Nber Working Paper Series Superpower Interventions and Their Consequences for Democracy: an Empirical Inquiry

Do superpower interventions to install and prop up political leaders in other countries subsequently result in more or less democracy, and does this effect vary depending on whether the intervening superpower is democratic or authoritarian? While democracy may be expected to decline contemporaneously with superpower interference, the effect on democracy after a few years is far from obvious. The absence of reliable information on covert interventions has hitherto served as an obstacle to seriously addressing these questions. The recent declassification of Cold War CIA and KGB documents now makes it possible to systematically address these questions in the Cold War context. We thus develop a new panel dataset of superpower interventions during the Cold War. We find that superpower interventions are followed by significant declines in democracy, and that the substantive effects are large. Perhaps surprisingly, once endogeneity is addressed, US and Soviet interventions have equally detrimental effects on the subsequent level of democracy; both decrease democracy by about 33%. Our findings thus suggest that one should not expect significant differences in the adverse institutional consequences of superpower interventions based on whether the intervening superpower is a democracy or a dictatorship. William Easterly Department of Economics New York University 19 West 4th Street, 6th Floor New York, NY 10012 and NBER [email protected] Shanker Satyanath New York University Department of Politics 19 West 4th Street New York, NY 10012 [email protected] Daniel Berger Department of Politics New York University 19 West 4th Street New York NY 10012 [email protected]