Siyasi temsil ve ekonomik büyüme

Political representation is an institution that sits at the heart of all policy-making processes in contemporary democracies. Despite the institution's essential role in influencing economic policy decisions in democratic societies, academic interest it has received from the field of economics has remained low, in part due to the unavailability of systematic cross-country data that allow for robust empirical analysis. Exploiting the prevalence of wasted votes in a total of 527 general elections that took place in 38 European countries between 1946 and 2017, we construct a novel dataset of political representation that allows for cross-country empirical analysis of the institution. The Political Representation Dataset, as we call it, consists of two annual indicators, the PRi and PRii, which measure the inclusiveness of processes of political representation across Europe in the post-1950 period. The PRi gives the proportion of wasted votes to all valid votes in an election, while the PRii gives the proportion of the sum of wasted, invalid and blank votes to all votes in an election, thereby constituting two separate expressions of the percentage of voters who have not gained the right to be politically represented in a democracy. We demonstrate that the PRi and PRii can significantly explain around 40 to 70 percent of the continent-wide variation in other popular indicators of economic development, such as the United Nation's Human Development Index, Freedom House's Political Rights and Civil Liberties indices and the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index. Regarding our empirical findings on the impact of political representation on economic growth, we propose that more inclusive processes of political representation do not have a systematic influence on economic growth rates in European democracies. On the other hand, we find preliminary evidence that the link between political representation and economic growth may be more nuanced in flawed democracies than in advanced democracies. Economic growth rates of less democratic nations are seemingly more prone to significant influences from variations in the inclusiveness of their representative institutions, whereas the link is found to be weak to non-existent in full democracies. Keywords: Political Representation, Economic Growth, Political Institutions.