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Modernization: Theories and Facts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Adam Przeworski  and
Fernando Limongi
Fernando Limongi
Affiliation:
New York University University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
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Abstract

What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? The main question is whether the observed close relation between levels of economic development and the incidence of democratic regimes is due to democracies being more likely to emerge or only more likely to survive in the more developed countries. We answer this question using data concerning 135 countries that existed at any time between 1950 and 1990. We find that the level of economic development does not affect the probability of transitions to democracy but that affluence does make democratic regimes more stable. The relation between affluence and democratic stability is monotonic, and the breakdown of democracies at middle levels of development is a phenomenon peculiar to the Southern Cone of Latin America. These patterns also appear to have been true of the earlier period, but dictatorships are more likely to survive in wealthy countries that became independent only after 1950. We conclude that modernization need not generate democracy but democracies survive in countries that are modern.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , January 1997 , pp. 155 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1997

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References

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3 While different data sets and different estimation methods lead to somewhat divergent results, the most careful statistical study of the aggregate patterns thus far, by Burkhart and Lewis-Beck, finds that economic development Granger causes democracy. Burkhart, Ross E. and Lewis-Beck, Michael S., “Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis,” American Political Science Review 88 (December 1994), 903–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A fair amount of ink has been spilled over whether the relation between development and democracy is linear. See Jackman, Robert W., “On the Relation of Economic Development to Democratic Performance,” American Journal of Political Science 17 (August 1973), 611–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Arat, Zehra F., “Democracy and Economic Development: Modernization Theory Revisited,” Comparative Politics 21 (October 1988), 21–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We now know better. Democracy, however measured, is a qualitative or a limited variable: it assumes values of 0 or 1 under our measurement; it ranges from 2 to 14 on the Freedom House Scale created by Gastil, R. D., Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 1987–88 (New York: Freedom House, 1988)Google Scholar; from 0 to 100 on the scale of Bollen, Kenneth A., “Issues in the Comparative Measurement of Political Democracy,” American Sociological Review 45 (June 1980), 370–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and so on. Hence, no predicted index of democracy can become negative as the level of development tends to zero, and no predicted index of democracy can exceed whatever is the maximum value of a particular scale as the level gets very large. Only a nonlinear function, such as the normal or logistic, as suggested by Robert A. Dahl can satisfy these constraints. See Dahl, , Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. This is why we use probit or logit models throughout.

5 This is not quite true of our data set, since different countries enter and exit the sample at different moments. For now, we consider the population of countries as fixed, but see Section IV.

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10 Our regime classification and the resulting list of regimes are described in Appendix 1 and in Mike Alvarex et al., “Classifying Political Regimes,” Studies in International Comparative Development (forthcoming). The reason for selecting this period and the sample is the availability of internationally comparable economic data, which we took from the Penn World Tables 5.6. The sample we describe here and use throughout does not include six countries that derive at least half of their income from oil revenues. While political data are available for 4,730 country years, data for economic growth are available for only 4, 126 country years, which is the number of observations in most analyses.

11 Readers used to the UN or the World Bank GNPfiguresshould be aware that counting incomes at purchasing-power parities tends to increase significantly the levels for poor countries and to decrease slightly the numbers for rich countries. It may be useful for future reference to know what different numbers describe: by 1990, Nigeria had a per capita income of $995, Indonesia had $1,973, Czechoslovakia $4,094, Spain $9,576, and the United States $18,073.

12 Note that we do not distinguish successive dictatorships. If President Viola succeeds President Videla or even if ayatollahs succeed a shah, we treat it as one continuous spell of dictatorship.

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14 An analogy may be useful. Suppose that someone runs the risk of 0.01 of dying from accidental causes during each year of her life and that at the age of seventy-eight she gets hit by a falling brick. To attribute this death to development is to conclude that she died of old age.

15 The claim about the prewar period is based on rather heroic backward extrapolation of 1950 incomes, but the levels at which democracies fell in Europe were an order of magnitude lower: we guess it to have been $1,825 in Austria in 1934, $1,974 in Finland in 1930, $1,474 in Germany in 1933, and $1,814 in Italy in 1922.

16 Londregan, John B. and Poole, Keith T., “Poverty, the Coup Trap, and the Seizure of Executive Power,” World Politics 42 (January 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Londregan and Poole found a similar pattern with regard to coups. In their sample of 121 countries between 1950 and 1982 coups were twenty-one times more likely to occur among the poorest than among the wealthiest countries.

17 Expected life in any state is the inverse of the probability of transition away from this state.

18 Adam Przeworski, “Why Democracies Survive in Affluent Countries?” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 28-September 1, 1996).

19 In the long run the proportion of democracies equals pAD/ (pAD * PDA), where p stands for transition probabilities, A for dictatorship (“authoritarianism”), and D for democracy. See Appendix 2. The numbers in the text are derived from Table 1.

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25 This finding parallels again the results of Londregan and Poole (fn. 16) with regard to coups, which they found to be less likely when the economy grows.

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31 O'Donnell was careful about not making general claims: his purpose was to explain the downfall of democracies in the Southern Cone. But his theory of “bureaucratic authoritarianism” captured the imagination of scholars around the world, who treated it as applicable almost everywhere.

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37 Suppose that the function which relates regimes to level is Pr[REGIME(t)=DEMOCRACY]=REG(t)=F[α+βLEVEL(t)], where F stands for a normal or logistic distribution. Now subtract and add βLEVEL(0) within the square brackets, to get REG(t)=F(α+βLEVEL(0)+ β[LEVEL(t)-LEVEL(0)]}. Defining LEVEL(0) as INI and LEVEL(t)-LEVEL(0) as DEV(t), and allowing the (cross-sectional) effect of the initial level to differ from the (dynamic) effect of development yields REG(t)= F[α+βc INI+βDDEV(t)].This is the model we estimated, by dynamic probit.

38 Huber, Rueschemeyer, and Stevens (fn. 6) go back just a few decades but the question remains: why would conditions found in the 1920s cause events in the 1960s, not earlier or later?

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