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By Daniel Treisman December 29

Joshua Tucker: One of our regular features here at The Monkey Cage is summaries from political scientists of recently published research. We have arranged for articles that are featured in this series to be ungated and made freely available to the public for a period of time following the post on The Monkey Cage. The current post is from UCLA political scientist Daniel Treismandescribing research from his article Income, Democracy, and Leader Turnover in the American Journal of Political Scienceand will be available forfree download for the next 30 days.

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Does economic development cause countries to become more democratic? A vast literature says yes. Except for a few petrostates, mostly in the Persian Gulf, almost all the richest countries have responsive and accountable governments.

Yet whenever consensus on this seems about to emerge, objections surface. Influential dissenters point out exceptions and propose alternative theories. Perhaps other factors predispose certain countries both to advance economically and forge democratic institutions, without one causing the other. And what to make of the countries that grow rapidly for years without any hint of political liberalization? What about Spain under Generalisimo Franco, Indonesia under President Suharto, Russia under Vladimir Putin?

In a recent article I suggest a reason why this debate refuses to die. Economic development does lead to greater democracy but not in a smooth, incremental way. At certain times, a countrys income matters a lot for its political evolution; in other periods, incomes influence is muted. What opens such windows is leadership succession. As authoritarian states become richer, they do tend to become more democraticbut the impact of development is concentrated in the early years of new authoritarian leaders.

Take Spain. Under Franco, who seized power in 1939, the country metamorphosed from a rural backwater into the worlds eleventh largest industrial economy. By the time Franco died of old age in 1975, GDP per capita had quadrupled and the number of telephones had increased by more than 250 times. But the political regime remained a brutal and arbitrary despotism.

Yet, within a few years, Spain had shot to the top of the democracy ratings. Historians see a clear link between the countrys multifaceted economic and social modernization in the 1960s and its political transformation in the late 1970s. Economic development set the stage for democracy. But its impact was felt only after the generalisimo left the scene.

This graphwhich tells Spains storyshows why we may miss the impact of development if we look for only short-run relationships. It plots Spains Polity scorea rating which ranges from -10 (pure dictatorship) to +10 (pure democracy)along with the countrys GDP per capita (in 1990 dollars). Do the two appear to be related? Looking only at annual changes we would not see much link. In fact, the two lines only move in the same direction for a few years after 1975. Most of the time the Polity score remains flat, seemingly unresponsive to the countrys steadily rising income.

Figure: Daniel Treisman/The Monkey Cage

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Monkey Cage: Economic development promotes democracy, but theres a catch