Democracy and trade: a gentle trade-off

Regime characteristics and their evolution have always been of interest of several disciplines. The difficulties that arise in measuring regime characteristics have been resolved to a large extent during the past three decades. In that, the POLITY IV project has generated a valuable source of knowledge where characteristics of world regimes from 1800 to 2007 were documented well. In this study, I elaborate the simple trade-weighted versions of the main indicators of POLITY IV for the year 2007. The results indicate that measurements of countries’ regime characteristics may be open to some criticisms once trade linkages are considered.