all. Our empirical evidence does, however, support not only the "primacy of institutions" view, but also the important …

democracy (186 countries, 1960-2014). The method takes its name from a machine learning technique for pattern recognition and … creates continuous and dichotomous indices. We use the SVM indices to investigate the effect of democratic institutions on … results are affected by conceptual and methodological changes in the measure of democracy. In particular, we show that …