A summary of the lectures 1-5 and 7-10 of the Democracies, Autocracies & Transitions course. This summary contains material discussed in the lectures and at the same time incorporates the literature. I completed Democracies, Autocracies & Transitions with a 9 average. Good luck!
Cross-national variance
Liberal Democracy Index (2019)
➢ Check out their website as a
source for your policy briefs
➢ What explains these
patterns?
➢ You see a relation between
democracy and wealth: US,
Europe, Australia → are
wealthy countries more
democratic?
➢ You can also say: no, these
are all colonializing
countries rather than
countries that have been colonialized → but the US, Latin-America and Australia were
actually colonialized: so how is it possible that some countries that were colonialized are
very democratic and some are less?
o Could have something to do with religion foundations for democracy
➢ Maybe the level of democracy of your neighboring country has something to do with your
own level of democracy
➢ What explains variance between countries?
➢ Which part of that variance is explained by…
o Religion
o GDP per capita
o Gini coefficient
o Etc.
➢ This is at the level of the nation-state → but there is also variance within countries
between regions
o So this picture can be deceptive
,Longitudinal variance
➢ Not looking at differences across space (so
between regions/countries), but looking at
differences across time within a certain unit of
analysis
➢ For example: if you say that
countries that are more
wealthy are more likely to be
democratic then you can test
that in two ways → either
compare rich and poor
countries (cross-national) or
see if a country becomes
more democratic when they
are becoming more wealthy
(longitudinal)
➢ When you do a cross-
national research then it is
useful to look at the
structures of a country, when
you conduct a longitudinal
research it is more useful to
look at the agents of that specific unit
➢ On the right is another longitudinal example
➢ You see countries like Tunesia and Armenia making a lot of progress on this liberal
democracy index, while big countries like the USA and Turkey are backsliding
Democracy. So what?
Amartya Sen – Democracy as a Universal Value (reading for today)
➢ Book: Development as Freedom
“A country does not have to be deemed fit for democracy; rather, it has to become fit through
democracy.”
➢ You don’t have to be rich enough as a country and then democratize, you don’t have to be
institutionalized enough and then democratize → you don’t have to be “ready” to
democratize, it is actually through democratizing that you are able to bring better
policies, grow economically, etc.
➢ So democratize → then good things will happen
The value of democracy:
1. Intrinsic: people are political animals, being part of a community, having your voice
heard, being able to live in dignity → this is what people value
, 2. Instrumental: what democracy does is it creates certain incentives for elites to act in a
responsive and responsible manner. So if democracy is implemented properly it entails
elites that can be hold accountable → usually through elections
3. Constructive: the value of democracy lies in allowing citizens to form an opinion in the
first place → elites are supposed to respond to the preferences of the govern, then the
govern should have the opportunity to articulate those preferences → go in debates with
each other, join interest groups, etc.
o Channel concerns from the population to elites → peaceful solutions for conflict
• Democracy as outcome (DV) vs. democracy as cause (IV)
➢ In this course mostly democracy as dependent variable
• See V-Dem’s (link in PowerPoint)
“The Lee Hypothesis”
Lee Kuan Yew: former prime-minister of Singapore
➢ Radically transformed Singapore
➢ See link in PowerPoint for a YouTube video
➢ Amartya Sen: democracy first, then economic growth
➢ Lee Kuan Yew is on the opposite of this debate: there is no time to think about democracy
if you are trying to actually economic develop → people don’t care about democracy,
they care about jobs → get people a job and educate them → after that we will talk about
civil rights and elections
o So the actual economic wonder of Singapore was achieved at the cost of
democracy → it was an authoritarian state with dictatorial leadership
➢ Are authoritarian states more likely to succeed in economic growth?
➢ For Shanghai this is the same story: in a few decades it goes from almost no buildings
with many many buildings after
➢ Also in Dubai, they made tremendous progress in an economic sence from 1991 to 2016,
while being politically very repressive
, ➢ Led to the idea that democracy hampers economic
growth: always people complaining about
environment, politicians are short-term,
authoritarians can think decades ahead
Democracy → growth
• Knutsen (2021)
If you look at the bottom right graph:
➢ You can see that there is an average higher growth
rate in democracies than in autocracies (1,5%
difference)
➢ Distribution: variance among autocracies is much
bigger → the tails of this distribution go very far,
especially towards the negative end: autocracies,
much more then democracies, are likely to go to
(economic) catastrophe.
➢ For example: Amartya Sen using the example of famine (hongersnood) that take millions
of lives → easy to think this comes as a consequence of natural disasters → this is not
taking place in a country that is modestly democratic
o India: during British rule massive famines → when they became independent it
stopped → not because of a changing climate
➢ Economic growth is in every time period bigger in democracies than in autocracies,
except in 1900s and 1930s → because of the Great Depression and the rise of new
regimes like fascism
Democracy → Social protection
• Murshed et al. (2020)
➢ Focusing on 77 developing
countries
➢ Why spend some developing
countries much more on social
protection of the poor than
others?
➢ DV: expenditure as a % of GDP
(social and education)
➢ Controlled for all these other
factors in the model, a unit
increase in liberal democracy is
predicted to increase welfare
spending by 4,190% → holding
all the other factors constant, the model predicts that the difference between a purely
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