Journal ArticleDOI
Democracy and Economic Growth: A Historical Perspective
TLDR
In this paper, the authors argue that the causal effect of democracy can be measured by a country's regime status in a particular year (T), which is correlated with its growth performance in a subsequent period (T+l).Abstract:
Recent studies appear to show that democracy has no robust association with economic growth. Yet all such work assumes that the causal effect of democracy can be measured by a country's regime status in a particular year (T), which is correlated with its growth performance in a subsequent period (T+l). The authors argue that democracy must be understood as a stock, rather than a level, measure. That is, a country's growth performance is affected by the number of years it has been democratic, in addition to the degree of democracy experienced during that period. In this fashion, democracy is reconceptualized as a historical, rather than a contemporary, variable—with the assumption that long-run historical patterns may help scholars to understand present trends. The authors speculate that these secular-historical influences operate through four causal pathways, each of which may be understood as a type of capital: physical capital, human capital, social capital, and political capital. This argument is tested in a crosscountry analysis and is shown to be robust in a wide variety of specifications and formats.read more
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Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options
Jason Seawright,John Gerring +1 more
TL;DR: Seven case selection procedures are considered, each of which facilitates a different strategy for within-case analysis and discusses quantitative approaches that meet the goals of the approach, while still requiring information that can reasonably be gathered for a large number of cases.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Role of Social Capital in Financial Development
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify the effect of social capital on financial development by exploiting social capital differences within Italy and find that households are more likely to use checks, invest less in cash and more in stock, have higher access to institutional credit, and make less use of informal credit.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Role of Social Capital in Financial Development
Luigi Guiso,Paola Sapienza,Paola Sapienza,Paola Sapienza,Luigi Zingales,Luigi Zingales,Luigi Zingales +6 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors exploit the well-known differences in social capital across different parts of Italy to identify the effect of social capital on financial development, and show that the behavior of movers is still affected by the level of Social capital present in the province where they were born.
Journal ArticleDOI
Clientelism, Credibility, and the Policy Choices of Young Democracies
TL;DR: The authors identified for the first time systematic performance differences between younger and older democracies and argued that these are driven by the inability of political competitors to make broadly credible preelectoral promises to voters.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a widely used data set on democracy, covering 1800-2007 and 219 countries, which represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently availab...
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Posted Content
Land Reform, Poverty Reduction and Growth: Evidence from India
Timothy Besley,Robin Burgess +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used panel data on sixteen main Indian states from 1958 to 1992 to consider whether the large volume of land reforms as have been legislated have had an appreciable impact on growth and poverty.
Journal ArticleDOI
Democracy, Economic Development, and Income Inequality
Abstract: Most cross-national tests of inverse association between democracy and inequality have operationalized the concept of democracy by measuring its level at a single point in time. More compelling theoretical arguments can be made for causal relationships that operate over time between (1) a country's years of democratic experience and income inequality; and (2) income inequality and the stability of democracy. Continuous and qualitative measures of years of democratic experience are estimated to have a significant negative impact on income inequality independent of economic development and other control variables for a sample of 55 countries. A very strong inverse correlation is also observed between income inequality and regime stability for a sample of 33 democracies. This association holds independent of economic development, which is found to have no direct effect on democratic stability after controlling for income inequality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Property and Contract Rights in Autocracies and Democracies
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present and test empirically a new theory of property and contract rights and show that the age of a democratic system is strongly correlated with the protection of contract rights.
Journal ArticleDOI
Land Reform, Poverty Reduction, and Growth: Evidence from India
Timothy Besley,Robin Burgess +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used panel data on sixteen main Indian states from 1958 to 1992 to consider whether the large volume of land reforms as have been legislated have had an appreciable impact on growth and poverty.
Book
The Crisis of Democracy
TL;DR: In this paper, a political decision made by France that was made in "semisecret, without open political debate, but with a tremendous amount of lobbying and intrabureaucratic conflict".