Skip Navigation  Income and Decmocracy  by Daron Acemoglu, Simon
Johnson, James A. Robinson and Pierre Yared. Reading for week of
September 21, 2004   We revisit one of the central empirical
findings of the political economy literature that higher income
per capita causes democracy.  Existing studies establish a
strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy,
but do not typically control for factors that simultaneously
affect income and democracy.   We show that controlling for such
factors removes the statistical association between income per
capita and various measures of democracy.  This is true both
when we include country fixed effects, and when we control
directly for potential historical determinants of political and
economic development in a sample of former European colonies. 
Overall, these results provide little support for the hypothesis
that income causes democracy.  Rather, different countries
appear to have followed different political and economic
development paths, some leadin