Recent studies of democratization, most importantly Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub,
Limongi, 2000 (PACL), question the modernization hypothesis that richer countries are
more likely to be democratic. PACL claim instead that transitions to democracy are
unpredictable, but once there, countries can remain democratic with higher levels of GDP
per capita. We retest this hypothesis using an expanded data set and a three-way, rather
than two-way, categorization of regimes: autocracies, partial democracies, and full
democracies. We find that the modernization theory does hold up well, contrary to
PACL’s findings: greater levels of prosperity do predict when countries are likely to
leave autocracy and stay fully democratic. Partial democracies, on the other hand, emerge
as the most volatile and least predictable category of regimes.
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