Thanks for putting this together—I always find your writing to be simultaneously very readable and also dense with novel ideas, which is rare to see.
As part of a contracting position with the Open Philanthropy Project, I have been looking into different metrics on the prevalence and success of democratic forms of governance over time. One piece of data that we were interested in but couldn’t find in the existing literature was the percent of GDP in democracies vs non-democracies over time. To answer this question, I combined data from Polity on categorizing regime type over time with the IMF’s data on nominal GDP. I ended up only going back to 1980, because before then I started to lose a lot of reliable GDP data for smaller countries. You can find my analysis here—in particular I recommend looking at the first two sheets that graph percent of GDP by regime type. I used Polity’s classifications for determining which countries counted as democracies, autocracies, and in between “anocracies.” (Disclaimer that I did this independently, may have messed something up, and it did not undergo the sort of review that would be associated with anything formally released by Open Phil. )
Overall, the main takeaway was that, at least from 1980 to today, democracies hold a disproportionate percentage of income in comparison to their population. (Compare with Our World in Data’s graph on percent of world citizens living in a democracy over time here.) However, while the percent of nominal income in democracies was increasing from 1980 to ~2000, after that it has started to reverse, largely because of increased GDP in authoritarian China. If one looks only at “western democracies” as the authors do here, the trend for relative financial power of non-democratic governments becomes more pronounced. I don’t think these analysis rebut any of your core points—the fact that this graph only covers 38 years underscores that these trends could easily be historical anomalies that disappear in the long run—but hopefully it adds an additional metric to use in thinking about the future prospects of democratic government.
Thanks for sharing this, Nathan! Very interesting graph (and a metric I haven’t ever thought to consider.)
I’m curious if you have any views on what we should take away from trends in “the portion of output produced by democracies” vs. “the portion of people living under democracy” vs. “the portion of states that are democratic.”
Am I right to think that “portion of output produced by democracies” is most useful as a measure of the global power/influence of democracies? If so, that does seem like an interesting trend to track. I could also imagine it being interesting to look at secondary metrics of national power, if you haven’t already. For example, I think some IR scholars argue for the use of GDP multiplied by GDP-per-capita, based on the intuition that poor-but-highly-populated countries (e.g. Indonesia) seem to have less global power than their GDPs would suggest. You’re also probably already familiar with this sort of unprincipled metric of “national material capabilities” that international relations people sometimes use. Although my guess is that the trends would probably look pretty similar.
It seems like “portion of output produced by democracies” also functions as a combined metric of the prevalence of democracy, the strength of the development/democracy correlation, and the weakness of the (I think slightly negative?) population/democracy correlation. I suppose it’s a bad sign for democracy if any of these components decrease.
[[Edit: One more thought. If you haven’t already done this, it might also be interesting to look at trends in Polity-score-weighted GDP as a more continuous measure of the financial power of democracy. I think the trend would probably look about the same, since China’s polity score has been pretty stable over time, but there’s some chance it’d be interestingly different. I might also just do myself, out of curiosity.]]
Hey Ben,
Thanks for putting this together—I always find your writing to be simultaneously very readable and also dense with novel ideas, which is rare to see.
As part of a contracting position with the Open Philanthropy Project, I have been looking into different metrics on the prevalence and success of democratic forms of governance over time. One piece of data that we were interested in but couldn’t find in the existing literature was the percent of GDP in democracies vs non-democracies over time. To answer this question, I combined data from Polity on categorizing regime type over time with the IMF’s data on nominal GDP. I ended up only going back to 1980, because before then I started to lose a lot of reliable GDP data for smaller countries. You can find my analysis here—in particular I recommend looking at the first two sheets that graph percent of GDP by regime type. I used Polity’s classifications for determining which countries counted as democracies, autocracies, and in between “anocracies.” (Disclaimer that I did this independently, may have messed something up, and it did not undergo the sort of review that would be associated with anything formally released by Open Phil. )
Overall, the main takeaway was that, at least from 1980 to today, democracies hold a disproportionate percentage of income in comparison to their population. (Compare with Our World in Data’s graph on percent of world citizens living in a democracy over time here.) However, while the percent of nominal income in democracies was increasing from 1980 to ~2000, after that it has started to reverse, largely because of increased GDP in authoritarian China. If one looks only at “western democracies” as the authors do here, the trend for relative financial power of non-democratic governments becomes more pronounced. I don’t think these analysis rebut any of your core points—the fact that this graph only covers 38 years underscores that these trends could easily be historical anomalies that disappear in the long run—but hopefully it adds an additional metric to use in thinking about the future prospects of democratic government.
Thanks for sharing this, Nathan! Very interesting graph (and a metric I haven’t ever thought to consider.)
I’m curious if you have any views on what we should take away from trends in “the portion of output produced by democracies” vs. “the portion of people living under democracy” vs. “the portion of states that are democratic.”
Am I right to think that “portion of output produced by democracies” is most useful as a measure of the global power/influence of democracies? If so, that does seem like an interesting trend to track. I could also imagine it being interesting to look at secondary metrics of national power, if you haven’t already. For example, I think some IR scholars argue for the use of GDP multiplied by GDP-per-capita, based on the intuition that poor-but-highly-populated countries (e.g. Indonesia) seem to have less global power than their GDPs would suggest. You’re also probably already familiar with this sort of unprincipled metric of “national material capabilities” that international relations people sometimes use. Although my guess is that the trends would probably look pretty similar.
It seems like “portion of output produced by democracies” also functions as a combined metric of the prevalence of democracy, the strength of the development/democracy correlation, and the weakness of the (I think slightly negative?) population/democracy correlation. I suppose it’s a bad sign for democracy if any of these components decrease.
[[Edit: One more thought. If you haven’t already done this, it might also be interesting to look at trends in Polity-score-weighted GDP as a more continuous measure of the financial power of democracy. I think the trend would probably look about the same, since China’s polity score has been pretty stable over time, but there’s some chance it’d be interestingly different. I might also just do myself, out of curiosity.]]