 Does democracy cause innovation? An empirical test of the popper hypothesisYanyan Gao, Leizhen Zang, Antoine Roth and Puqu Wang Research Policy, 2017, vol. 46, issue 7, 1272-1283 Abstract: Democratic countries produce higher levels of innovation than autocratic ones, but does democratization itself lead to innovation growth either in the short or in the long run? The existing literature has extensively examined the relationship between democracy and growth but seldom explored the effect of democracy on innovation, which might be an important channel through which democracy contributes to economic growth. This article aims to fill this gap and contribute to the long-standing debate on the relationship between democracy and innovation by offering empirical evidence based on a data set covering 156 countries between 1964 and 2010. The results from the difference-in-differences method show that democracy itself has no direct positive effect on innovation measured with patent counts, patent citations and patent originality. Keywords: Democracy; Innovation; Patent data; DID method (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:46:y:2017:i:7:p:1272-1283 DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2017.05.014 Access Statistics for this article Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier |
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