Are Elections Enough?

Shirleen Manzur ()
Additional contact information
Shirleen Manzur: Simon Fraser University, https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirleen-manzur-31315976/

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University

Abstract: While political regimes are often distinguished in a binary manner as democracy and autocracy, many countries deemed democracies fail to fulfill fundamental characteristics of a full democracy. This paper focuses on characteristics of political regimes - in particular, election and liberalism. The paper at first documents the historical trend and pattern of transitions and differences in belief systems across countries distinguished by the characteristics of their political institutions. Using multiple empirical approaches, the paper then analyzes how these characteristics can affect an economy’s growth. The results suggest that the aggregated characteristics of competitive elections alongside liberalism, as in full democracies, is required for a political regime to fuel growth. Even with competitive elections, regimes with illiberalism does not have a significantly different impact on growth than regimes with no elections. The paper further explores various mechanisms to gain insight into the heterogeneous effect of political characteristics on growth.

Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sfu.ca/repec-econ/sfu/sfudps/dp22-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp22-05

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Working Paper Coordinator ().