Does Democracy Matter?

John Gerring; Carl Henrik Knutsen; Jonas Berge

doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-060820-060910

Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 25, 2022

Review Article

Open Access

Does Democracy Matter?

John Gerring¹, Carl Henrik Knutsen², and Jonas Berge²
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Affiliations: ¹Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA; email: [email protected] ²Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; email: [email protected][email protected]
Vol. 25:357-375 (Volume publication date May 2022) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-060820-060910
Copyright © 2022 by Annual Reviews.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information

Abstract

Does democracy matter for normatively desirable outcomes? We survey results from 1,100 cross-country analyses drawn from 600 journal articles published after the year 2000. These analyses are conducted on 30 distinct outcomes pertaining to social policy, economic policy, citizenship and human rights, military and criminal justice, and overall governance. Across these diverse outcomes, most studies report either a positive or null relationship with democracy. However, there is evidence of threshold bias, suggesting that reported findings may reflect a somewhat exaggerated image of democracy's effects. Additionally, democratic effects are more likely to be found for outcomes that are easily attained than for those that lie beyond the reach of government but are often of great normative importance. We also find that outcomes measured by subjective indicators show a stronger positive relationship with democracy than outcomes that are measured or proxied by more objective indicators.

Keyword(s): democracy, economic policy, governance, regime type, social policy

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2024-12-04

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