Democratization and knowledge in social sciences

Scholars in the social sciences and humanities play a crucial role in shaping political discourse by conducting research, teaching, and engaging the public. Therefore, autocratic regimes frequently impose restrictions and surveillance on social scientists’ and humanists’ scholarly and teaching activities to ensure alignment with the regime’s political interests. Our study explores how reducing such restrictions, as expected by a transition to democracy (democratization), influences academic knowledge creation and dissemination in these fields. We also investigate if the impact of democratization differs for the STEM fields that tend to benefit from preexisting academic freedom. Using data from SCImago (Scimago journal & country rank, 2021. https://www.scimagojr.com ), we use the total number of published documents as knowledge formation and average citations per document as knowledge dissemination metrics across 149 countries from 1996 to 2018. Drawing on the Episodes of the Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset, we find that democratization significantly increases citations per document in the social sciences and humanities, though the results are less robust for the humanities. There is no statistically significant change in the volume of published documents post-democratization in either field, possibly due to the limitations of our metric in capturing non-traditional contributions. This limitation is particularly pronounced in the humanities, where books, rather than articles, serve as the primary scholarly output. Therefore, they fall outside the scope of our knowledge creation metrics, leading to an underestimation of democratization’s impact. We do not find any effect of democratization on our knowledge creation or dissemination metrics in the STEM fields. Our results withstand various checks, including an instrumental variable approach to address potential endogeneity in democratization periods.