Coalitions, Threats, Ideologies and the Origins of Democratic Developmentalism

• In Event: Democracy and Development: Insights from new Data Collection Efforts

Abstract

In recent years, a rich qualitative historical-analytical scholarship has emerged providing new insights and arguments as to why some developing economies grew faster than others. Revolving around the role of coalitional politics and power configurations, systemic threats, as well as differences in economic ideology (Yashar 1997; Centeno 2002; Kohli 2004; Doner et al. 2005; Slater 2008; Kelsall 2014; Henley 2015; Khan 2018), this scholarship, however, has made little attempt to test these arguments more rigorously across countries and time. This makes it difficult to assess their validity more generally and with regard to whether they can explain developmental differences among developing democracies in particular. This paper promises to fill this gap. It uses data from an ongoing large-scale survey-based at the University of Manchester of 126 country-experts coding these and related political economy variables throughout the modern history of 42 developing countries. Employing a mixed-method design, the study first identifies different combinations of factors and pathways to democratic developmentalism using QCA on a smaller sample and then tests the external validity of these findings with standard OLS-regression analysis on a larger sample.

Author

• Nicolai Schulz, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin