The Effect of Political Regime on Transparency: Democracy and Data Dissemination in Latin America

Are democracies more transparent than other types of political regimes? The answer to this question is often assumed to be yes. Yet the logic and empirical implications behind this assertion have not been rigorously tested. In a larger project, we investigate theoretically the willingness of policymakers to provide credible announcements of intended inflation and unemployment rates, and show that the availability (or absence) of that data is correlated with regime type, even after controlling for level of development, participation in IMF programs, and country-specific effects. This paper is an empirical extension of the general project looking specifically at Latin America. Focusing on a single region at a time allows us to understand the pattern of data dissemination in greater detail and learn about specific cases. The investigation supports the finding of the larger project.

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