New tools in comparative political economy : the database of political institutions

By Thorsten Beck, George R. G. Clarke, Alberto Groff, Philip Keefer, Patrick Paul Walsh. 2001

390 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article introduces a large new cross-country database, the database of political institutions. It covers 177 countries over 21 years, 1975-95. The article presents the intuition, construction, and definitions of the different variables. Among the novel variables introduced are several measures of checks and balances, tenure and stability, identification of party affiliation with government or opposition, and fragmentation of opposition and government parties in the legislature.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec959bb9ee69cd0027c0064850a08b6d315d66dd

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Citations in the corpus

In the Shadow of Democracy Promotion (2009, positive): “of legislative institutional competitiveness (LEIC from Beck et al., 2001 ).”
Auditor Choice in Politically Connected Firms (2014, positive): “In successive regressions, we interact CONNECTED with three variables reflecting the extent of media and political oversight, namely the circulation of daily newspapers divided by population (NEWSPAPER) from Dyck and Zingales (2004); the strength of political opposition (POLITICALOPP) obtained from ”
Accountability and Corruption: Political Institutions Matter (2001, neutral): “…Time of Democratic Stability Beck et al. (2001) Years of continuous democratic stability (democ¼ 1 uninterruptedly) since 1930. list Closed Lists Beck et al. (2001) Dummy for existence of closed lists in a democratic regime. presid Presidential System Beck et al. (2001) Dummy for a…”
On the measurement of political instability and its impact on economic growth (2009, positive): “…the Polity IV dataset, the International Peace Research Institute Oslo (Gleditsch et. al, 2002) and the Database of Political Institutions of the World Bank (Beck et al., 2001).5 To meet the assumptions underlying the factor analysis model we have to leave out a number of potential indicators.”
Fiscal decentralization and deficits: International evidence (2010, positive): “6 See, for example, Blanchard and Shleifer, 2000, and Bradhan and Mookherjee, 1998 7 Among the empirical cross-sectional studies, de Mello (2000a) shows that higher social capital, defined as confidence in government, civic cooperation and associational activity, is positively related with fiscal de”
Immigrant Children's Educational Achievement in Western Countries: Origin, Destination, and Community Effects on Mathematical Performance (2008, neutral): “To assess the ideological positioning of political parties, we use the World Bank Political Indicators (Beck et al. 2001).”
The Determinants of Trust (2005, positive): “The data to calculate these scores derive from Beck et al. (2001).”