In this essay, I have reflected on recent research on the relationship between democracy
and economic development. I believe that the most significant advance in the
past decade is theoretical: Finally the types of mathematical tools developed by
economists and political scientists in other subfields, such as American politics,
are being systematically applied to model the determinants of democracy. The
political science and sociological literatures on the creation and consolidation of
democracy are full of ideas and insightful case studies, but they have provided few
theoretical generalizations about the circumstances that lead a society to become
and remain democratic. One possible reason is that many scholars of comparative
politics reject the possibility of the scientific study of politics. Linz & Stepan (1978,
p. xi) argued that “the historicity of macro-political processes precludes the highly
abstract generalizing of ahistorical social scientific models... applicable to all past
times and any future cases,” and O’Donnell & Schmitter (1986, p. 3) note, “We
did not have at the beginning, nor do we have at the end of this lengthy collective
endeavor, a ‘theory’ to test or to apply to the case studies and thematic essays in
these volumes.” This attitude may account for why the study of the mechanisms
generating the cross-country correlation between income per capita and democracy
remains pretty much where Lipset (1959) left it. In this essay, I have provided
a simple model, inspired by Acemoglu & Robinson (2000, 2001, 2006), which
captures what I believe to be some of the insights of this new approach. I showed
how the model could generate mechanisms that could link economic development
and democracy