The results achieved in the five years of the Political Economy of Power Relations project with respect to conflict can be summarized as follows: in an article on the Journal of Economic Literature with Sonno I have first illustrated with a simple empirical analysis that for conflict risk at the interstate level one needs to consider both strength asymmetries and economic dependence; a 2022 article on “Theory of Power Wars” with Herrera and Nunnari published on the Quarterly Journal of Political Science provides the first dynamic theory of the crucial importance of the mismatch between relative military power and relative political power for conflict also at the civil war level; a third complementary paper on “Power Mismatch and Civil Conflict in Africa” with Ogliari and Hong required new machine learning methodology in order to construct valid measures of military and political power of ethnic groups, and hence the contribution is also to provide new data and measures for future researchers and practicioners. Beside the theoretical and empirical confirmation of the ”power mismatch” idea offered by these three articles, I have published two articles, both with Meirowitz, Ramsay and Squintani, on the role of third parties to resolve conflicts, and on how the effectiveness of such an intervention by third parties may depend on the distribution of powers between the opponents in conflict. One of these two papers, published in 2019 on the Journal of Political Economy, concerned the importance of mediation even to reduce militarization incentives, and the second one on the Quarterly Journal of Political Science in 2022 has demonstrated how third parties can reduce probability of conflict and militarization incentives more by soft interventions than hard ones. A sixth article, joint with Esteban, Flamand and Rohner, addressing the secessionist vs centrist conflict incentives, is under review. As a way to disseminate these results to the international relations and conflict research community in economics, I have organized a workshop in 2021 at Bocconi in hybrid format, also including a section on the upcoming Handbook of Economics of Conflict. A similar number of results has been achieved for the second part of the project concerning the interrelated dynamics of political and bureaucratic incentives. Most important, the article “From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and Overproduction of Laws” with Gratton, Guiso and Michelacci, published on the American Economic Review in 2021, has demonstrated that political instability can generate incentives to overlegislate and overregulate, and the consequent additional burdon on the bureaucracy can further alter the legislators’ incentives, creating a loop that can bring to a Kafkaesque steady state. An important objective for my research agenda was to understand under what conditions it is optimal to maintain checks and balances vs concentration of legislative power in one chamber, and this led eventually to the publication of a general theoretical normative article in 2022 on the International Economic Review with Gratton, entitled “Optimal Checks and Balances under Policy Uncertainty.” Delegation of policy making and legislative power has been addressed in an article joint with Ash and Vannoni on PSRM in 2020, entitled “Divided Government, Delegation and Civil Service Reform.” A further empirical and methodological article on how to disentangle discretion and delegation incentives using text analysis, again with Ash and Vannoni, has been published in 2021 on Political Analysis journal. Still in 2021 I have published another methodological paper on Political 2 Analysis same journal with Ash and Osnabrugge on how to detect political strategies from congressional texts, and an article on the Journal of Public Economics with Sasso on “Bureaucrats under Populism,” again emphasizing the consequences of an important change in politics for the functioning of the bureaucracy. Finally, the research on populism produced a publication on the journal Economic Policy in 2019 with Guiso, Herrera and Sonno on “Global Crises and Populism”. In terms of dissemination, I have presented many of these articles in keynote lectures, and in seminars at econometric society and European association meetings.
