Does democracy produce quality of government?
This is a recently published article in the European Journal of Political Research which looks at democracy's conditional relationship with Quality of Government (QoG). This article examines the relationship between political regimes and quality of government (QoG), which is defined broadly and measured empirically as ‘controlling corruption, having an effective bureaucracy and a strong, impartial rule of law’. The authors ask the broad question - which type of political regime - democracy or dictatorship - provides better QoG? Based on several earlier studies, it has been shown in the literature that this relationship is 'j-shaped', meaning that when democracy is measured on a continuous scale, countries in the middle are outperformed by both strong democracies and strong autocracies on average.
Charron and Lapuente are the first to posit a serious theoretical argument as to WHY this is the case, and they hypothesize that the relationship between democracy and QoG - based on supply and demand - is conditioned by economic development. When a democracy is wealthy, voters demand longer term investment in state capacity and politicians seeking re-election must supply it to them or face being voted out of office, while in poorer democracies, voters demand shot-term goods, not necessarily QoG. Dictatorships, sheltered from the whims of the electorate, can provide a moderate level of QoG to make things like order and tax collection more efficient. Thus poor dictatorships have relatively higher QoG than poor democracies, but wealthy democracies outperform wealthier dictatorships on average. The authors provide robust empirical evidence for their claims.
Citation: European Journal of Political Research 49(4) (June 2010)
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
