ECONOMICS SEMINAR SERIES (ESS) - 2025/2026

Speaker: Fabian Waldinger (LMU)

Title: Dictators, Democracies, and Discoveries: The Effect of Political Institutions on Science

Abstract:We study how political institutions shape global knowledge production from 1900 to the present. We assemble comprehensive data on universities, scientists, and discoveries worldwide and document how institutional quality influences science along several dimensions. First, stronger political institutions are associated with larger academic sectors, as measured by the number of universities and scientists. Second, researchers in countries with stronger institutions generate more scientific output, especially frontier research and Nobel Prize–winning discoveries. Event studies of sharp improvements and deteriorations in institutional quality confirm a large impact of institutions on scientific productivity. Third, democracies foster frontier research even after holding constant the size of the academic workforce, indicating that their advantages extend beyond scale. Finally, political institutions shape the scope of inquiry: autocracies restrict research to a narrower set of fields, producing excellence in some areas but lacking the broad exploration of ideas that characterizes democracies.