Income and Democracy: Lipset's Law Revisited
27 Pages Posted: 28 Feb 2013
Date Written: December 2012
Abstract
We revisit Lipset's law, which posits a positive and significant relationship between income and democracy. Using dynamic and heterogeneous panel data estimation techniques, we find a significant and negative relationship between income and democracy: higher/lower incomes per capita hinder/trigger democratization. Decomposing overall income per capita into its resource and non-resource components, we find that the coefficient on the latter is positive and significant while that on the former is significant but negative, indicating that the role of resource income is central to the result.
Keywords: Development, Economic models, Income, Political economy, cross-section dependence, democracy, dynamic panel data, parameter heterogeneity
JEL Classification: C23, O11, O17, O55
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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