Political regimes, opaqueness, and official statistics

Abstract

We provide evidence that the type of political regime significantly influences official statistics. Democracy positively impacts a country's national statistical performance. Our empirical strategy employs various approaches. We conduct ordinary least squares regressions to analyze the relationship between a country's statistical performance and its level of democracy. For the sake of robustness, we utilize multiple indices of democracy and statistical performance, which yield consistent results. Additionally, we use governance as an instrumental variable (IV), which satisfies the exclusion restriction.