Democratic polities appear to produce more stable policy than do autocracies. In this paper, we explore a potential source of the policy stability observed in democracies: special-interest groups. We find that interest groups are associated with greater stability in some measures of policy and...

The Freedom House democracy index is often used in regression analysis to estimate the relationship between democratic freedoms and growth. The index is comprised of two broad categories for political rights and civil liberties. However, the relationship between the underlying types of rights...