The conventional wisdom views high levels of education as a prerequisite for democracy. This paper shows that existing …

We use a Bayesian measurement error model to derive a probabilistic measure of democracy from several existing … dichotomous data sets. This approach accepts the premise that democracy may usefully be construed as a bivalent concept for … democracy for studies that require a dichotomous measure of regime type …

Is there any relation between education and democracy? Once we correct for weak instruments and identify education as … `weakly exogenous` we find new evidence that education systematically predicts democracy. Our results are robust across model …

Essay 1: We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu … variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et al. (2008), some support of causality is found particularly when … explaining heteroscedasticity. We also find democracy is a bimodal variable and approximate the distribution using two separate …