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Scholars have studied effects of economic openness and democracy on national income inequality in two literatures. In democracy studies, scholars agree democracy reduces inequality but empirical evidence is ambiguous. In globalization studies, effects of economic openness on inequality are debated but have not been rigorously examined. This article is the first systematic statistical study of the effects of both economic openness and democracy on income inequality. These effects need to be studied together. The authors measure national income inequality from a comprehensive Gini coefficient data set. Economic openness is measured from trade flows, foreign direct investment inflows, and financial capital inflows. The period studied is 1960 to 1996, the unit of analysis is a country decade, and the sample includes 69 countries. The authors find that democracy and trade reduce income inequality, foreign direct investments increase income inequality, and financial capital does not affect income inequality. Policy implications are discussed.

In a relatively small but growing body of literature in political science and environmental studies, scholars debate the effect of democracy on environmental degradation. Some theorists claim that democracy reduces environmental degradation. Others argue that democracy may not reduce environmental degradation or may even harm the environment. Empirical evidence thus far has been limited and conflicting. This article seeks to address the democracy–environment debate. We focus on the effect of political regime type on human activities that directly damage the environment. Our discussion of the theoretical literature identifies different causal mechanisms through which democracy could affect environmental degradation. The empirical analysis focuses on the net effect of these competing mechanisms. We examine statistically the effect of democracy on five aspects of human‐induced environmental degradation—carbon dioxide emissions, nitrogen dioxide emissions, deforestation, land degradation, and organic pollution in water. We find that democracy reduces all five types of environmental degradation. While the substantive effect of democracy is considerable, it varies in size across different types of environmental degradation. We also find nonmonotonic effects of democracy that vary across the environmental indicators.

The theoretical literature presents conflicting expectations about the effect of globalization on national democratic governance. One view expects globalization to enhance democracy; a second argues the opposite; a third argues globalization does not necessarily affect democracy. Progress in explaining how globalization affects democracy requires confronting these theoretical positions with data. We assess empirically the effects of globalization on the level of democracy from 1970 to 1996 for 127 countries in a pooled time-series cross-sectional statistical model. The effects of four national aspects of globalization on democracy are examined: trade openness, foreign direct investment inflows, portfolio investment inflows and the spread of democratic ideas across countries. We find that trade openness and portfolio investment inflows negatively affect democracy. The effect of trade openness is constant over time while the negative effect of portfolio investment strengthens. Foreign direct investment inflows positively affect democracy, but the effect weakens over time. The spread of democratic ideas promotes democracy persistently over time. These patterns are robust across samples, various model specifications, alternative measures of democracy and several statistical estimators. We conclude with a discussion of policy implications. Does economic globalization affect the level of democracy? Is deepening integration into the world economy associated with a decline or rise of democratic governance? These questions have captured the imagination of policy makers and academic scholars alike. Various answers have been provided, and policy recommendations have been made. Anecdotal evidence is typically invoked in debates, but systematic evidence is scarce. This article seeks to fill up this empirical lacuna.The notions of globalization and democracy are widely discussed in the literature. Most scholars agree that, at the minimum, globalization implies that countries are becoming more integrated into the world economy, with increasing information flows among them. 1 Greater economic integration, in turn, implies more trade and financial openness. Rising information flows imply, arguably, cultural convergence across countries. Most scholars also agree that democracy implies a national political regime based on free elections and broad political representation. 2

While many scholars have posited a simultaneous relationship between trade and conflict, very few empirical studies have specified the relationship as such. Those that did employed samples that were relatively limited in spatial-temporal coverage. None have employed conflict indicators based on Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data due to the difficulty of including discrete dependent variables in a simultaneous equation framework. We overcome both limitations in this study and offer results with important theoretical implications. In line with the most recent published studies, we design our model to "condition" the estimates on recent histories of dyadic trade and conflict. We apply Maddala's estimator, which is designed for a two-equation system in which one endogenous variable is continuous and the other is dichotomous. While the signs of all control variable coefficients match those reported in mainstream trade-conflict literature, our main result does not. We find what we call the "primacy of politics"; i.e., that conflict indeed inhibits trade while the effect of dyadic interdependence on the likelihood of conflict is statistically insignificant. Extensive sensitivity analyses show the results to be consistent across estimators as well as alternative model specifications and trade data sets. We conclude that liberal claims about interdependence and conflict may be problematic.The relationship between economic interdependence and interstate armed conflict continues to fuel lively debates among scholars. The majority of published empirical studies support the liberal position that trade reduces conflict, though some scholars challenge this claim directly and others argue that contingencies and boundary conditions still need to be specified (Mansfield and Pollins 2001). Importantly, there is agreement that the relationship may well be reciprocal (that is, trade affects conflict and conflict moves trade), yet there is very little work to date which takes this possibility into account. Almost all published studies to date estimate the relationship in single-equation form. That is, the study looks only at how trade influences conflict, or it examines only the effect of conflict on trade-