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Democratization and Economic Output in Sub-Saharan Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2016

Daniel de Kadt  and
Stephen B. Wittels
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Abstract

Does democratization increase economic output? Answers to this question are inconsistent partly due to the challenges of examining the causal forces behind political and economic phenomena that occur at the national level. We employ a new empirical approach, the synthetic control method, to study the economic effects of democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1975–2008. This method yields case-specific causal estimates, which show that political reform associated with the “third wave” of democracy had highly heterogeneous, yet often substantively important effects in Africa. In some countries democratization adversely affected economic output while in others it exerted an analogous positive effect.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 63 - 84
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Daniel de Kadt, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E53--470, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA (ddekadt@mit.edu), Stephen B. Wittels, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E53--470, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA (swittels@mit.edu). The authors thank Jens Hainmueller, Chad Hazlett, Danny Hidalgo, Tom O’Grady, Daniel Posner, Melissa Sands, and Teppei Yamamoto, as well as seminar participants at MIT and Harvard, discussants and panelists at MPSA, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and advice. Both authors contributed equally and all errors are their own.

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