<p>Innovation plays a key role in sustaining economic growth. However, the political drivers of innovation have not been fully investigated, especially in the cross-national context. In this paper, we explore the general relationship between political institutions and innovation, using a new data set containing information on over 130 countries from 1995 to 2022. We aggregate product-level trade data to construct a new indicator of innovation capacity based on a country’s comparative advantage in exporting innovation-intensive products. We show that an improvement in political accountability has a significant positive effect on innovation capacity, while party institutionalization has no comparable effect. We also estimate the effect of political accountability conditional on natural resource rents and find a negative interaction effect. Our results are robust to a large set of control variables and multiple model specifications.</p>