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Democracy and the dollar

By Louise Williams
May 29, 2004

In the mid-1990s, a renowned political scientist put forward an intriguingly simple political formula, the answer to which was $US6055.

When a nation reached a per capita GDP equivalent to the spending power of $US6055 (at 1990 prices) it had probably endured its last military coup or dispatched its last dictator.

Prosperity was the most effective insurance against a slide back into authoritarianism, argued Professor Adam Przeworski of New York University.

Political scientists had long been fascinated by the apparent relationship between affluence and political freedom. But this was theory. What Przeworski did was to conduct a vast empirical study of political transitions in 135 countries between 1950 and 1990 - a total of more than 4000 years of politics around the world.

He did not find that wealth itself triggered democracy. Oil wealth, for example, has made the Gulf states some of the richest nations in the world. But the Middle East is the globe's most authoritarian region.

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Political change, he said, was randomly linked to per capita GDP. But once a democratic system had been established, "economic development has a very strong influence on the probability that democracy will survive. Above $US6000 [GDP per capita], democracies are impregnable and can be expected to live forever; no democratic system has ever fallen in a country where a per capita income exceeds $6055."

Only a few democracies in Asia sit above Przeworski's magic GDP level; Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The majority are in a mid-range GDP per capita of between $US1000 and $US6000 a year.

By Przeworski's reckoning, the region's most vulnerable democracy is East Timor, with Indonesia and the Philippines not far behind.