Collaborative Research on Democracy and Risk and Return

民主与风险与回报的合作研究

• 批准号: 9729766
• 负责人: Dennis Quinn
• 金额: $ 7.5万
• 依托单位: Georgetown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1998
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1998-02-01 至 2003-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9729766&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Democracy; Risk; Return

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.

之前关于民主对经济表现影响的研究通常都包含一个不合理的假设，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不同的假设。一个民主国家的表现将反映出的不是对增长的不受限制的渴望，而是对增长的渴望和实现更高增长所涉及的风险之间的平衡。该项目的研究发展了一种假设，即民主国家与独裁国家的不同之处在于，民主国家要么寻求低波动性增长战略，要么寻求波动性更高的战略，这些战略可以预测地得到更高的增长率的很好补偿。初步调查显示，当考察经济表现的两个维度--增长速度和变异性--1972-73年间民主程度较高的国家在对108个国家的样本进行横断面回归分析后，毫无疑问地表现出比非民主国家更好的经济表现，1974年-。研究人员通过解决以下问题来发展和扩展调查：1)更高的初始民主水平是否会在更广泛的样本国家中带来最长时间的经济表现改善？2)相对于基准年民主，时期内的民主化与民主化和增长之间在这两个维度上有什么联系？3)增长率波动的政治相关性是什么？该项目的主要目标是检验研究的核心假设，即民主是否像调查人员所说的那样，是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：民主是否会影响国家经济表现，如果是，又是如何影响的？收集到的数据将对其他对这一问题感兴趣的学者有所帮助。