Are Democratic Regimes Antithetical to Globalization?

Abstract

In this study we have made an attempt to investigate into the relationship between political regime type (that ranges from authoritarian to democratic) and the extent of globalization, which of late has been considered as a path to development. We have made use of the Democracy index (and its constituent indicators) provided by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the globalization index (and its constituent indicators) of the KOF. Applying canonical correlation analysis on the data we have made an attempt to look into the response of globalization to the quantitative measures of democratic (versus authoritarian) practices of the governments in 116 countries distributed over Asia, Africa, Australia/Oceania, Europe and the Americas. We have also tested the Lee thesis in the context of globalization as a path to development. Our findings indicate that the empirical support to Lee's thesis if extended to globalization as a path to development is superficial and does not withstand critical analysis. Contrary to Lee's thesis, democracy promotes globalization. In African countries political discordance (at the national as well as international level) is not much favourable while in the Asian countries, political will, irrespective of regime type, is more or less in concordance with globalization. Therefore, rather illusively, it so appears that democracies thwart development as well as globalization as a means to development by implication, while the reality is very different.

A Study on Regime Type and Globalization in Simultaneous Equation Framework

“…They suggest that globalization measures are concordant with each other and the democratic regimes promote globalization. These results are in consonance with the research findings elsewhere (Mishra, 2017b). We also find that DI 16 is positively affected by all predictor variables included in equation #7, indicating that globalization promotes democratization.…”

“…These five measures are used as the predetermined (exogenous) variables in the model. In the present work we have used EPP 06 , FOG 06 , PPN 06 , PCL 06 and CVL 06 for the year 2006, pertaining to 116 countries (Mishra, 2017b).…”

“…For any particular th i country (among 116 countries considered in the study at hand) we have G for 9 years, 2006-2014 that we denote by G ij ; j=2006 through 2014 and i=1 through 116. For every G ij we have the associated sub-indices [E1 ij , E2 ij , S1 ij , S2 ij , S3 ij and P ij ; j=2006 through 2014 and i=1 through 116 (Mishra, 2017b). We may call them pessimistic (associated with min G ) and optimistic (associated with max G ) vectors of globalization.…”