Are Elections Enough?

While political regimes are often distinguished in a binary manner as democracy and autocracy, many countries deemed democracies fail to fulfill fundamental characteristics of a full democracy. This paper focuses on characteristics of political regimes - in particular, election and liberalism. The paper at first documents the historical trend and pattern of transitions and differences in belief systems across countries distinguished by the characteristics of their political institutions. Using multiple empirical approaches, the paper then analyzes how these characteristics can affect an economy’s growth. The results suggest that the aggregated characteristics of competitive elections alongside liberalism, as in full democracies, is required for a political regime to fuel growth. Even with competitive elections, regimes with illiberalism does not have a significantly different impact on growth than regimes with no elections. The paper further explores various mechanisms to gain insight into the heterogeneous effect of political characteristics on growth.