Do Return Migrants Make Better Leaders?

While migration per se is not found to affect the quality of political institutions, it appears that leaders who studied abroad are associated with higher levels of democracy (p. 3).

That is from this interesting paper by Marion Mercier.

Democracy and trust

From a paper by Martin Ljunge

This paper finds evidence that more democratic political institutions increase trust. Second generation immigrants with ancestries from 115 countries are studied within 30 European countries. Comparing individuals born and residing in the same country, those whose father was born in a more democratic country express higher trust than those whose father was born in a less democratic country. The results are robust to individual, parental, and ancestral country controls.

The author takes into account other influences that might be driving the results. A draft is here.  

More educated leaders lead to more educated citizens

This paper looks at the contribution of political leaders to enhance citizens' education and investigate how the educational attainment of the population is affected while a leader with higher education remains in office. For this purpose, we consider educational transitions of political leaders in office and find that the educational attainment of population increases when a more educated leader remains in office. Furthermore, we also observe that the educational attainment of the population is negatively impacted when a country transitions from an educated leader to a less educated one. This result may help to explain the previous finding that more educated political leaders favor economic growth. That is from this paper by Luis Diaz-Serrano & Jessica Pérez. HT: Eugene Beaulieu

Labor Migration and Democracy (Moldova)

Communities with more westward migration vote significantly less for the Communist Party. P. 16.

That is from a paper on the effects of labor migration over diffusion of democracy in Moldova in the late 1990s by Toman Omar Mahmoud, Hillel Rapoport, Andreas Steinmayr, & Christoph Trebesch. 

Domestic Institutions and the Taxing of Multinational Corporations

Nathan M. Jensen, in a new published paper

After controlling for parent firm and foreign affiliate–level factors, I find that democratic countries generate as much as 26% more tax revenues from multinational corporations relative to authoritarian countries.

The influence of direct democracy on the shadow economy

In this paper we have analyzed the influence of direct democratic institutions on the size and development of the shadow economies of 57 countries that have some direct democratic institutions. The main result of our theoretical analysis is that, ceteris paribus, direct democratic institutions have a negative effect on the shadow economy’s size. Our model also predicts that this effect should be nonlinear and should interact with other features of the political system (e.g., district magnitude). The empirical investigation confirms these hypotheses. Our econometric results demonstrate that the effect of direct democratic institutions on the shadow economy is negative, nonlinear, and economically meaningful; these results are robust to the inclusion of a wide variety of control variables yet are sensitive to the interaction of direct democracy with other political institutions (here, district magnitude). 

What are the policy implications of this work? We believe that the results reported here confirm that direct democratic institutions play an important role in reducing the size and development of the shadow economy by favoring good governance; this should be taken into account in the design of institutions. They also confirm that different institutional features are likely to interact with one another in shaping fiscal policies and economic outcomes. The fact that some political institutions may be substitutes (as in our framework) or complements is an important aspect that should be taken into account when designing an institutional framework.

Data

Data on the informal sector are drawn from the dataset of Schneider (2005), which gives the size of the shadow economy as a proportion of official gross domestic product (GDP) for 145 countries over the 1999–2003 period. Our dependent variable is an average of the three available observations for the period indicated; this allows us to cover up to 73 of the countries included in the original sample. 

The direct democracy index (DDI) is that described in Fiorino and Ricciuti (2007). They derive it from three different sources: Kaufmann (2004) for 43 European countries, Hwang (2005) for 33 Asian countries, and Madroñal (2005) for 17 Latin American countries. Thus there are 57 countries for which we have both the size of the shadow economy and the index of direct democracy (see Table 1). The DDI ranges in value from 1 to 7, with 7 corresponding to countries rated as radical democrat and 1 to countries with the least direct democracy. As pointed out by Fiorino and Ricciuti, the main advantage of using this index is that it provides both a qualitative and a quantitative assessment of direct democracy. In fact, this index reflects both the quality and performance of direct democracy in that it focuses on the two most important and widely used processes (initiatives and referendums) as well as on the integrity of the processes themselves. The disadvantages of the DDI are that it is a subjective measure and that it does not identify the issues addressed by referendums and initiatives.

That is from a paper by Désirée Teobaldelli & Friedrich Schneider.

Note that Bolivia is the country with the largest shadow economy in the sample (68%), and Switzerland the only country, in the sample, under 10%. Switzerland is also the country with the highest score in the Direct Democracy Index, and Bolivia is at the bottom. Surprisingly Costa Rica and Singapore, are at the bottom too. 

Athletics and Democracy in ancient Greece

In the present essay we examine whether and how sports affected the emergence of democracy as a political phenomenon in Classical Greece. To achieve this we introduce in a model the concept of macroculture as a complex of mutually supporting values, norms and beliefs in various areas of human activity, like athletics, war, politics, etc. Then, we proceed through a historical review on the history of sports in Ancient Greece and we investigate various aspects of how and under which terms athletics performed during classical Greece, predominantly, in ancient Athens. We found that the values that gradually emerged through sports during an extended period that goes back as far as the Bronze Age times, led to the development of an environment of mutually supporting norms and values such as equality and trust, that by being correlated and coordinated each other, led to the creation of new values and norms, as the theory of macroculture proposes. We also found that these new values were “diffused” from athletics to the field of politics and played a key role to the emergence of democracy.

That is from a paper by Economou and Kyriazis. 

HT: Fabio Sabatini.

Support for democracy by gender (20 S-S African countries)

Source.

The authors, García-Peñalosa & Konte (March 2013), conclude:

An alternative hypothesis is that women’s lower support for democracy comes from the fact that democratic transitions are often associated with civil conflict. If women have a higher cost of conflict than men, then they are less likely to support democracy. Our analysis seems to point in this direction.

HT: Eugene Beaulieu. 

Democratization and Economic Prosperity (Africa)

That is from a new paper by De Kadt & Wittels. From the conclusions (p. 27):

How does democracy affect economic prosperity? This paper applies a new empirical approach to answer this long-standing question. Using the synthetic control method and new balanced panel data for the period 1975-2008 we estimate unique treatment effects for every African country that democratized in the late 20th century. Our approach takes some important steps toward resolving the inferential problems that compromise existing country-level, cross-national research on the economic consequences of political regimes.

First, we demonstrate with some confidence that democratization does, in fact, matter for economic output. These effects are highly heterogenous across countries: Some states appear to experience a considerable economic boost, while others are estimated to contract as a result of democratic reform. This pattern of effects is consistent with the common finding that democracy has a weakly positive average effect on eco- nomic growth. Further, we present evidence that corroborates some existing theories about the factors that moderate the economic effects of democratization.

The method used is complex, but very interesting.  

Women voted for change, men for status quo (India)

We document the political participation of women in Indian democracy by comparing the turnout of women voters to men in the state elections from 1962 till 2012. Our analysis reveals striking findings: (1) There is a steady and a sharp decline in the gender bias in voting over time. In particular, we find that the sex ratio of voters (the number of women voters to every 1000 men voters) increased very impressively from 715 in the 1960s to 883 in the 2000s. (2) This phenomenon of declining gender bias in voting is across all the states, including the traditionally backward “BIMARU” states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. (3) This decline is solely driven by the dramatic increase in women participation in the elections since the 1990s, while men participation has remained unchanged. (4) We also find evidence that women voters are agents of change - they vote differently from men and affect re-election prospects.

That is from this paper by (Kapoor & Ravi, March 2013). The authors find that increasing female voting has a negative effect on the probability of reelection of a political party, while male voting has a positive effect. Women vote for change. 

Who Gets a Swiss Passport?

We study discrimination against immigrants using microlevel data from Switzerland, where, until recently, some municipalities used referendums to decide on the citizenship applications of foreign residents. We show that naturalization decisions vary dramatically with immigrants’ attributes, which we collect from official applicant descriptions that voters received before each referendum. Country of origin determines naturalization success more than any other applicant characteristic, including language skills, integration status, and economic credentials. The average proportion of “no” votes is about 40% higher for applicants from (the former) Yugoslavia and Turkey compared to observably similar applicants from richer northern and western European countries. Statistical and taste-based discrimination contribute to varying naturalization success; the rewards for economic credentials are higher for applicants from disadvantaged origins, and origin-based discrimination is much stronger in more xenophobic municipalities. Moreover, discrimination against specific immigrant groups responds dynamically to changes in the groups’ relative size.

From a a new published paper  by Hainmueller & Hangartner (American Political Science Review, February 2013) . A draft (2011) is here. 

Superpower interventions and democracy

Abstract: The United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have revived again the phenomenon of “regime change” that was thought to have died with the Cold War. We study Cold War “regime changes” for insight, although of course they do not extrapolate exactly to modern events. The recent declassification of Cold War documents now makes it possible to develop a new time series cross section dataset of superpower interventions during the Cold War which takes account of interventions by the secret services. We find that US interventions to prop up a leader are associated with significant short term and medium term declines in democracy in the intervened country. We observe a similar size effect for Soviet interventions, but they are not robustly significant like US interventions. Although the negative effect of interventions dissipates once the intervention ends, an intervention has a large effect on democracy when it lasts for a long time.

That is from a new published paper by Berger et al (Journal of Comparative Economics, January 2013).  A draft (2008) is here. 

The transmission of democracy

Paola Giuliano and Nathan Nunn have a new working paper titled "The Transmission of Democracy: From the Village to the Nation-State." They argue:

We provide evidence on mechanisms, showing that past experience with local level democracy is associated with more supportive beliefs of national democracy today. This finding suggests the possibility that a tradition of village-level democracy may affect people’s attitudes about the appropriateness of democratic institutions, which in turn affect the stability of such institutions at the national level. In places where democratic institutions existed traditionally at the local level, it was natural for these institutions to be extended to the national level. National level democracy was more likely to be viewed as natural and legitimate by the population and was more likely to remain once implemented.

That sounds intutitive, but the authors use very interesting data:

The data, reported at the country, district, and grid-cell levels, are constructed by combining pre-industrial ethnographic information on over 100 ancestral characteristics for 1,265 ethnic groups with information on the current distribution of approximately 7,000 language groups reported at the grid-cell level. The database uses the languages and dialects spoken by current populations to construct measures of the characteristics of their ancestors.

Unemployment and the Democratic Electoral Advantage

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president and governor move together. Other things being equal, higher unemployment increases the vote shares of Democratic candidates. The effect is greatest when Republicans are the incumbent party, but Democrats benefit from unemployment even when they are in control. The explanation for these findings is that unemployment is a partisan issue for voters, not a valence issue, and that the Democratic Party “owns” unemployment. When unemployment is high or rising, Democratic candidates can successfully convince voters that they are the party best able to solve the problem.

Source: Wright (American Political Science Review, September 2012). I did not find the full paper online.  

What Motivates Political Preferences? Self-Interest, Ideology, and Fairness in a Laboratory Democracy

Substantial prior literature has established that subjects in laboratory experiments are typically willing to sacrifice their own well-being to make nancial allocations more equal among participants. We tested the applicability of this result in an environment that contained some of the key contextual issues are usually excluded from more abstract games, in particular situations of income redistribution. Our general finding is that votes for a redistributive tax were almost entirely in accordance with self-interest: above-average earners vote for low tax rates and below-average earners vote for high tax rates. A measure of subjects' preferences for fairness or equality, their self-reported economic ideology, was unrelated to their behavior in this experiment. Because our ideology measure should have been correlated with any intrinsic preferences regarding inequality aversion, we conclude that any preferences for fairness or inequality that our subjects possessed were not strong enough to overcome self-interest in this context.  

Because our results seem to run counter to prior experimental evidence, it is important to interpret these results carefully. While there is evidence that people will sacrifice their own well being for others in abstract ultimatum and dictator games, there is also evidence that this willingness decreases substantially in cases where the subjects have earned their position. Our results should be taken as further confirmation of that result. Our results strongly suggest that when money to be re-distributed is earned through real effort, subjects are much less willing to sacrifice their well-being for that of others. The failure of the ideology variable to explain much about the data is more problematic and more interesting. There can be little doubt that there is substantial support for income redistribution outside of the lab, often by people who do not receive a financial benefit from redistribution. There is, however, little evidence of such behavior in our experimental society.

The also write about what is missing from the experimental design. The title of the paper by Esarey, Salmon, and Barrilleaux is "What Motivates Political Preferences? Self-Interest, Ideology, and Fairness in a Laboratory Democracy" (Economic Inquiery - one of my favorite journals, July 2012). An early draft 2007 is here.

Democracy and the Arab World

In order to grasp what is happening in the Middle East, we must set aside a number of deep-rooted prejudices. First among them is the assumption that democracy presupposes secularization: The democratization movement in the Arab world came precisely after thirty years of what has been called the “return of the sacred,” an obvious process of re-Islamization of everyday life, coupled with the rise of Islamist parties. The second is the idea that a democrat must also, by definition, be a liberal. There was no flowering of “liberal Islam” preceding the spread of democratic ideas in the Middle East. 

Source: Roy (July 2012) - Journal of Democracy. 

Democracy X education => Economic Growth

While the incidence of education on the determination of personal income has been well documented by scholars, the same is not true when it comes to the effects of education on economic growth, where different data sets and models have yielded contradictory results. This paper shows that a democratic environment is favourable to the impact of education on economic growth, even if democracy itself may not have a direct effect. This can be at least part of the explanation for why education alone, when observed in a cross section of countries, has shown mixed effects on growth.

This looks like a very important piece of the puzzle, from a new paper by Armellini (Kyklos, July 2012). Alas I did not find the full paper online, and wonder how the authors define "democracy."  

The effects of elections on public goods and redistribution

This study investigates the effects of introducing elections on public goods and redistribution in rural China. We collect a large and unique survey to document the history of political reforms and economic policies and exploit the staggered timing of the introduction of elections for causal identification. We find that elections significantly increase public goods expenditure, the increase corresponds to demand and is paralleled by an increase in public goods provision and local taxes. We also find that elections cause significant income redistribution within villages. The results support the basic assumptions of recent theories of democratization (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2000; Lizzeri and Persico, 2004). In addition, we show that the main mechanism underlying the effect of elections is increased leader incentives.

From a new paper by Martinez-Bravo et al. The title is: "The Effects of Democratization on Public Goods and Redistribution: Evidence from China." 

Democracy and human development

Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This article reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: (a) that a country’s level of democracy in a given year affects its level of human development and (b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant mortality rates as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series—cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time-dependent, historical phenomenon.

That is the abstract of a new paper by Gerringa, Thackera, and Alfaro. It was published in the latest number of The Journal of Politics. 

Democracy in China

. . . This is a view [the view that democracy can become a problem because it can lead to violence] the government has propagated for a long time. It’s like saying you can’t practice swimming until you can swim and you can’t swim because you can’t practice. . . 

. . . I think that what we’re seeing is the loss of hope by a lot of people in change taking place, so they’re making excuses about why it can’t happen. The decline in morals has lead to an increase in violence—violence against opponents, protesters, and others—not because we’re having a revolution but because we are not.

That is from an interview of Chang Ping, "one of China’s best-known commentators on contemporary affairs." It was published in the "New York Review of Books."