- The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science
- The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
- About the Contributors
- Introduction
- Multicausality, Context‐Conditionality, and Endogeneity
- Historical Enquiry and Comparative Politics
- The Case Study: What it is and What it Does
- Field Research
- Is the Science of Comparative Politics Possible?
- From Case Studies to Social Science: A Strategy for Political Research
- Collective Action Theory
- War, Trade, and State Formation
- Compliance, Consent, and Legitimacy
- National Identity
- Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict
- Mass Beliefs and Democratic Institutions
- What Causes Democratization?
- Democracy and Civic Culture
- Dictatorship: Analytical Approaches
- Rethinking Revolutions: a Neo‐Tocquevillian Perspective
- Civil Wars
- Contentious Politics and Social Movements
- Mechanisms of Globalized Protest Movements
- The Emergence of Parties and Party Systems
- Party Systems
- Voters and Parties
- Parties and Voters in Emerging Democracies
- Political Clientelism
- Political Activism: New Challenges, New Opportunities
- Aggregating and Representing Political Preferences
- Electoral Systems
- Separation of Powers
- Comparative Judicial Politics
- Federalism
- Coalition Theory and Government Formation
- Comparative Studies of the Economy and the Vote
- Context‐Conditional Political Budget Cycles
- The Welfare State in Global Perspective
- The Poor Performance of Poor Democracies
- Accountability and the Survival of Governments
- Economic Transformation and Comparative Politics
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article discusses the poor performance of poor democracies. The article points to recent literature on political market imperfections as a way to explain anomalies in the relationship between economic performance and regime type. The first section looks at the poor countries and their respective policies, while the second section attempts to explain the ambiguity in the democracy-growth relationship. It studies the political market imperfections and the heterogeneous democratic performance, and discusses democratization, the role of history, and puzzles in the literature on democracy. The article ends with a discussion of incomplete information, which is one imperfection of the political market.
Keywords: poor performance, poor democracies, imperfections, economic performance, regime type, poor countries, democracy-growth relationship, democratic performance, incomplete information
Philip Keefer is Lead Research Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank.
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- The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science
- The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
- About the Contributors
- Introduction
- Multicausality, Context‐Conditionality, and Endogeneity
- Historical Enquiry and Comparative Politics
- The Case Study: What it is and What it Does
- Field Research
- Is the Science of Comparative Politics Possible?
- From Case Studies to Social Science: A Strategy for Political Research
- Collective Action Theory
- War, Trade, and State Formation
- Compliance, Consent, and Legitimacy
- National Identity
- Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict
- Mass Beliefs and Democratic Institutions
- What Causes Democratization?
- Democracy and Civic Culture
- Dictatorship: Analytical Approaches
- Rethinking Revolutions: a Neo‐Tocquevillian Perspective
- Civil Wars
- Contentious Politics and Social Movements
- Mechanisms of Globalized Protest Movements
- The Emergence of Parties and Party Systems
- Party Systems
- Voters and Parties
- Parties and Voters in Emerging Democracies
- Political Clientelism
- Political Activism: New Challenges, New Opportunities
- Aggregating and Representing Political Preferences
- Electoral Systems
- Separation of Powers
- Comparative Judicial Politics
- Federalism
- Coalition Theory and Government Formation
- Comparative Studies of the Economy and the Vote
- Context‐Conditional Political Budget Cycles
- The Welfare State in Global Perspective
- The Poor Performance of Poor Democracies
- Accountability and the Survival of Governments
- Economic Transformation and Comparative Politics
- Subject Index
- Name Index
