The Developmental Consequences of Democracy and Human Rights, 1980 to 2010

• In Event: 128 - Section on Human Rights Paper Session. Human Rights and the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals Agenda (co-sponsored with Section on Sociology of Development)

Abstract

A long-standing research question asks whether democracy promotes or inhibits development. The question remains unsettled: some studies find that democracy and economic growth are incompatible; others conclude that they are mutually reinforcing; and still others discern no systematic relationship. One controversial perspective, often referred to as the “Lee thesis,” contends that authoritarianism is beneficial to economic growth and that individuals’ civil and political rights must sometimes be curtailed in the interests of collective development. To test this idea, I analyze the effect of democracy and human rights on economic growth rates over 1, 5, and 10 years for up to 160 countries over a thirty-year period (1980 to 2010), using two-stage models with instrumental variables to isolate causal directionality. I find, in contrast with the Lee thesis, that democracy and human rights protections generally promote modest rates of growth. Although human rights protections are weakly associated with reduced annual growth rates in the otherwise fast-growing BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), democracy and human rights do not appear to inhibit economic growth for other subsamples—including, with the exception of China, East Asian countries, the region of greatest relevance for the Lee thesis.

Author

• Wade M. Cole, University of Utah