Improving models of democracy: The example of lagged effects of economic development, education, and gender equality

•I discuss theoretical and empirical lack of understanding of lagged effects.•Theoretical rationale to use lagged instead of immediate effects is developed.•The results of the bivariate and multivariate models support the use of lags.•Lags of economy, education, and gender equality show unique time trajectories.•I call for a routine exploration of the lagged effects in democracy models.

The author examines how time delayed effects of economic development, education, and gender equality influence political democracy. Literature review shows inadequate understanding of lagged effects, which raises methodological and theoretical issues with the current quantitative studies of democracy. Using country-years as a unit of analysis, the author estimates a series of OLS PCSE models for each predictor with a systematic analysis of the distributions of the lagged effects. The second set of multiple OLS PCSE regressions are estimated including all three independent variables. The results show that economic development, education, and gender have three unique trajectories of the time-delayed effects: Economic development has long-term effects, education produces continuous effects regardless of the timing, and gender equality has the most prominent immediate and short term effects. The results call for the reassessment of model specifications and theoretical setups in the quantitative studies of democracy.