Centre for Development Economics
and
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR

Regime Type and Economic Performance:
Why Democracies Just ‘Muddle Through’
by

Siddharth Chandra
University of Pittsburgh


On Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 1:50 p.m.

Venue : New Seminar Room [First Floor]
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

All are cordially invited

Do democracies differ from autocracies in the production of stable growth in national income? This analysis investigates how and why economic growth in democracies tends towards stability, and why growth rates in authoritarian regimes show so much variation. We revive the earlier work of Charles Lindblom and hypothesize that the degree of constraints on the chief executive's decision-making is the underlying causal mechanism which explains the non-monotonic relationship between regime type and economic performance. While negotiations and disagreements between decentralized decision-making partisans (i.e., citizens, congress, public administrators, interest groups) more or less guarantee stable growth outcomes in democracies, authoritarian leaders have greater scope to make radical changes in economic policy that may turn out to be either good or bad for growth. We test this hypothesis using a panel dataset for countries over the period 1961-2000. Findings from this analysis establish that political regimes experience growth patterns reflecting an underlying portfolio structure. One startling implication is that, in certain situations, impressive gains in economic growth can only be achieved at the expense of political and civil liberties; although, this is not for reasons previously assumed.