Replication Data for: Is Democracy Pro-poor? An Empirical Test of Sen Hypothesis with Worldwide Evidence

It has long been hypothesized that democracy benefits the poor; however, the hypothesis still lacks solid empirical evidence. This paper contributes to providing new worldwide evidence on the poverty reduction effect of democracy which we refer to as the Amartya Sen hypothesis. The difference-in-differences estimation using cross-national panel data on over 100 countries from 1995 to 2015 shows that democracy does reduce poverty, although the size of the effect varies to the poverty at different poverty lines. Further studies show that the poverty reduction effect of democracy is robust to a number of specifications and heterogeneous over time and to democratization types.

长久以来，学界已提出民主有益于贫困人口的假说，但该假说至今仍缺乏坚实的实证支撑。本文旨在为民主的减贫效应提供全新的全球范围实证依据，我们将这一研究涉及的假说称为阿玛蒂亚·森（Amartya Sen）假说。本文采用1995年至2015年间覆盖100余个国家的跨国面板数据，通过双重差分法（difference-in-differences）进行估计，结果显示民主确实能够减缓贫困，不过其效应强度会因不同贫困线标准下的贫困状况有所差异。进一步研究表明，民主的减贫效应在多种模型设定下均保持稳健，且随时间推移以及不同民主化类型呈现异质性特征。