Due especially to the work of Friedrich Hayek, “spontaneous order” has become an influential concept in social theory. It seeks to explain how human practices and institutions emerge as unintended consequences of myriad individual actions, and points to the limits of rationalism and conscious design in social life. The political implications of spontaneous order theory explain both the enthusiasm and the skepticism it has elicited, but its basic mechanisms remain elusive and underexamined.

Robert Mugabe resigned as Zimbabwe’s president in November 2017, following a military action called Operation Restore Legacy. This article examines the motivations and dynamics of Operation Restore Legacy, which it characterizes as a coup by military generals that had significant commonalities with historical coups in Africa. This characterisation, which is informed by the accounts of coup participants and a reading of the literature, challenges interpretations of the coup as ‘a non-coup-coup’, ‘very Zimbabwean’, or ‘special’.

Robert Mugabe resigned as Zimbabwe’s president in November 2017, following a military action called Operation Restore Legacy. This article examines the motivations and dynamics of Operation Restore Legacy, which it characterises as a coup by military generals that had significant commonalities with historical coups in Africa.

This characterisation, which is informed by the accounts of coup participants and a reading of the literature, challenges interpretations of the coup as ‘a non-coup-coup’, ‘very Zimbabwean’, or ‘special’.

Other People's Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of "conscience constituents" in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a movement, but do not stand to benefit if it succeeds. Why do such people participate, when they do not stand to benefit? Why are they sometimes present and sometimes absent in social movements? Why and when is their participation welcome to those who do stand to benefit, and why and when is it not?

The literature on the political “resource curse” has recently seen heated debates over the average causal effects of oil on democracy and the generalizability of the theory. One of the reasons these disagreements remain unresolved is that the causal mechanisms of the resource curse receive little scholarly attention and historical and international aspects are frequently overlooked.

Experiments should be designed to facilitate the detection of experimental measurement error. To this end, the authors advocate the implementation of identical experimental protocols employing diverse experimental modes. They suggest iterative nonparametric estimation techniques for assessing the magnitude of heterogeneous treatment effects across these modes. They propose two diagnostic strategies—measurement metrics embedded in experiments, and measurement experiments—that help assess whether any observed heterogeneity reflects experimental measurement error.

The parliamentary authorities have taken the view that because the Supreme Court has quashed the prorogation of Parliament, everything else done by the Royal Commission in the morning of 10 September has been quashed as well. Accordingly, both the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Lord Speaker have indicated that Royal Assent for the Restoration and Renewal Bill would need to be signified again. This paper argues that the Speakers have wrongly understood the Supreme Court’s judgment in this respect.