Democracy and Development: Insights from new Data Collection Efforts

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Whether democracy is conducive to or harmful for economic development in developing nations is a contested and long-standing debate in the Social Sciences. Theoretically and empirically the debate remains inconclusive. Existing meta-analyses have found either no or only a very small positive effect of democracy on development (Doucouliagos and Ulubaşoğlu 2008; Colagrossi et al. 2017). In recent years, a small but growing group of scholars has tried to break or circumvent this deadlock by focusing on economic variations within rather than between regime types. This panel brings together scholars from this group. In particular but not exclusively, the panel presents recent efforts to explain differences between more and less developmental democracies by using new panel data with broad geographical and temporal coverage.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Cosponsor

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Facets of Democratic Change and their Causal Effect on Economic Growth - Vanessa Alexandra Boese

• Stitching a Patchwork Quilt: Democracy, Social Heterogeneity, and Development - Jonathan Hanson, University of Michigan

• Coalitions, Threats, Ideologies and the Origins of Democratic Developmentalism - Nicolai Schulz, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

• Female Empowerment, Technological Change, and Economic Growth - Sirianne Dahlum, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Carl Henrik Knutsen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo; Valeriya Mechkova, Varieties of Democracy, Gothenburg University

Chair

• John Gerring University of Texas, Austin

Discussants

• Candelaria Garay Harvard University

• Michael K. Miller George Washington University