The present study attempts to replicate the Barber (2011) finding that more considerable security influences a country's disbelief in God. However, this research uses a more diverse sample and seeks to answer additional questions about religiosity and security than the previous work. The results are in line with all of the predictions and offer extra support to the uncertainty hypothesis.

The authors propose that societies with a tradition of rice farming are less likely to develop a democracy than societies with a tradition of wheat farming. They base their predictions on the theory that wheat farming, as opposed to rice farming, does not require extensive community collaboration and promotes individualism, which then in turn promotes democracy. Their findings were robustly consistent with their predictions. The authors used multiple controls in their analyses, including religion, economic development, geography, and local democratic practices.

The authors of this study examine the relationships between historical exposure to Islamic kingdoms and current economic, medical, and educational development in Africa. They predict that ethnic groups that were previously ruled by Islamic states or chiefdoms will have worse outcomes today, theorizing that these worse outcomes would be not as a result of an inherent characteristic of Islam or Islamic kingdoms themselves but rather decreased investment by colonial states or missions. Their results lend some support to their hypotheses, and particularly to the predictions that Christian missions and colonial states would not be able to penetrate areas under Islamic influence as easily as other regions.

The present study investigates whether there is resilience variability following climate-related disasters in societies that are corporate-oriented, which promote participatory and inclusive structures, and exclusionary-oriented, which limit political authority and power. The findings offer modest support for social resilience theory that more flexible (i.e. more participatory) societies would be more resilient after a disaster than less flexible societies. Although only 5 of 14 correlations are significant, the direction is significant by a binomial sign test.

This study investigates the relationship between domestic organization (i.e. family structure and size) and democracy at both the communal and supracommunal levels. The authors suggest that the prevalence of independent monogamous families in Europe in the Late Middle Ages may have facilitated the political evolution toward democracy.

The study looks at 137 countries and examines the relationship between disbelief in God and increased security in health, economic development and security. The findings provide additional support for the uncertainty hypothesis as there is a positive relationship between a country's health or financial growth/security and the population's disbelief in God.

This study examines the relationship between equality and democracy, focusing on social stratification and political participation as the primary measures. Results suggest that equality strengthens some aspects of democracy, but several other factors such as industrialization are involved in the relationship.

This study examines socio-economic predictors of political complexity. Findings suggest that class stratification is the most significant predictor of political complexity.

This article examines the evolution of social inequality through tests of the influence of political, economic and social factors. “Analysis of comparative data shows that while some dimensions of the stratification system (such as measures of social complexity) exhibit a monotonic trend of increasing inequality with level of technology from the hunting-and-gathering to the agrarian type, others (such as measures of freedom and sexual inequality among males) exhibit a pattern of “agrarian reversal” in which inequality increases from the hunting-and-gathering to the advanced horticultural type but then declines with the agrarian type” (292).

The present study attempts to replicate the Ember, Ember, and Russett (1992) worldwide finding that fighting rarely occurs between democracies in a sample of eastern African societies. Following the earlier study, the authors considered internal warfare to be an analog of international warfare and measures of political participation analogous to democracy. The researchers also explore if there is an association between political participation and committing atrocities. Contrary to past findings, internal warfare was not predicted by the same set of variables as the 1992 study, but there is an inverse relationship between committing atrocities and political participation. However, when additional variables were added, internal warfare was significantly predicted by less political participation.