Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 31st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG9: The Rule of Law & Public Administration Author(s) Shimasaan Anger University of Ljubljana ljubljana Slovenia Title Impact of democracy on human development File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Shimasaan Anger Abstract Does democracy improve the quality of life for its citizens? Scholars have long assumed that it does, but recent research has called this orthodoxy into question. This paper reviews this body of work, develops a series of causal pathways through which democracy might improve social welfare, and tests two hypotheses: a) Does democracy impact and improve well-being and what are the factors that influence the relationship ? and b) that its stock of democracy over the past century affects its level of human development. Using infant quality of institutions such as rule of law, accountability, transparency and wellbeing as a core measure of human development, we conduct a series of time-series cross-national statistical tests of these two hypotheses and also utilizing web or science and Scopus to perform content analysis. We find only slight evidence for the first proposition, but substantial support for the second. Thus, we argue that the best way to think about the relationship between democracy and development is as a time- dependent, historical phenomenon.
