Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09 View Post
American Pride---just curious so in all your comments I hear you saying that a democratically elected president who together with his cronies stole over 70B then fled ---even his dentist son went to billionaire status in under three years---how is that possible---is far better than the street tossing out the former crook and installing an interim individual who seems to have some support from somewhere.

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Come on AP you are sliding back into the political debate I went through on the FU Berlin in the 60/70s between world communist dominance and the evils of capitalism---the world has moved on and it is now all about the rule of law and good governance and along the way if a country can get an economy moving along that is accepted by the population regardless of how it looks then so be it.
While I generally agree with most of your post(s), those two phrases always trigger the hairs in the back of my neck. "Rule of Law" is just another way of saying that you are following locally interpreted procedural legitimacy - it is always a matter of interpretation. Stoning a woman for being raped is following the "rule of law" in some parts of the world. “Good governance” is almost meaningless since the standard of what is “good” has to be interpreted by those being governed. It is really only relevant if you are trying to correct “bad” governance and then it is only important if it is really bad (like your examples of Yanukovych. I guess I would caution against using terms that may not have a universally agreed upon definition.

That said, I agree, the proof will be in the pudding. Economics matter first and foremost, since a country had a better chance to remain a democracy if it is wealthy.


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.