Collaborative Research on Democracy and Risk and Return

民主与风险与回报的合作研究

• 批准号: 9730403
• 负责人: John Woolley
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of California-Santa Barbara
• 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 2002-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9730403&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.

以前关于民主对经济表现的影响的研究通常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，而是对增长的渴望和实现更高增长所涉及的风险的平衡。该项目的研究提出了一个假设，即民主国家与殖民地的不同之处在于，民主国家将寻求低波动性增长战略或高波动性战略，这些战略可以预见地得到较高增长率的很好补偿。初步调查表明，在对1974-1989年108个国家的抽样进行横截面回归分析时，如果对经济业绩的两个方面-增长率和变化率-进行审查，1972- 1973年民主程度高的国家无疑比非民主国家的经济业绩好上级。研究人员通过解决以下问题来发展和扩展调查：1）在更广泛的样本国家中，更高的初始民主水平是否会在最长的时间内导致经济表现的改善？2)与基准年民主相比，期内民主化与民主化及其两个方面的增长之间有何联系？3)经济增长率的波动与政治有何关联？该项目的主要目标是检验研究的核心假设，即民主是否如研究人员所认为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可靠性，并根据报告的结果重新审查以前对投票和经济表现的研究。本研究探讨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的经济绩效？如果会，又是如何影响的？收集到的数据将对其他对这个问题感兴趣的学者有用。