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

Boese-Schlosser, Vanessa; Eberhardt, Markus

Abstract

How substantial are the economic benefits from democratic regime change? We argue that democratisation is often not a discrete event but a two-stage process: autocracies enter into 'episodes' of political liberalisation which eventually culminate in regime change or not. To account for this chronology and the implicit counterfactual groups, we introduce a repeated-treatment difference-indifference implementation capturing non-parallel trends and selection into treatment. We find that modelling regime change in two stages rather than a single event yields stronger long-run growth effects. Among democratizers, experiencing repeated episodes without regime change reduces growth in democracy whereas length of episode does not.

Citation

Boese-Schlosser, V., & Eberhardt, M. (in press). Democracy Doesn't Always Happen Over Night: Regime Change in Stages and Economic Growth. Review of Economics and Statistics,

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: May 10, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 10, 2024
• Journal: Review of Economics and Statistics
• Print ISSN: 0034-6535
• Electronic ISSN: 1530-9142
• Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Democracy; Growth; Political Development; Difference-in-Difference; Interactive Fixed Effects
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/34631839