Do politics and administration affect innovation performance? A comparative analysis

Abstract The paper’s primary goal is to analyze the effects of politics and administrative capacity on countries’ innovative performance. The inquiry comparatively examines possible correlations between democracy, political competition, income inequality, bureaucratic capacity, and corruption/transparency with countries’ innovation results. The dependent variables are three performance indicators of the Global Innovation Indexes (GII). After presenting the theory and the descriptive data analysis on the research variables, the paper runs multivariate regression models to test the hypotheses. The empirical analysis reinforced that political and administrative dimensions are relevant to understanding the national innovation systems’ achievements. However, democracy, bureaucracy quality and corruption/transparency are not influential factors in countries’ innovative results as the normative assumptions would suppose. On the contrary, political competition and inequality considerably impact how economies innovate. In conclusion, the paper brought original and intriguing findings that put in perspective the claim that there is a unique path or rule of thumb for innovation growth. Consequently, the inferences provide insights to scholars and stakeholders, public and private, to improve the debates and decisions regarding the priorities for government actions in times of evidence-based policymaking.