Democracy and the price of a vote

Atypical economist gdp does not have all that much in common with a typical protester in a failing dictatorship. Dismal scientists favour cautious lessons, carefully crafted and suitably caveated, backed by decades of data and rigorous modelling. Protesters need electrifying arguments and gargantuan promises about just how good life will be as soon as their aims are achieved, since that is how you recruit people to a cause. But the two groups share at least one trait. They both tend to be ardent democrats.Democratic institutions are good for economic growth. That is one of the few things on which, after decades of probing the link between politics and prosperity, economists agree. Dictators may be able to control the state, its resources and much of society. But countries that have long-established elections and associated institutions also tend to have trustworthy governments, competent finance ministers and reliable legal systems. In a paper published in 2019, Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-authors split countries into dictatorships and democracies. They found that 25 years after making a permanent switch from the former camp to the latter, a country’s was one-fifth higher than it would otherwise have been.