Official Visits and Democracy

Abstract

This paper examines whether the number of official visits to and from the U.S. allows the country to adopt a more democratic system of governance. To achieve its objective, the paper develops a model that derives the conditions under which a host invites a guest to persuade or pressure for democratic improvement, and the conditions under which the guest accepts an invitation to visit and decides to improve the quality of democratic governance after the visit. To test our hypothesis, we introduce novel variables that indicate the number of leader’s trips to the U.S., and the number of visits of U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State to the country, from 1960 to 2015. The estimation results show that the official visits have a statistically significant positive effect on democracy. These results are robust. The paper also uses 3SLS to deal with potential endogeneity. The estimation confirms our previous findings that the official visits have a statistically significant positive effect on democracy. Finally, we explore the channels of transmission and find that American administrations use bilateral trade flows and U.S. aid as an incentive for countries to democratize. This supports our model predictions.