Collaborative Research on Democracy and Risk and Return

以往关于民主对经济表现影响的研究通常隐含地包含了一个不合理的假设，即选民要求尽可能高的增长率。从对选民可能的风险/回报偏好的分析中可以得出一个不同的假设。民主国家的表现反映的不是对增长的不受约束的渴望，而是对增长的渴望与实现更高增长所涉及的风险的平衡。这个项目的研究提出了一个假设，即民主与独裁的不同之处在于，民主国家要么寻求低波动性的增长战略，要么寻求高波动性的战略，这些战略可以通过更高的增长率得到很好的补偿。初步调查表明，当考察经济表现的两个维度——增长率和可变性——时，在对1974-1989年108个国家样本的横断面回归分析中，1972-73年民主程度高的国家无疑比非民主国家表现出更好的经济表现。研究人员通过解决以下问题来发展和扩展调查：1)在可用的最长时间内，更高的初始民主水平是否会在更广泛的国家样本中导致经济表现的改善？2)相对于基准年民主，在这两个维度上，期内民主化和民主化与增长之间的联系是什么？3)经济增长率波动的政治相关性是什么？该项目的主要目的是检验该研究的核心假设，即民主是否如研究者所言，是一种经济上有效的政府形式。另一个目标是确定试点研究结果的稳健性，并根据报告的结果重新审查以前关于投票和经济表现的研究。这项研究考察了政治经济学研究中最重要的问题之一：民主是否影响国家经济表现，如果影响，是如何影响的？收集到的数据将对其他对这个问题感兴趣的学者有用。

Prior research on democracy's effect on economic performance generally, often implicitly, contains an unsound assumption, which is that voters demand the highest possible rate of growth. A different assumption can be drawn from an analysis of the likely risk/return preferences of voters. It is that a democracy's performance will reflect not an unconstrained desire for growth, but a balancing of a desire for growth and the risks involved in attaining higher growth. The research in this project develops the hypothesis that the way in which democracies will differ from dictatorships is that democracies will seek either low volatility growth strategies or higher volatility strategies that are predictably well compensated by higher rates of growth. Initial investigation has shown that when two dimensions of economic performance are examined - - the rate and variability of growth - - countries with a high level of democracy in 1972-73 unquestionably showed superior economic performance compared to non-democracies in a cross-sectional regression analysis of a sample of 108 countries, 1974-1989. The researchers develop and extend the investigation by addressing the following questions: 1) does a higher initial level of democracy lead to improved economic performance in a broader sample of countries for the longest period of time available? 2) as opposed to base-year democracy, what is the connection between within-period democratization and democratization and growth in both its dimensions? 3) what are the political correlates of volatility in the rate of growth? The main objective of the project is to examine the core hypothesis of the research, which is whether or not democracy is, as the investigators argue, the economically efficient form of government. Another objective is to establish the robustness of the findings from a pilot study, and to re-examine previous studies of voting and economic performance in light of the reported results. This research examines one of the most important question in the study of political economics: does democracy affect national economic performance and if so, how? The data collected will be of use to other scholars interested in the question.