The Political Economic Origins of Democracy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What determines whether a country will become and remain a well-functioning democracy? Given the gradual slide into authoritarianism that we are experiencing worldwide this fundamental question in comparative political economy is more pertinent now than ever. To explain what we see today it is important that we better understand the roots of democratic uprise and consolidation more generally.

This panel contributes to this endeavor by bringing together four papers on the political economic origins of democracy. Conceptually, the papers focus on the relationship between different forms of structural economic change and the introduction and sustainment of democratic forms of government. Methodologically, the papers tend to leverage major historical shocks (e.g. the Black Death in the 14th century, the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century) to examine the long-run relationship between structural economic change and political institutions.

In the first paper Aditya Dasgupta revisits Barrington Moore's classic hypothesis that the transition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism played an important role in laying the foundations for democracy. Unlike the existing literature Dasgupta tests this hypothesis in a much wider range of cases, expanding the sample both across time (from the 19th century until today) and across space (including a wide range of cases outside the West). The paper finds conditional support for Moore's original hypothesis -- technology-driven improvements in productivity leading to the commercialization of agriculture played an important role in early but not in late episodes of democratic transitions. Utilizing comparative case studies Dasgupta finds that one reason for this treatment heterogeneity is that later incumbents were more effective at coopting the new commercial elites that emerged from agricultural revolutions.

In the second paper Daniel Gingerich and Jan Vogler study the long-term consequences of the Black Death. They hypothesize that the Black Death, through the major loss of life that it caused, significantly uprooted traditional socio-economic structures by increasing the bargaining power of local citizens (labor) relative to elites (capital). This in turn led to the emergence of institutions that allowed for more political participation by non-elites, differences in political institutions that are still observable today.

In the third paper Pablo Beramendi and Carles Boix provide a formal model illuminating the relationship between the level of income, the distribution of income, and regime type. Using the tools of game theory they show that high inequality reduces democratic stability, that high income moderates the effect of inequality, and that economic shocks are particularly dangerous to democracy at low income levels. Taking the model one step further they endogenize inequality itself by linking it to different forms of technical change over time (inequality-enhancing in the 19th century and today; equality-enhancing during the 20th century). To test their theory they analyze time series cross-section data from the late 19th century until today.

In the last paper Sam van Noort revisits the classic modernization theory of Lipset (1959) -- i.e. the idea that economic development leads to a wide range of changes in a society' socio-economic structure (e.g. a widespread increase in living standards among the working- and middle classes, a reduction in the political-economic power of large landowners), structural changes which in turn tend to be conducive to democracy. The existing literature has attempted to test this theory by studying the effect of GDP per capita on regime type, and has found at best inconclusive results. Van Noort argues that this is because GDP per capita often captures poorly the "type" of economic development that plausibly leads to the forms of socio-economic change that Lipset had in mind (e.g. much economic growth is derived from agricultural production by big landowners, natural resource extraction, and informal services, while such production increases are in fact quite unlikely to lead to the type of socio-economic changes that modernization theory relies on). Using micro-economic theory van Noort argues that it are predominantly increases in economic production in the manufacturing sector that are likely to induce democratization. He tests this theory by examining the effect of the industrial revolution in the United States during the 19th century. For identification he exploits that US states that due to geological reasons had more access to coal could more readily imitate the coal-powered British Industrial Revolution.

Taken together the papers provide a novel contribution to the long-term debate on the fundamental causes of comparative democratization. Sharing a clear conceptual and methodological core all authors would greatly benefit of a panel discussion at the Annual Meeting of the APSA in 2020.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Chair

• Carl Henrik Knutsen Department of Political Science, University of Oslo

Discussants

• Adriane Fresh Duke University

• Milan Svolik Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Was Barrington Moore Right? The Role of Agriculture in Democratization - Aditya Dasgupta, University of California, Merced

• The Long-Term Consequences of the Black Death for Democracy - Daniel W. Gingerich, University of Virginia; Jan P. Vogler, University of Konstanz

• Technological Change, Inequality, and the Future of Democracy - Pablo Beramendi, Duke University; Carles Boix, Princeton University

• The Industrial Revolution and the Emergence of Liberal Democracy - Sam van Noort, Princeton University