life has been spent in institutions dedicated to public policy: the State Department, the Rand Corporation and the Rand Graduate School, George Mason’s School of Public Policy, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and now Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. People in these places make policy, give advice about what […]