Democracy and the Market for Culture: Institutional Determinants of Cultural Goods Exports

Description:

This dataset accompanies the research paper "Democracy and the Market for Culture: Institutional Determinants of Cultural Goods Exports" and provides all data and code necessary to reproduce the main findings. The repository examines the relationship between democratic institutions and cultural exports using panel data from 161 countries over the period 2004-2019.

Files Included:

• culture.ipynb - Main Jupyter notebook containing all analysis code, regression specifications, and robustness checks
• culture_exports.csv - UNESCO cultural goods exports data (log-transformed)
• GDPPC.csv - GDP per capita data from World Bank
• population.csv - Population data from World Bank
• V-Dem-CY-Core-v15.csv - Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) institutional quality indicators

How to Use:

1. Requirements: Python 3.7+ with pandas, numpy, statsmodels, matplotlib, and seaborn libraries
2. Setup: Download all files to the same directory
3. Execution: Open culture.ipynb in Jupyter Notebook/Lab or Google Colab
4. Analysis: Run cells sequentially to reproduce:
   • Data cleaning and merging procedures
   • Descriptive statistics and visualizations
   • Cross-sectional regressions (positive democracy effects)
   • Fixed effects panel regressions (negative within-country effects)
   • Robustness checks including winsorization, country trends, and PPML estimation
   • Leave-one-out sensitivity analysis

Key Findings: The notebook demonstrates that while democratic countries export more cultural goods on average (cross-sectional evidence), democratization processes within countries are associated with temporary decreases in cultural exports (fixed effects evidence), highlighting the importance of distinguishing between institutional levels and institutional changes.

Data Sources:

• Cultural exports: UNESCO Institute for Statistics
• Democracy measures: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project v15
• Economic controls: World Bank World Development Indicators

Reproducibility: All analysis is fully reproducible. The notebook includes detailed comments explaining each step and produces all tables and figures reported in the accompanying paper.