Professor Gerring Receives Major Award to Study Governance, Democracy and Development
Professor John Gerring has just received a major grant to investigate some of the most fundamental questions of government around the world. The project will test things like the conventional wisdom that when rulers obey the law, when they are accountable to the people, when personal security and property rights are guaranteed, and when capable bureaucracies are responsive to elected officials, good things will follow. Professor Gerring’s project addresses these issues by leveraging new data from the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem) that measure hundreds of aspects of democracy and governance – including electoral competition, the rule of law, civil liberty, inclusion, decentralization, and legislative power – at a very specific level for all sizeable countries in the world from 1900 to 2012. With this immense database at our disposal, the project team will test conventional ideas about the impact of these institutions on outcomes such as economic growth, infrastructure, health, and education over the past century.