Political reforms and public policies : evidence from agricultural and food policy

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a new dataset on global agricultural and food policies over 50 years (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the period 1955-2005). We find evidence that democratization leads to a reduction in agricultural taxation and/or an increase in agricultural subsidization. The empirical findings are consistent with median voter model predictions since the political transitions occurred mostly in countries with a majority of farmers. The results are robust to different specifications, estimation approaches, and definitions of variables