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Economic modelling is vital to our understanding of the world - and even more vital to policymakers. Yet, says Alison McGovern, do they provide us with the certainty that we think they do? And is our focus on economic evidence in political discourse really representative of the bases on which policy decisions are actually made? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives This article investigates whether economic growth and income level affect revolution attempts and successful revolutions. Methods The article conducts a statistical analysis, mainly using panel data logit models, on a data set including 150 countries with time series from 1919 to 2003. Results Low short-term growth increases probabilities of both attempted and successful revolutions. There is some evidence that higher income levels mitigate revolution attempts, but this is not robust and further analysis indicates that any association may stem from oil income more specifically. There is no net effect of income level on successful revolution, but high income seemingly reduces probability of successful revolution more in democracies than in dictatorships. Although revolutions occur more frequently after 'J curves' and 'decremental deprivation patterns,' this is largely due to economic crises and not the more complex growth patterns as hypothesized by, respectively, Davies and Gurr. Conclusion Low short-term economic growth induces revolutions, whereas the impact of income level is less clear and seemingly contingent on factors such as regime type and source of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a test of the impact of voters' political ideology on economic growth and of the role of preferences for government size as a transmission channel. We focus on France from the beginning of its stable democratic experience in 1871. A move of voters' ideology to the right increases economic growth over the total observation period. However, the growth effect of ideology is mediated by voters' preferences for government size only during the post-World War II period. For reverse causality concerns, we use the political ideology of other historical democracies as an instrument variable for France's ideology. ( JEL E6, O43, H11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution discusses Ron Martin's Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography, 'Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock-in to Evolution'. The lecture offered original ideas on how to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with path dependence theories and the equilibristic understanding of the temporality of economic change. This contribution addresses the question of co-evolution of the economic and the political in regional and local industrial evolution. It questions the conception of temporality that seems implicit in the framework. It is suggested that the notion of punctuated co-evolution may be a way forwards, avoiding some of the difficulties in Martin's model. The contribution concludes by discussing the analytical limits of path dependence models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this contribution is to respond to the three preceding critiques of my Roepke Lecture on 'Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock-in to Evolution'. Each critique raises some pertinent and challenging issues: specifically that Marxist regional political economy is a more powerful perspective with which to 'take history seriously'; that I should have given due recognition to the idea of 'punctuated evolution'; and that my attempt to revise and extend the concept of path dependence has ontological problems. I welcome these commentaries, as they contribute to the very debate that my Roepke Lecture was intended to initiate. But I argue that these critiques are themselves contestable, and that none of them undermines the main thrust of that lecture. My aim in the latter was to suggest that we need to widen and revise the concept of path dependence if it is to function as a an evolutionary concept, to set it free from the overly restrictive and conservative interpretation (of 'lock-in') that it has all too often been given in economic-geographic applications. I defend that aim here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]