Democratization

A Comparative Analysis of 170 Countries

Tatu Vanhanen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134366972
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the relationship between indicators of resource distribution and democratization in the group of 170 countries with data ranging from the 1850s to the present day. Vanhanen constructs a compelling argument, concluding that the emergence of democracy is closely linked to resource distribution.

1 Debate on the causes of democratization

Ever since S.M. Lipset’s seminal article ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy’ (1959), researchers have discussed and studied the causes of democratization. Most of the world’s countries have democratized, at least to some extent, but democracy is still fragile in many of them, and the number of countries in which democratic institutions, or attempts to establish democracy, have failed is considerable. Therefore it would be important to understand why democracy has emerged in some countries but not in certain others. What are the causes of democratization and of the failures of democratization? Are the causes and failures of democratization similar in all parts of the world, or do they vary from place to place and over time? These are some of the basic questions tackled by researchers and investigated in this study, too.

Economic development and modernization

Lipset assumed that two characteristics of a society ‘bear heavily on the problem of stable democracy: economic development and legitimacy, or the degree to which institutions are valued for themselves and considered right and proper’ (Lipset 1960: 46). He tended to agree with Weber who suggested that modern democracy in its clearest form can occur only under capitalist industrialization. Lipset emphasized the significance of social conditions conducive to democracy and related democracy to the level of economic development and wealth. According to his generalization, ‘the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy’ (Lipset 1959: 75; 1960: 48–50). When he tested this hypothesis by empirical evidence, he found that the average wealth, degree of industrialization and urbanization, and the level of education is much higher for the more democratic countries than for the less democratic ones.

Daniel Lerner had presented similar arguments on the effects of modernization on political development in his book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958). According to his theory, the process of modernization follows a similar pattern in different countries. It starts from urbanization, and is followed by increased literacy and rising media participation. Finally, modernization produces democracy: ‘Democratic governance comes late, historically, and typically appears as a crowning institution of the participant society’ (Lerner 1968: 64).

Many other researchers have tested and retested Lipset’s and Lerner’s economic development and modernization hypotheses of democratization, developed them further, and applied them to different regions and periods of time (see, for example, Marvick 1962; Cutright 1963; Neubauer 1967; Needler 1968; Olsen 1968; Smith 1969; Banks 1970; Winham 1970; Cutright and Wiley 1969–70; Kim 1971; May 1973; Marquette 1974; Coulter 1975; Bollen 1979; O’Regan 1992; Muller 1995, 1997; Londregan and Poole 1996; Karvonen 1997; Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Mousseau 2000; Bunce 2000; Elgström and Hyden 2002). In the expanded edition of Political Man (1983), Lipset repeats his arguments on the social requisites of democracy and notes that a number of social scientists ‘have continued to work in this area and, using more statistically sophisticated methods, have also found positive relationships between economic development and democracy’ (1983: 470). He refers to Inkeles and Diamond, who ‘present considerable evidence to sustain the hypothesis that the level of a country’s economic development independently affects the orientations conducive to democracy of its citizens.’ However, he admits that there are still deviant cases. Most of them are ‘oil-rich, otherwise less developed, highly inegalitarian, Middle Eastern states, or the more industrialized Communist regimes’ (ibid.: 473; see also Lipset et al. 1993).

Gary Marks and Larry Diamond refer to the numerous studies which have tested Lipset’s assertion of a direct relationship between economic development and democracy in the last 30 years and conclude that ‘the evidence shows, with striking clarity and consistency, a strong causal relationship between economic development and democracy’ (Marks and Diamond 1992: 6). Diamond (1992) notes that a number of studies have strongly supported Lipset’s thesis, but he makes some reservations. His argument is that the Human Development Index is an even better indicator of economic development than per capita GDP. He assumes that ‘the relationship between economic development and democracy has weakened somewhat in the last 30 years as the number of democracies, especially in the middle ranges of development, has grown, especially in the last few years’ (ibid.: 102). Diamond emphasizes the extraordinary consistency with which the central premise of Lipset’s thesis has stood up through all manner of tests, but he reformulates it slightly: ‘The more well-to-do the people of a country, on average, the more likely they will favor, achieve, and maintain a democratic system for their country.’ According to his interpretation, economic development promotes democracy ‘only by effecting changes in political culture and social structure’ (ibid.: 109, 128). Christian Welzel (2000) has explored the relationship between measures of democracy and some indicators of human development and found that they are strongly correlated.

Lipset’s thesis about the strong positive relationship between economic development and democracy has become generally accepted. Economic development constitutes an essential part of the more extensive process of modernization. Robert A. Dahl (1989), for example, notes that polyarchy has been strongly associated with a society marked by a host of interrelated characteristics including

a relatively high level of income and wealth per capita, long-run growth in per capita income and wealth, a high level of urbanization, a rapidly declining or relatively small agricultural population, great occupational diversity, extensive literacy, a comparatively large number of persons who have attended institutions of higher education, . . .

(Dahl 1989: 251)

He calls such a society a modern dynamic pluralist society. Edward N. Muller makes the same conclusion on the connection between economic development and democracy: ‘Quantitative cross-national research on the economic determinants of democracy consistently finds that a country’s level of economic development is associated positively and strongly with the extent to which the political system manifests properties of democracy’ (Muller 1997: 133).

Dietrich Rueschemeyer et al. (1992) accept the repeated observations that socio economic development and democracy are positively correlated, but they point out that such a correlation does not carry its own explanation. They do not accept the usual explanation, according to which economic development produces the middle class, which is the primary promoter of democracy, whereas the upper class, and especially the lower class, are seen as the enemies of democracy. Their theoretical explanation is different: democracy concerns power, and democratization represents an increase in political equality. Therefore, power relations determine whether democracy can emerge, stabilize, and then maintain itself. Capitalist development tends to change the balance of power among different classes and class coalitions. Industrialization empowers subordinate classes and makes it politically difficult to exclude them. Empowered lower classes can then challenge the hegemony of upper classes, and this challenge, if it is successful, leads to democratization. As a consequence, there is positive correlation between capitalist development and democracy (ibid.: 1–5). Their conclusion is that ‘capitalist development is associated with democracy because it transforms the class structure, strengthening the working and middle classes and weakening the landed upper class’ (ibid.: 7). They support these theoretical arguments by historical evidence and emphasize that the working class was the most consistently pro-democratic force. So they differ from Lipset who focuses in his theoretical explanation on education, moderation, and tolerance, which are assumed to characterize the middle class (ibid.: 13–14). However, after the comparative historical studies, they found it necessary to modify certain ideas of their original framework. For example, they note that the middle classes turned out to be more central to the political developments in South America than in the advanced capitalist societies (ibid.: 281–2). Besides, they observed so much regional variation in the paths to democracy that they rejected ‘the assumption of cross-national statistical research that there is a homogeneous pattern of causation throughout history’ (ibid.: 284; cf. Sanderson 2001: 317–18).

Robert J. Barro (1999) found on the basis of his statistical analysis covering 100 countries that empirical evidence supports the Lipset hypothesis: prosperity stimulates democracy. In particular, increases in various measures of the standard of living – real per capita GDP, life expectancy at birth, and measures of education – tend to generate a gradual rise in democracy. Once the indicators of the standard of living are held constant, some other variables, like the urbanization rate and the size of population, are not important. Income inequality seems also to be unimportant for democracy, but he notes that this finding ‘may reflect the poor quality of the data on income distribution rather than the irrelevance of inequality for democracy’ (ibid.: 69). Referring to African countries in particular, he observed that countries at low levels of economic development typically do not sustain democracy.

Valerie Bunce’s (2000: 706) argument is that the level of economic development seems to have considerable impact not so much on whether democracy exists as on its sustainability over time. Democracy can be introduced in poor as well as rich countries, but its prospects for enduring increase substantially at high levels of economic development (see also Yi Feng 1997; Landman 2000: 61–82; Clague et al. 2001).

Multivariate models

Lipset himself has in his later works emphasized the multivariate nature of social requisites of democracy. For example, in his paper ‘The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited’ (1994), he refers not only to the level of economic development but also to de Tocqueville’s idea of social equality; to the significance of market economy; to the centrality of political culture, including ‘the acceptance by the citizenry and political elites of principles underlying freedom of speech, media, assembly, religion, of the rights of oppposition parties, of the rule of law, of human rights, and the like’ (1994: 3); to religious traditions; to Weber’s idea of legitimacy; to the effects of electoral systems and political parties; and to the significance of a strong civil society. It is possible that all these factors affect the chances of democracy in a country, but a problem is that it is probably impossible to test a hypothesis based on a list of various undefined factors.

There are several other studies in which the origin of democracy is traced to multivariate causal factors. Dahl listed in his Polyarchy (1971) seven sets of complex conditions favoring polyarchy. In his later book On Democracy (1998), Dahl mentions three essential conditions for democracy: (1) control of military and police by elected officials; (2) democratic beliefs and political culture; and (3) no strong foreign control hostile to democracy; and, in addition to them, two favorable conditions for democracy: (4) a modern market economy and society, and (5) weak subcultural pluralism (ibid.: 147). All of these conditions are plausible but so vague that it would be very difficult to operationalize them and to test their explanatory power (see also Dahl 1989: 244–64; cf. O’Regan 1992). The same concerns the long list of facilitating and obstructing factors for democratic development used in Diamond et al.’s (1990, 1995) extensive comparative study of politics in developing countries. Their cluster of such factors includes legitimacy and performance, political leadership, political culture, social structure and socio-economic development, civil society, state and society, political institutions, ethnic and regional conflict, the military, and international factors (Diamond et al. 1995: 9–52).

G. Bingham Powell (1982: 30–52) tested some of the most widely accepted hypotheses about the effects of environmental conditions on democratic performance and found that factors like small population size, higher levels of development, and ethnic homogeneity make democracies easier to govern, but he emphasized that it is difficult to test hypotheses based on specific components of the social structure because their significance varies greatly from country to country. It should be noted that Powell’s analysis concerns democratic performance, not the causes of democratization.

Samuel P. Huntington (1991) notes that his purpose is not to develop a general theory of the preconditions of democracy. He tries to explain why, how, and with what consequences a group of roughly contemporaneous transitions to democracy occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. However, he refers to numerous variables identified in theories of democratization to explain democratization and assumes that each variable is likely to have relevance in only a few cases. Huntington continues: ‘The search for a common, universally present independent variable that might play a significant role in explaining political development in such different countries is almost certain to be unsuccessful if it is not tautological.’ His conclusion is that the ‘causes of democratization differ substantially from one place to another and from one time to another’ (Huntington 1991: 38; cf. O’Regan 1992).

Axel Hadenius (1992) explored a number of theories on the requisites of democracy and tested the explanatory power of their independent variables by empirical evidence. His purpose was to separate the chaff from the wheat. He used a stepwise regression for this purpose and came to the conclusion that seven variables display significant associations with the level of democracy: literacy, commodity concentration, trade, capitalism, percentage of protestants, military expenditure, and average fragmentation. Taken together these explanatory factors explained some 60 percent of the variation concerning the level of democracy, but a problem with this list is that the variables are not connected with each other by any theory (Hadenius 1992: 143–57).

Transition and consolidation studies

Guillermo O’Donnell et al. (1986) focus on the last phase of democratization in their four-volume study Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. They emphasize the crucial significance of political actors and choices in the transition process. They do not explore the causes of democratization. As Gabriel A. Almond (1992: 10) says: ‘In their emphasis on the indeterminacy and reversibility of the democratization process they seem to have given up or postponed the search for causality, for explanation.’ Because of this theoretical diffidence, they do not formulate or test any theory of democratization. Whitehead (1996a: 353) remarks that ‘our chances of producing a strong predictive theory are slight.’

Consolidation studies represent another genre of transition studies. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) use the following definition of consolidated democracy:

A democratic transition is complete when sufficient agreement has been reached about political procedures to produce an elected government, when a government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote, when this government de facto has the authority to generate new policies, and when the executive, legislative, and judicial power generated by the new democracy does not have to share power with other bodies de jure.

(Linz and Stepan 1996: 3)

Briefly stated, Linz and Stepan mean by a consolidated democracy a political situation in which democracy has become the only game in town. They explore in their book to what extent this situation had been reached in Southern Europe, South America, and post-communist Europe by 1995. Their attention is focused on political factors, especially on the significance of a strong state. Their argument is that ‘modern consolidated democracies require a set of socio-politically crafted and sociopolitically [sic] accepted norms, institutions, and regulations, which we call economic society, that mediates between state and market’ (ibid.: 11). A role for the state is needed in the economy because markets require, for example, corporation laws; the regulation of stock markets; regulated standards for weight, measurement, and ingredients; and the protection of property. Consequently, they argue that political reforms, especially state reconstruction, should precede economic reforms. In this point, they disagree with some free market enthusiasts who endorsed privatization as the most important component of the post-1989 process in post-communist Europe (ibid.: 434–57).

Yi Feng and Paul J. Zak (1999) explore the determinants of democratic transitions and come to the conclusion that ‘democratic transitions are less likely when the level of development is low, income inequality is high, and citizens are poorly educated’ (ibid.: 174). I think that these conditions reflect a low level of resource distribution. They add to the list of unfavorable conditions some cultural factors. According to their evidence, ‘democratic transitions tend not to occur when democratic heritage is weak, the Muslim population is large, or Confucianism is widespread’ (ibid.: 175–6).

Graeme Gill (2000) reviews transition and consolidation literature and discusses explanations given for democratization. He notes that there is a positive correlation between economic development and democracy. He asks why increased affluence leads to the replacement of authoritarian regimes by democracies and mentions eight aspects of the process of economic development which have been identified to explain the emergence of democracies. His second question concerns the breakdown of authoritarian regimes. There is no single explanation for regime breakdown. Gill’s list include economic crisis, political mobilization, international pressure, and regime disunity. The point is that quite different factors may cause the breakdown of an authoritarian regime (for transition studies, see also Gómes Buendia 1996; Shin 1999; Siaroff 1999; Munck 2001).

Thomas Carothers criticizes the transition paradigm for its assumption that ‘a country’s chances for successfully democratizing depend primarily on the political intentions and actions of its political elites without significant influence from underlying economic, social, and institutional conditions and legacies’ (Carothers 2002: 17). I agree with this criticism (see also Landman 2000: 143–71; Haynes 2001: 18–34; McFaul 2002). For counter-arguments, see O’Donnell 2002; Wollack 2002; Hyman 2002.

Political culture

Larry Diamond argues in his book Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation that democracy should be viewed as a developmental phenomenon, because there ‘is not now and has never been in the modern world of nation states a perfect democracy, one in which all citizens have roughly equal political resources and in which government is completely or almost completely responsive to all citizens’ (Diamond 1999: 18; cf. Dahl 1971: 1–2). Diamond examines the process of democratic consolidation in numerous countries which are, after the ‘third wave’ of global democratization, above the threshold of electoral democracy. His attention is focused on political and cultural factors and civil society, but he refers also to economic structures and economic performance. Sustainable economic growth and the decrease of economic inequalities would support democratic consolidation as well as land reforms especially in Latin America (1999: 78–88). He emphasizes the significance of political culture as a central factor in the consolidation of democracy, because democracy ‘requires a distinctive set of political values and orientations from its citizens: moderation, tolerance, civility, efficacy, knowledge, participation’ (ibid.: 161). Diamond thinks that the prospects for a fourth wave of democratization are gloomy, because almost ‘all of the countries that had favorable economic, social, and cultural conditions for democracy have democratized.’ For most of the 53 ‘not free’ states, the prospects for democratization appear bleak because they share one or more of the following three characteristics: (1) they have a majority Muslim population and often strong Islamic fundamentalist pressures; (2) they have deep ethnic divisions without a single, dominant ethnic group; and (3) they have neocommunist or post-Communist regimes with a strong hangover of diffuse, one-party domination (ibid.: 261; see also Diamond 1994).

Ronald Inglehart says that culture plays a much more crucial role in democracy than the literature of the past two decades would indicate. According to his argumentation, economic development ‘seems to bring gradual cultural changes that make mass publics increasingly likely to want democratic institutions and to be more supportive of them once they are in place’ (Inglehart 2000: 95–6; see also Harrison 2000; Inglehart and Welzel 2003; Welzel et al. 2003). Huntington blames culture for the failure of democracy in Muslim societies. He says that this ‘failure has its source at least in part in the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture and society to Western liberal concepts’ (Huntington 1996: 114).

Christopher Clague et al. (2001: 36–7) argue on the basis of their empirical study that ‘the probability of democracy in the postwar period is strongly affected by country characteristics that reflect cultural and institutional inheritances.’ British colonial influence, island status, and a relatively low degree of ethnic fragmentation have been conducive to democracy, whereas Muslim heritage has had a negative effect on the probability of democracy. Göran Hyden (2002) pays attention to cultural pluralism and argues that ethnicity is much more compatible with democracy in Africa than it is in the other parts of the world.

The advocates of ‘Asian values’ have attempted to explain the lack of political freedom in some Asian countries by Asian cultural traditions which are said to emphasize community over individualism, to favor authoritarianism, and to include preponderance towards strong and stable leadership rather than political pluralism (see Inoguch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Debate on the causes of democratization
• 2 Resource distribution theory of democratization
• 3 Measures of democracy
• 4 Explanatory variables
• 5 A review of democratization in 1850–1998
• 6 Correlation analysis
• 7 Regression analysis
• 8 Analysis of single countries
• 9 Conclusions
• Appendix 1 Data on the measures of democracy for 1999–2001 in 170 countries
• Appendix 2 Data on adult literacy and students in universities per 100,000 inhabitants in 170 countries
• Appendix 3 The percentage of Family Farms of the total area of agricultural holdings in 170 countries, 1960–1995, and the percentage of the agricultural population in 1999
• Appendix 4 The estimated degree of decentralization of mainly non-agricultural economic power resources (DD) in 170 countries, 1995–1999
• Appendix 5 Data on GNP 1998 and GDP per capita (PPP US$) 1998 in 170 countries
• References