Do politics and administration affect innovation performance? A comparative analysis of ‘third wave’ democracies

Resumo

Does the degree of democracy affect countries' innovation performance? Can a high level of political competition or income inequality affect how NIS achieves positive results? Does bureaucratic capacity reflect on better innovative outcomes? Are corruption and transparency in the public administration influential in improving economies' innovation performance? To address these questions, the paper compares three groups of countries from regions that experienced democratization during the so-called 'third wave' since the mid-1970s, i.e., South and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. First, the inquiry employs descriptive data analysis on the independent and dependent variables, the Global Innovation Index (GII) outputs. Then, the paper runs multivariate regression models to test how politics and administrative variables affect the economies’ performance. As a result, the hypothesis that politics influence the capacity and accomplishment of countries' innovation was confirmed, although estimates indicate that lowest the democratic level is, the better innovative performance. In theadministrative dimension, the hypothesis cannot be fully sustained since the quality of state apparatus was not statistically significant in any model. The results for transparency/corruption were substantial for both the creative outputs and the innovation performance sub-indexes.