The plan of this chapter is thus the following. In the next section, I briefly state what I mean
by democracy and dictatorship. Then I summarize results concerning regime dynamics.
Finally, I proceed to the central question, namely, the impact of political regimes on
economic performance. To keep the discussion free of technical issues, I present some
descriptive tables and only report conclusions of statistical findings. The reader who wishes
to know how these results were derived is directed to Przeworski et al.(2000), from which
this discussion borrows. Most of the results summarized below are based on observing 135
countries (excluding major oil producers) between 1950 and either 1990 or 1999.2