No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Since the Second World War, two main research traditions have tackled the questions of which social and economic conditions most favor democracy: cross-national quantitative studies and comparative historical work. These two different methods have tended toward different theoretical positions, and more troublesome, arrived at contradictory results.One seminal work in the cross-national quantitative research program was Seymour Martin Lipset's (1959) essay on "Some social requisites of democracy: economic development and political legitimacy." These studies assembled a narrow range of aggregate data on development and democracy for many countries, converted them into standardized numerical values, and performed increasingly sophisticated statistical analyses of this material. Their theoretical interpretations were first inspired by modernization theory-a conception in which society, economy and polity are systematically interrelated, integrated by an overarching value consensus, and subject to increasing specialization and differentiation of social structures-while later research focused more on specific hypotheses and refrained from broader theoretical assumptions. Even though these studies used a variety of indicators for development and democracy and examined different samples of countries, they consistently arrived at one major result: the level of economic development correlated positively with