Counting Calories: Democracy and Distribution in the Developing World1

How does regime type affect the poor? And are certain types of regimes better at translating economic growth into consumption for the world’s least privileged citizens? We propose an alternative measure of transfers to the poor that is nearly universally available and innately captures distribution: average daily calorie consumption. In sharp contrast to the consumption of material goods or the accumulation of money for which humans have shown no upper bound on their ability to achieve, biological limits make it impossible for a small number of individuals to consume most of a nation’s calories. We find that for a variety of model specifications, democracies are better at translating economic growth into calorie consumption and discuss two potential causal mechanisms linking regime type to pro-poor growth.