The Impact of Economic Development on Democracy

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

The Coevolution of Economic and Political Development

“…The causal link between the level of economic development and political democracy is also con…rmed by cross-national statistical analyses and comparative historical research (Huber, Rueschemeyer and Stephens 1993). Most democracies today have industrialized economies where human capital is the dominant capital form; in countries where natural resources are the main factors in production, authoritarian political regimes are more likely to happen than democracy (Lipset 1959, Moore 1966, Huber et al 1993, among others).…”

A global empirical evaluation of new communication technology use and democratic tendency

“…3 A precise explanation of their data interpolation procedure was not readily available. See http://www.econstats.com/weo/V023.htm 4 Available at http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/ 5 The data used in this study is available at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/informationsharing/ 6 The data are available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/01/weodata/index.aspx population of country i at year t and M F it is the male/female gender ratio. 7 β 0 is the intercept term for country i, and γ t T D and ξ i CD are a time effect and a country effect, respectively.…”

“…Huber et al write that the most basic feature of democracy is power sharing [6]. They identify three clusters of power as primarily relevant for the chances of democracy: (1) the balance of power in civil society; (2) the balance of power between state and society; and (3) the transnational balance of power that shape the first two and constrain political decisionmaking.…”

Voting Counts: Participation in the Measurement of Democracy

“…The wide array of theoretical perspectives that anticipate an empirical relationship between democracy and de- velopment provides additional confidence. Since Lipset's (1959) original formulation, nearly identical predictions have been generated from both refinements of modernization theory and theoretical challenges to it (Rostow, 1971;Bollen, 1983;Inkeles, 1998;Huber et al, 1993). In what has become known as the "endogenous" explanation, a range of structural conditions that accompany rising incomes are said to undercut autocracy and promote the adoption of democracy: education, urbanization, changing class structures, technological growth, and others.…”