Democracy Doesn’t Always Happen Over Night: Regime Change in Stages and Economic Growth

Markus Eberhardt and Vanessa Boese

No 16587, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: How substantial are the economic benefits from democratic regime change? We argue that democratisation is not a discrete event but a two-stage process: autocracies first enter into 'episodes' of political liberalization; in the second stage, these episodes either culminate in regime change or not. Failure to account for this chronology and the implicit counterfactual groups risks biased estimates due to selection effects. Adopting a repeated-treatment difference-in-difference implementation, which captures non-parallel trends and selection into treatment, we find that a single event approach substantially underestimates the economic dividends from regime change and, crucially, obscures the permanent growth effect of democratisation.

Keywords: Democracy; Growth; Political development; Interactive fixed effects; Difference-in-difference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
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