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Guest post by Vilde Lunnan Djuve and Carl Henrik Knutsen In March 2020, COVID-19 generated a major emergency…

The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally – including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies – from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers 1900 to the present – together these two datasets cover the bulk of 'modern history'. Historical V-Dem also includes several new indicators, covering features that are pertinent for 19th-century polities. We describe the data, coding process, and different strategies employed in Historical V-Dem to cope with issues of reliability and validity and ensure intertemporal and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we describe patterns of democratization in the 'long 19th century'. Finally, we investigate how interstate war relates to subsequent democratization.

SummaryThis paper argues that democracy enhances technological change, the most important determinant of long‐term economic growth. It first presents an argument on how and why dictators restrict civil liberties and diffusion of information to survive in office, even if this reduces their personal consumption. The argument predicts that autocracies have slower technological change than democracies, which in turn impairs GDP per capita growth rates. These and other implications from the argument are tested empirically, and so are implications from alternative explanations on the association between democracy and technological change. Drawing on an extensive global dataset, with some time series going back to the early 19th century, the paper reports robust evidence that democracy increases not only technology‐induced growth but also net economic growth rates. Notably, the results hold when accounting for the endogeneity of democracy, country‐fixed effects, and sample‐selection bias.

ObjectivesThis article investigates whether economic growth and income level affect revolution attempts and successful revolutions.MethodsThe article conducts a statistical analysis, mainly using panel data logit models, on a data set including 150 countries with time series from 1919 to 2003.ResultsLow short‐term growth increases probabilities of both attempted and successful revolutions. There is some evidence that higher income levels mitigate revolution attempts, but this is not robust and further analysis indicates that any association may stem from oil income more specifically. There is no net effect of income level on successful revolution, but high income seemingly reduces probability of successful revolution more in democracies than in dictatorships. Although revolutions occur more frequently after "J curves" and "decremental deprivation patterns," this is largely due to economic crises and not the more complex growth patterns as hypothesized by, respectively, Davies and Gurr.ConclusionLow short‐term economic growth induces revolutions, whereas the impact of income level is less clear and seemingly contingent on factors such as regime type and source of income.

This paper surveys the literature on how democracy affects economic growth. The paper first presents descriptive statistics and brief case-descriptions to illustrate how democracy and dictatorship may affect growth. Thereafter, it evaluates five central arguments on democracy and growth, before surveying empirical studies on the relationship. Furthermore, the paper highlights critical methodological challenges, and draws implications for constructing valid models for empirical research on the topic. The review shows that there is still disagreement over whether democracy enhances growth or not. Nevertheless, in the light of more recent studies, using better methodological approaches and more data than previous studies, two trends are recognizable: first, the hypothesis that democracy reduces economic growth is refuted by recent studies; second, the hypothesis that democracy has no effect on growth, although still widespread in the academic community, seems less plausible today than it did 10 or 20 years ago. Several recent studies show that democracy has positive effects on growth, although these effects are 'indirect' in the sense that democracy affects growth through, for example, enhancing human capital or strengthening the protection of property rights.