Related papers: The Calculus of Democratization and Development
A critical issue for society today is the emergence and decline of democracy worldwide. It is unclear, however, how democratic features, such as elections and civil liberties, influence this change. Democracy indices, which are the standard…
A large body of literature in economics and political science examines the impact of democracy and political freedoms on various outcomes using cross-country comparisons. This paper explores the possibility that any positive impact of…
This article addresses the origins of income inequality in post-socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from 1991 to 2016. The aim is to analyze the relationship between democracy and income inequality. In…
Political systems shape institutions and govern institutional change supporting economic performance, production and diffusion of technological innovation. This study shows, using global data of countries, that institutional change, based…
This article examines the political consequences of terrorism in Burkina Faso. Using a dataset combining geolocated terrorist events from ACLED (from 2015 to 2024) with public opinion data from Afrobarometer, I compare the effect of…
Scholars have long hypothesized that democratic forms of government are more compatible with scientific advancement. However, empirical analysis testing the democracy-science compatibility hypothesis remains underdeveloped. This article…
We find that, in the 21st century, democracy has persistent negative impacts on growth in GDP and night-time light intensity. This finding emerges from five different instrumental variable strategies that account for potential invalidity in…
There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…
In Nigeria, electoral behavior is often interpreted through ethno-religious views and regional allegiances, without empirically assessing the influence of socioeconomic indicators such as health, income, education, and other deprivations on…
Previous studies have offered a variety of explanations on the relationship between democracy and the internet. However, most of these studies concentrate on regions, specific states or authoritarian regimes. No study has investigated the…
We construct a majority cellular automata based model to explain the power-law signatures in Indonesian general election results. The understanding of second-order phase transitions between two different conditions inspires the model. The…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
Recent democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarian regimes worldwide have rekindled interest in understanding the causes and consequences of such authoritarian rule in democracies. In this paper, I study the long-run political…
Does it matter whether a government is "left wing" or "right wing" for economic growth? Using a panel of 113 countries (1995 2022), we combine: (i) the economic ideology of the executive branch (V Dem), (ii) the disaggregated institutional…
The emergence and decline of democratic systems worldwide raises fundamental questions about the dynamics of political change. Contrary to the idea of a stable endpoint of liberal democracy, recent backsliding towards less democratic…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
The relationship between democracy and economic growth is of long-standing interest. We revisit the panel data analysis of this relationship by Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo and Robinson (forthcoming) using state of the art econometric methods.…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…