The politics of academic innovation: A cross-national study of the effects of regime type on knowledge production

ABSTRACT

Academic innovation is key to a country’s international competitiveness and national well-being, and therefore explore its drivers is important. This paper tests a neglected driver – regime type – on how it affects academic innovation in 92 countries. Cross-national evidence of the effects of democracies and autocracies on scholarly production is lacking but much needed, especially when autocracies like China have overtaken the democratic United States for the number of scientific publications produced. For our independent variable, we use data from the Polity Project to measure the democratic level of a regime, backed by datasets from the Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem). Unlike the existing literature that focuses on academic outputs by quantity and on science subjects alone, our dependent variables measure research outputs using the Scopus data and the Essential Science Indicators, which sort academic innovation by both quantity and quality measures for all disciplines. We find higher scholarly productivity and creativity, manifested as larger output quantity with higher citation rates per documents and greater H-index figures for quality and impact, are positively associated with a regime’s democratic level. Why do democracies enable better innovation? We utilise the V-Dem dataset to suggest that academic freedom is a crucial cause.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic innovation
• Quality of innovation
• Quantity of innovation
• Political freedom
• Regime type

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor as well as the two reviewers for their significant insights. Both authors contribute equally to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The 2019 Global R&D Funding Forecast: https://www.rdworldonline.com/global-funding-forecast-predicts-growth-of-rd-spending-worldwide/

2 The Polity Project: http://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html

3 The Database of Political Institutions: https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/wps2283-database-political-institutions

4 The Worldwide Governance Indicators: https://databank.worldbank.org/source/worldwide-governance-indicators

5 The Freedom House database: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2018-table-country-scores

6 The SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR): https://www.scimagojr.com/

7 The Essential Science Indicators (ESI): https://esi.clarivate.com

8 http://stats.uis.unesco.org

9 These 92 countries are Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Zambia.

10 See note iv.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yi Yang

Yi Yang got his DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. He currently teaches at China’s Peking University and uses qualitative and quantitative methods including formal modelling, econometric analysis, field/lab experiments, deep interviews and archival research to test and challenge existing political science paradigms. He has published widely in political science, social theory, organisational theory, and complexity science.

Lin Liu

Lin Liu has published extensively in game theory modelling and political science and he got his PhD in Economics.