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.]]
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.]]