ABSTRACT

In recent decades, the ‘Why Europe?’ question has attracted overwhelming interest in the social sciences. From having been a dusty, forgotten issue, primarily studied by historical sociologists, it is now a part of mainstream political science and economics. For example, over the last decade, the leading journal in political science, American Political Science Review, has published a series of articles that, often with the help of sophisticated statistical methods, address different aspects of the question (e.g., Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Stasavage 2010; 2014; Hariri 2012; Woodberry 2012; Blaydes and Chaney 2013; Kokkonen and Sundell 2014). Similarly, the question has received attention from economists, an issue to which we return in Chapter 13.