Does Economic Growth Bound Political Rights in Non-democracies? An Empirical Evaluation

The present paper aims to examine whether the impact of economic growth on political rights/civil liberties depends on the political environment. The paper introduces the concept of political disinterest, which defines social unawareness/unresponsiveness to the loss of political rights/civil liberties in cases of expansion of economic opportunities, and which is proxied by economic growth in the empirical part of the study. The paper argues that political disinterest causes a negative impact of economic growth on political rights/civil liberties. The study uses data for 142 countries from 1996 to 2017 to empirically evaluate whether the impact of economic growth on political rights depends on the political environment. System Generalized Method of Methods (GMM) is used to take account of reverse causality, country-based heterogeneities, and heteroscedasticity problems. The estimation result shows that the impact of economic growth on political rights/civil liberties is positive for democracies but negative for autocracies. The results also indicate the presence of political disinterest only in the context of autocratic countries, which is referred to in the hypothesis in the body of the paper. The results also suggest that the presence of political disinterest in autocratic countries is only valid for non-fiscal expansions in which economic growth is not financed by government funds.