Collaborative Research: Institution, Development, and Democracy

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It is generally presumed that when rulers are constrained by law, when they are accountable to broad electorates, when personal security and property rights are assured, adn when capable bureaucracies are responsive to elected officials, good things will follow. But how do we know this is true? And how might we know which sorts of favorable outcomes of these institutional features is likely to foster? Work on these topics has been constrained by the absence of fine-grained measure of democracy and governance. This project addresses the problem by enlisting a new database, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), that measures various aspects of democarcy and governance-including electoral contestation, rule of law, civil liberty, inclusion, decentralization, and legislative primacy-at a highly disaggregated level for all sizable countries in the world from 1900 to 2012. With this immense database at its disposal, the researchers will test the relationship between these institutions and outcomes such as economic growth, infrastructure, health, and education over the past century. The benefits of the project include enhancing current understandings of the impact of political institutions on development outcomes. This should benefit governments, international organizations, and NGOs that aim to promote economic and social development around the world by providing guidance about the kinds of institutional interventions that tend to work, backfire, or have no effect. Also, the data will be provided to development agencies, policy-makers, and scholars. All the data will be freely available in a variety of interactive infterfaces on the project web site (v-dem.net). This is a BIG DATA project. However, unlike many big data projects, it is guided by theory. It will use innovative Bayesian techniques as well as case studies to help examine the causal mechanisms that are behind the relationships that are found by the analysis. Where appropriate other techniques will be used to examine the panel data such as Granger causalit, etc. This project will then allow for the testing of a number of current theories in political science about the interaction between institutions, democracy and development.