Democracy and economic performance

Does democracy hurt or help economic performance? There are few questions in political economy that have attracted more attention over the years. Thinking on this subject, in one form or another, goes all the way back to Plato—who favored aristocracy to democracy, and has preoccupied many of the most fertile minds in political philosophy. More recently, with the advent of cross-national data sources and statistical techniques, there have been numerous econometric studies investigating the relationship between political liberties and economic growth......