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Abstract of Job Market Paper: The Long-run Effects of Africa’s Wave of Democratization

I investigate how Africa’s democratization wave of the early 1990s influenced economic performance and long-term development at the national, subnational, and individual levels. At the national level, I find that a transition from nondemocracy to democracy is associated with 1.2 percent higher income per capita, while a full-range increase in the liberal democracy index from 0 to 1 corresponds to a 13 percent increase in income per capita. These income gains operate through improvements in physical capital accumulation, trade openness, human capital formation, and economic liberalization. To strengthen causal identification, I exploit Africa’s colonial borders, which arbitrarily divided ethnically homogeneous communities into present-day consolidated democracies and nondemocracies. This identification strategy allows me to examine the impact of democratization on subnational development and on individual living conditions. Grid cell-level panel fixed effects estimates show that democratization significantly raises subnational development as proxied by nighttime light density. Employing a within-ethnicity geographic regression discontinuity design, I track development disparities from 1992 to 2013. The main results show that while both sides of the border started at comparable development levels in the early 1990s, democratic partitions experienced sustained gains thereafter, becoming 7 percentage points (pp) more likely to have light at night by 2013, representing a 37 percent increase relative to the sample mean. Individual-level survey evidence further shows that residents of democratic partitions report substantially lower economic insecurity, higher educational attainment, greater waged employment, and significantly better access to public infrastructure.