Comparative Democracy Redux: The Economic Development Thesis, 1972-2014

• In Event: The Economy Under Autocracy: New Research Directions

Abstract

We wrote an article published in the American Political Science Review some time ago (1994) on the cross-national relationship between economic development and democracy. We made three major claims in it: (1) economic development has a causal relationship to democracy, (2) economic development has a logarithmic relationship to democracy, controlling for democratic history and world-system position, and (3) the more the country is in the periphery of the world-system, the less that economic development translates into democratic performance. The article became well-cited: there have been over 1100 citations of it according to Google Scholar, with ten citations last year and three so far this year.

The article needs revision, however, as the data are dated (1972-89), yet no one has attempted to revise the article since its publication. We propose a fresh analysis based on the addition of data from 1990-2014, updating the historical eras to those of the post-Cold War, 9/11, and Great Recession, monumental events that may well have affected economic development and democracy. We will use the same measurement strategy from the earlier dataset so that the quantitative information remains consistent (Freedom House measures for democracy, UN/World Bank measures of energy consumption per capita, panel-of-experts derived measurement of world-system status for countries). We will perform the same tests as in the 1994 article, using similar pooled time-series methodology, to see if the original conclusions remain intact, or need revision.

Authors

• Ross E. Burkhart

• Michael S. Lewis-Beck, University of Iowa