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Cited by 584

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 162 of the 162 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Democracy and Economic Growth: A Meta‐Analysis

Doucouliagos, Hristos, Ulubaşoğlu, Mehmet Ali·2008·American Journal of Political Science

Abstract

Despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature, no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth. This article challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy‐growth literature. It applies meta‐regression analysis to the population of 483 estimates derived from 84 studies on democracy and growth. Using traditional meta‐analysis estimators, the bootstrap, and Fixed and Random Effects meta‐regression models, it derives several robust conclusions. Taking all the available published evidence together, it concludes that democracy does not have a direct impact on economic growth. However, democracy has robust, significant, and positive indirect effects through higher human capital, lower inflation, lower political instability, and higher levels of economic freedom. Democracies may also be associated with larger governments and less free international trade. There also appear to be country‐ and region‐specific democracy‐growth effects. Overall, democracy's net effect on the economy does not seem to be detrimental.

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Crossref · 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00299.x

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Metadata

Authors
Doucouliagos, H., & Ulubaşoğlu, M. A.
Venue
American Journal of Political Science
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2008-01
Volume
52
Issue
1
Pages
61-83
ISSN
  • 0092-5853 (ISSN-L)
  • 1540-5907
OpenAlex
W1956940534
Cited by
584
References
162
FWCI
52.27
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Democracy and Economic Growth: A Meta‐Analysis. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00299.x
The paper
Doucouliagos, H., & Ulubaşoğlu, M. A. (2008). Democracy and Economic Growth: A Meta‐Analysis. American Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00299.x

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.