Economically highly developed countries are mostly democratic. But does this association constitute a causal relationship according to which democracy is a determinant of economic development? Or is it, conversely, economic development that paves the way for democratization? This paper gives an...

Using cross-country data, we find evidence for a significant negative interaction effect between democracy and inequality in determining the quality of growth-promoting institutions like rule of law. Democracy is associated with institutions of higher quality when inequality is lower.

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens' support for the market by guaranteeing income redistribution to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to...

Using modern methods for analyzing multi-level data, we find that, by and large, citizens of OECD countries are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country if more environmental policies are in place and if environmental quality is higher. We also document that parents care...

Es ist eine weitverbreitete Wahrnehmung, dass die Politik vergleichsweise schlecht funktio-niert, das heisst nur unbefriedigende Ergebnisse hervorbringt. Politiker und Parteien haben eine geringe Wertschätzung in der Gesellschaft. Dies gilt sowohl für die Bürger als auch für viele Experten...

As a result of the prevailing governance structure, economic policy in democracies usually suffers from specific deficiencies. Among these are the predominance of distributive over efficiency objectives, the neglect of long-run effects, and the lack of or biased use of expert knowledge in the...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

Democratic capitalism has become the popular paradigm in the modern world, and it is spreading further through globalization. It is a model based on growth, expansion and constant innovation. However, it is accompanied by social problems which may worsen despite overall gains in wealth. In this...

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from...