Course: POLSCI 353-01 Globalization of Democracy, Duke University
Instructor: Herbert Kitschelt
Teaching Assistant: Peng Peng
Various studies examine on how a country’s development can account for the survival and stability of its democracy. They connect different concepts and indicators of development with the persistence of democracies worldwide, testing their whether correlations or causations, or both, exist between the two.
Seymour Martin Lipset emphasizes on a number of major indicators of development including income level, education, occupational division of labor, communication and transportation, and urbanization. Using contemporary data from European, English-speaking, and Latin American countries, Lipset constructs a frame of comparison between democracies and non-democracies on the scale of affluence, industrialization, education, and urbanization (Lipset 1959: 76-77). He also draws comparison among Middle Eastern countries on the variables of urbanization, literacy, media participation, and political participation using a computed “multiple correlation coefficient” (Lipset 1959: 84). Based on those, he demonstrates a strong correlation between these development indicators of a country and whether or not it is a democracy (Lipset 1959: 75-84). This statistical correlation corresponds to his reasoning of the fundamental functions of these development factors, such as education’s contribution for citizens to believe in democratic values (Lipset 1959: 79) and the higher income level giving citizens more intelligence to participate in politics (Lipset 1959: 75). His conclusions that these development factors make democracies emerge and sustain correspond to the modernization theory originated from Max Weber (Clark et al. 2018: 181). The inferences made in this study is less convincing and generalizable as it only utilizes data from a limited geographical region (Lipset 1959: 74) and a limited time span (Lipset 1959: 77).
The research of Murtin & Wacziarg (2014) examines the Modernization Theory over the long run. It takes advantage of historical data since 1870 using time-specific sample selections to test the correlation and causations between democracy and only two developmental indicators – income and education (Murtin and Wacziarg 2014: 158). By employing controls and blockings, Murtin & Wacziarg further examines the relation between development (income and education) and the persistence of democracy, namely whether the existing democracies experienced “large decreases in democracy” under the influence of poor development performance (Murtin and Wacziarg 2014: 161). They discover that it is unlikely for already democratic countries to “lose” democracy (Murtin and Wacziarg 2014: 161). This is again consistent with the modernization theory in terms of “securing democracies”. Their research has much more explanatory leverage since it makes use of a much larger data set from over 144 years in 74 countries (Murtin and Wacziarg 2014: 144).
Przeworski et al. (1996) refutes the modernization theory while arguing that development does help secure democracies. The research identifies three major domestic development indicators that are necessary for maintaining democracies: affluence, growth with moderate inflation, and declining inequality (Przeworski et al. 1996: 39). Instead of merely observing the correlation between democracy level and development level, Przeworski et al. directly constructs a probability of democracy collapse (Przeworski et al. 1996: 41), using retrospective statistical inferences. By comparing this probability among various quantifiable intervals of development indicators, for example the intervals of annual per-capita income, the research concludes a negative relationship between development level and democracy collapse probability for income level and economic performance. The research finds confident enough to conclude that moderate affluence, high growth, and low or declining inequality serve as agents to secure an existing democracy can be concluded. Similarly, this research has sufficient explanatory leverage as it collects data comprehensively and constructs a much more direct measurement for democracy persistence.
Throughout these studies and their usage of different indicators of development, I find that affluence is the most useful conception of development to account for the lock-in of democracy, due to its objectivity and quantifiability.
Affluence is the easiest indicator of development, compared to education, urbanization, industrialization, among others, to be defined and standardized. There are various existing macroeconomic statistics can be employed to assess or describe a country’s affluence, with per capita income being the most popular one being used in these studies (Lipset 1959: 76; Murtin and Wacziarg 2014: 147; Przeworski et al. 1996: 41). They are generally direct and indisputable representations of the affluence of a country, where we don’t have to first synthesize from many different statistics to generate a level in order to describe an indicator. A counter example, as we witness in these studies, is that one needs to assess the educational level of a country using different statistics including literacy rates, school enrollment, and average number of schooling years due to the complexity of the concept of “education”, where subjectivity is unavoidable (Lipset 1959: 76; Murtin and Wacziarg 2014: 147). The objectivity of affluence statistics like per capita income is intrinsic, meaning that these studies make no impact on its data’s objectivity, thus increasing the robustness of such inferences they made using affluence statistics.
Moreover, affluence has an overwhelming advantage over other conceptions of development: quantifiability. Everyone can directly borrow the raw numerical data from a macroeconomic survey to draw inferences on the affluence-democracy relationship without taking any extra steps to process these data and make them suitably quantifiable for statistical inferences. On the contrary, it is not only biased but also practically difficult to quantify indicators like urbanization, industrialization, and communication. Admittedly there are still many ways to sorting countries by urbanization levels or development of communication, but the resulting inferences would also subject to change greatly once the sorting mechanism changes. Therefore, the replicability of a research would be compromised if indicators like urbanization and communication are heavily relied on, thus reducing the integral robustness of a research.
In fact, Przeworski et al.’s study demonstrates that the correlation between per capita income and democracy persistence is the greatest among all (quantifiable) indicators, as the probability of democracy collapse decreases most significantly from less developed countries to more developed countries when adopting per capita income as development indicator (Przeworski et al. 1996: 41-43). This is consistent to the affluence statistics’ robustness that I just discussed.
In conclusion, affluence is the most useful and effective conception of development when assessing the relationship between development level and the “lock-in” of democracy, because of its advantages of objectivity and quantifiability as an explanatory variable as well as its resulting strong correlation with democracy persistence.
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