Government Turnover and the Effects of Regime Type: How Requiring Alternation in Power Biases Against the Estimated Economic Benefits of Democracy
Abstract
Incumbents voluntarily leaving office after losing elections is a hallmark of democracy. Hence, the most prominent binary democracy measure (Democracy–Dictatorship/Alvarez–Cheibub–Limongi–Przeworski [DD/ACLP]) requires observed alternation in power to score regimes democratic. Such “alternation rules” may, however, lead to underestimating democracy’s effect on economic growth. As strong economic performance reduces the probability of incumbents losing democratic elections, young democracies with high growth may falsely be coded dictatorships; their popular governments have yet to lose an election. We identify the expected bias using different tests, for example, when following Przeworski et al.’s advice to re-estimate relationships after re-coding multi-party regimes without alternation as democratic, or when employing differences in information about alternation from different time points to contrast original DD estimates with our “real-time” DD estimates. We present resembling arguments on how alternation rules may bias democracy’s estimated relationships with civil war onsets and coups, but find fewer empirical indications of biases here.
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Biographies
Carl Henrik Knutsen is a professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. His research interests include the economic consequences of political institutions and the determinants of regime change. His publications include articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Journal of Development Studies, and World Development.
Tore Wig is research fellow and Phd candidate at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. His research interests include the institutional determinants of civil conflict, and how institutions in autocracies impact on regime survival.
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