Democratic capital: The nexus of political and economic change
Torsten Persson () and
Guido Tabellini
No 308, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University
Abstract:
We study the joint dynamics of economic and political change. Predictions of the simple model that we formulate in the paper get considerable support in a panel of data on political regimes and GDP per capita for about 150 countries over 150 years. Democratic capital — measured by a nation’s historical experience with democracy and by the incidence of democracy in its neighborhood — reduces the exit rate from democracy and raises the exit rate from autocracy. In democracies, a higher stock of democratic capital stimulates growth in an indirect way by decreasing the probability of a sucessful coup. Our results suggest a virtuous circle, where the accumulation of physical and democratic capital reinforce each other, promoting economic development jointly with the consolidation of democracy.
Date: 2006
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hpe, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (66)
Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/wp/2006/308.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic Change (2009) 
Working Paper: Democratic capital: The nexus of political and economic change (2006) 
Working Paper: Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic Change (2006) 
Working Paper: Democratic Capital: The Nexus of Political and Economic Change (2006) 
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:igi:igierp:308
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://repec.unibocconi.it/igier/igi/
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano (Italy).
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().