The effect of income on democracy revisited: A flexible distributional approach

Rajius Idzalika, Thomas Kneib and Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso

No 247, University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics

Abstract: We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero-one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. The zero-one-inflated beta distribution is more appropriate for continuous but bounded responses with non-zero probabilities for the boundaries of the support than the other frequently used distributions such as the normal. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et al. (2008), some support of causality is found particularly when explaining the variance of the democracy variables. Since our analysis highlights that the distribution of democracy is bimodal, we approximate the modes using two separate samples of OECD and non-OECD countries. Our results indicate that there are differences not only in the mean but also in other features of the response distribution between the two groups. For instance, higher incomes are associated with higher democracy levels in the OECD sub-sample, however for non-OECD the association is insignificant.

Keywords: income; democracy; beta distribution; bimodal; OECD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C16 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/110677/1/826996426.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of income on democracy revisited a flexible distributional approach (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cegedp:247

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().