What accounts for the dynamics of financial reforms? This paper identifies the political regime as main factor. Focusing on democratization and financial reform, it puts forward novel evidence for a U-shaped relation, across countries, over time as well as in a panel setting for different reform measures and a wide range of estimators. Partial democracy is a main obstacle to financial reforms and democratization, when incomplete, may lead to severe financial reform reversals. We also show that, even when de jure set off de facto financial liberalization, the political regime still play a fundamental role in the reform's implementation phase.
