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
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
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...
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Inequality, Democracy, and Persistence: Is There a Political Kuznets Curve?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide comprehensive empirical evidence on recent theories that link democracy and income inequality for the period 1960-1995, using simple cross-country regressions, they find a non-monotonic link between these two variables when using ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, and Eusufzai tests.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Regime Debate Revisted: A Sensitivity Analysis of Democracy's Economic Effect
TL;DR: In this paper, a variety of sensitivity analyses are conducted to answer two basic questions: why has the literature yielded contradictory results? Secondly, how believable are these results? The existing contradictions can be explained by analysts' choice of time period, with democracy having a negative effect on growth in the 1960s, a positive effect in the 1980s and no effect at all in the 1970s and 1990s.
Book
Liberalism, Democracy and Development
TL;DR: Chan as mentioned in this paper proposes a new theoretical framework in which liberal democracy is decomposed into economic, civil and political dimensions that can be combined in different ways, allowing for a range of "institutional matrices".
Posted Content
Democracy, Volatility and Development
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak,Francisco Rodríguez,Roger R. Betancourt,Maureen L. Cropper,Bill Evans,John J. Shea,Margaret McMillan,Dani Rodrik,Judy Hellerstein +8 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study the determinants of average growth and its volatility as a two-equation system, and find that higher levels of democracy, incomes and diversification lower volatility, while volatility itself reduces growth.
Book
Authoritarian legacies and democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe
Katherine Hite,Paola Cesarini +1 more
TL;DR: Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe brings together well-known comparative political scientists to define and explore the effects of authoritarian rule in post-authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe, the Southern Cone, and Brazil as mentioned in this paper.