In the wake of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, various postcommunist countries rushed to gain greater access to foreign markets. Many of them have made substantial progress in liberalizing commerce, but the movement toward free trade has been by no means universal. One prominent view is that the establishment of democratic institutions has stimulated economic reform in thepostcommunist world. The authors conduct one of the first studies on this topic and find that democracies are indeed more likely to liberalize trade than nondemocracies. They also find that the electoral calendar has a potent influence on the timing of commercial reform in postcommunist democracies: Controlling for a range of factors, politicians are most likely to reduce trade barriers immediately after voters go to the polls. Trade liberalization is much less likely to occur at other points in a democracy’s electoral calendar, and elections have no effect on commercial reform in nondemocracies.
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