Democracy as a Curve

This paper attempts to model the widely studied relationship between a country's economic growth and its level of democracy, with an emphasis on possible non-linearities. We adopt the concept of “political capital” as a measure of democracy, which is extremely uncommon in the literature and brings considerable advantages both in terms of dynamic considerations and plausibility. While the literature is not consensual on this matter, we obtain significant and robust results that indicate that the impact of democratization on economic growth varies according to the stage of democratic development each country is in