Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ICE-TEA 2022, Nevşehir, Türkiye, 1 - 04 Eylül 2022, ss.10-14
Political representation is an institution
that sits at the heart of all policy-making processes in contemporary
democracies. Despite the institution’s essential role in influencing economic
policy decisions in democratic societies, academic interest it has received
from economists has remained low, in part due to the unavailability of
systematic cross-country data that allow for robust empirical analysis. Exploiting the prevalence of wasted votes in
a total of 527 general elections that took place in 38 European countries
between 1946 and 2017, I construct a novel dataset of political representation
that allows for cross-country empirical analysis of the institution. The
dataset consists of two annual indicators, the PRi and PRii, which measure
inclusiveness of processes of political representation across Europe in the
post-1950 period. The PRi gives the proportion of wasted votes to all valid
votes in an election, while the PRii gives the proportion of the sum of wasted,
invalid and blank votes to all votes in an election, thereby constituting two
separate expressions of the percentage of voters who have not gained the right
to be politically represented in a democracy. Basic descriptive statistical
analysis demonstrates that the PRi and PRii can significantly explain around 40
to 70 percent of the continent-wide variation in other popular indicators of economic
development, such as the United Nation’s Human Development Index, Freedom
House’s Political Rights and Civil Liberties indices and the Economist
Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.
Employing a two-step System GMM procedure, the empirical findings of the
study propose that more inclusive processes of political representation do not
have a systematic influence on economic growth rates in European democracies.
On the other hand, I find preliminary evidence that the link between political
representation and economic growth may be more nuanced in flawed democracies
than in advanced democracies: Economic growth rates of less democratic nations
are seemingly more prone to significant influences from variations in the
inclusiveness of their representative institutions, whereas the link is found
to be weak to non-existent in full democracies.