This project focuses on the extent to which deregulation of national laws liberalizing international finance is predictable from the degree of democratization. Two hypotheses are being tested. First, sustained international financial liberalization arises from sustained democratic political contestation and that sustained liberalization leads to and enablement cycle. Second, the absence of sustained democratic contestation will lead to restrictive or highly variable international financial policies. These lead to a repression cycle. This project extends the PIs prior work in which data from 64 counties were cataloged. In the current effort, data from an additional 60 countries, mostly poor and less stable and democratic in comparison to those previously assessed, will be cataloged. In addition, data for the years 1994 through 1996 are being added for the originally cataloged countries. The core hypotheses are examined using cross-sectional regression analyses. The dynamic of the contemporaneous relationship between liberalization and political economic performance are examined using pooled, time-series, cross-sectional regressions. This research addresses one of the central developments of modern political economics and extends a dataset of great value to other sociolegal researchers.
