Growth, development and political change.
Economic development has long been associated with democratic politics, Seymour Martin Lipset in 1959 established a correlation between high levels of economic development and democracy (Lipset, 1959). He found that the more advanced economies, measured ad Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, were all stable, advanced democracies. Lipset postulated that such an association arose out of the greater wealth, education and urbanization of developed economies. Those circumstances created greater demand for openness and competition.