Nobel prizes and Democracy

Does democracy cause more top-quality science and literature? To test the question, we rank all countries by Population / "Intellectual" Nobel Prize Ratio. By "intellectual" we mean that the Peace Prizes are omitted. Our tables include all Science and also the Literature prizes from the first year (1901) they were awarded, up to and including 1999. We have also included the Economics "Nobel" although Nobel himself did not endow an Economics prize and it was created by a separate agency (the central Swedish bank) in 1968 and is regarded with disdain by many scientists. (And note there is no mathematics Nobel prize although the "Abel Prize" was established by the government of Norway in 2002.)

To be fairer to low-population countries, we rank countries by the ratio of number of prizes won divided by population. Most of the population data (in thousands) are from the World Almanac and Book of Facts 2000 (for 1999) Mahwah, New Jersey: PRIMEDIA Reference, 1999. The Nobel Prize data was tallied from the same source and also from http://www.nobel.se/index.html. Almost all this data was gathered by Rodrigo de la Jara for an entirely unrelated project about IQ; we have merely copied it. There was sometimes more than one country listed for a Nobel – then we gave all the listed countries (full) credit. I (Warren Smith) am simply using de la Jara's data without any attempt to check it. [There is also what might be a better (?) Nobel-data compendium in Wikipedia here. I haven't used it.] The population data for the USSR is from their 1989 census (the last one conducted).

Color codes:

Democracies are white, but the three "advanced-design Democracies" are light blue. Non-Democracies are colored red. Note, it is somewhat subjective what a "democracy" is. I fully admit I am using my subjective judgment, but subject to these principles:

1. We try to coincide with the general feeling at that time about whether that country was a democracy. (See these capsule histories of countries.)
2. Further, some of the countries listed (e.g. Germany) were only democracies for some but not others among their Nobels (which also brings in the somewhat-muddy issue of just when and where each Nobel-worthy work was done...). They are colored less-red the more-democratic they (roughly) were.
3. Some countries are or were "apartheid democracies" such as South Africa before the 1990s, Israel in 2000, and the USA before the 1970s. In these countries, there was a racial/ethno/religious underclass which did not enjoy democratic representation and benefits, while an overclass did. We have listed these countries as "democracies" because their Nobelists were all from the overclass and thus from their point of view were living in a democracy.

It seems quite clear from this data that democracies produce more Nobelists per capita than non-democracies. Possible reasons: non-democracies tend to try to keep a tight rein on unpredictable developments (that might conceivably lead to a disagreeable power-shift) such as science and literature, and tend to prevent/control free exchange of information and publication; meanwhile democracies tend to encourage those things. It is hard to build long-term research facilities in an atmosphere of political instability, and some non-democracies seem unstable. (But some democracies also seem unstable, so that would not necessarily have anything to do with it; but in fact all our top-ranking countries have been quite-stable democracies.) Perhaps people in non-democracies have incentive to "stay invisible" and indistinguishable from the crowds, which is incompatible with being a Nobelist. Perhaps democracies tend to foster greater immigration and general migration of talented people, which helps. (Observe Japan has been comparatively unfriendly to immigrants, and sure enough is doing quite poorly, Nobel-count-wise, versus other democrcies.) Non-democracies when they have striven to advance science and technology have often done so in military technology, which while it leads to advances, tend not to be the sort of advances that garner Nobel prizes. Democracies tend to be richer countries, which helps. Finally, perhaps the sort of mind that produces Nobel-quality work has trouble doing it in a non-democratic milieu. Actually I have no idea what the true reason or reasons are, those all were guesses. But the data seems fairly clear, ignoring the reasons.

How statistically significant is this?

Well, looking only at the top 14 and bottom 14 among the 40 Nobel-winning countries, if Nobelitude were totally unrelated to (or negatively-related to) democracy then what would be the chance that at most 2 in the top-14 would have any non-democraticness, while meanwhile at most 4 in the bottom-14 would be democracies?

Answer (given that the 28 total countries are split 16+12) is

That already would be 99.5% statistical significance. (Above calculation redone October 2013. Earlier version had found 0.0032.) But if we also throw in the fact the three advanced-democracies in the world are all in the top half, that's another juicy factor. I could probably try harder to get stronger confidence estimates, but haven't bothered. (It might be interesting for somebody to do a careful analysis trying to milk every last drop of statistical significance out of this data to see how confident we really ought to be. Our crude analysis only gives a lower bound on confidence.) So, in conclusion: even without trying very hard we can see with at least about 99.9% statistical significance that democracy is positively-related to Nobel-prize rate.

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