Dictators, Democracies, and Discoveries: Political Institutions and the Creation of Ideas

We investigate the role of political institutions in shaping global knowledge production, leveraging a newly assembled comprehensive dataset on universities, scientists, and major discoveries worldwide from 1900 to the present. We find that institutional quality is a key determinant of scientific production. Countries with high-quality institutions not only build larger academic sectors but also produce substantially more research, including frontier research and Nobel Prize–winning discoveries. Event study analyses of sharp improvements or deteriorations in institutional quality confirm that these relationships are driven by changes in institutions rather than by selection or long-run trends. Countries with high-quality institutions also produce more frontier research, conditional on the size of the academic workforce, indicating higher productivity per researcher. Finally, political institutions influence the breadth of inquiry: autocracies channel research into a narrower set of fields, achieving excellence in some areas but lacking the broad exploration of ideas that characterizes democracies.