Income and Democracy: Lipset’s Law Inverted

Ghada Fayad and Robert Bates
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Anke Hoeffler (anke.hoeffler@uni-konstanz.de)

No 61, OxCarre Working Papers from Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: In this article, we revisit Lipset’s law (Lipset 1959), which posits a positive and significant relationship between income and democracy. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques that account for short-run cross-country heterogeneity in the relationship between income and democracy and that correct for potential cross-section error dependence, we overturn the literature's recent set of findings of the absence of any significant relationship between income and democracy and in a surprising manner: We find a significant and negative relationship between income and democracy: higher/lower incomes per capita hinder/trigger democratization. We attribute this result to the nature of the tax base. 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. In the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) portion of the sample where the relationship runs from political institutions – i.e. democracy – to economic performance – i.e. income, democracy is found to positively and significantly affect income per capita, which slowly converge to its long-run value as predicted by current democracy levels: SSA countries may thus be currently too democratic to what their income levels suggest.

Keywords: Income; democracy; Sub-Saharan Africa; Dynamic panel data; parameter heterogeneity; Cross-section dependence. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 O11 O17 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-06-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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