Abstract

The causal relationship between regime type and public services has been subject to decades of scholarly debate and numerous empirical investigations. Different theories make different predictions on how institutions will lead political elites to make different economic prioritizations. A majority of the empirical proofs rely on macroeconomic data that are self-reported by governments. But these data are known to suffer from a type of measurement bias that is especially problematic when answering questions about regimes and leaders' incentives. Using novel data on the quality of postal services which does not suffer from any of these validity-issues, I show that postal services in democracies deliver significantly better services, responding to somewhere between 20 - 40 percentage points more letters. The effect is not driven by any single country or region, is not driven by different bureaucratic capacity or economic development, and can not be explained by countries' historical legacies.