Product Description

Is economic development conducive to political democracy? Does democracy foster or hinder material welfare? These two questions are examined by looking at the experiences of 135 countries between 1950 and 1990. Descriptive information, statistical analyses, and historical narratives are interwoven to gain an understanding of the dynamic of political regimes and their impact on economic development. The often surprising findings dispel any notion of a tradeoff between democracy and development. Economic development does not generate democracies, but democracies are much more likely to survive in wealthy societies.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166018 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
"[Democracy and Development] is "must reading" for any scholar serious about political economy. I predict that the book will be a milestone in our inquiries into political systems and economic performance." Journal of Democracy

"Democracy and Development is a great book. . . [It] is based on a rich data set covering most of the countries in the world from 1950 to 1990 and including dozens of variables. With its quantitative skills it combines sophisticated analysis of the data." Latin American Politics and Society

"This is the best defence of democracy of its generation. On almost every count, economic and humanitarian, it shows that democracy outperforms authoritarianism. Western governments which justify their support for dictatorships on the ground that this is ultimately beneficial for development are simply mistaken. Unlike most treatments of the subject, the conclusions are based not on theoretical supposition or normative preference, but on rigorous and sophisticated empirical analysis." - Francis Castles, Australian National University

"This book is a tour de force, a model of how research should be done, on a question that matters. Przeworski and his colleagues take great care in their measurement of difficult concepts like "democracy" and "growth", and in their specification of the causal processes that are involved. The result is a set of findings that are often surprising, but in which we can invest full confidence." - W. Phillips Shively, University of Minnesota

"There are few questions in the social sciences more fundamental than the relationship between political regimes and economic prosperity. This book sets a new standard for the field. Unabashedly empirical, yet grounded in theory, it produces a torrent of statistical evidence with which all future work will have to contend." - Dani Rodrik Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard University

"[Democracy and Development] is "must reading" for any scholar serious about political economy. I predict that the book will be a milestone in our inquiries into political systems and economic performance. Its arguments will be quoted and requoted. The answers the authors have provided will be visited and revisited. Their findings will be tested and retested. There will be no end to this research enterprise, only beginning after beginning. In this respect, it resembles the democratic process itself, which constantly reinvents and reinvigorates itself." Journal of Democracy

"...an excellent book based on a long-term, nearly comprehensive analysis." Journal of Politics

Customer Reviews

Interesting Work
I had a love/hate relationship with this book. First, and this is purely a stylistic point, I believe it could have been far better edited. It was an avalanche of statistics, statistical analyses, and presented results without a lot of discussion of why relationships emerged. Their first goal -- showing development does not "cause" democratization is, I believe, a revamp of earlier published work. It is, nonetheless, an important finding that is worth repeating.

More interesting is the relationship between dictatorships and demography, but, again, aside from a little theorizing and a few statistical tests I believe the authors do little to shed much light on why different regimes affect demography differently. They begin to flesh out an argument the crux of which revolves around the ability of democratic polities to "commit" to providing social welfare over the long run, but this seems to run counter to their initial dismissal earlier in the book of the Neo-Institutional economics claim put forth by Douglass North, among others, as to the importance of institutions in "binding the hands of the sovereign."

Finally, their results do show that democracies tend to survive in wealthy states, in essence becoming "unkillable" after a certain level of wealth is reached. They do little to really explain why this is, but the result gives credence to Lipset's thesis that devolpment, at the very least, helps sustain democracies.

Overall I liked to book and would reccommend it as an assigned book in a comparative politics/political economy class.

Sophisticated and brilliant
It's a marvellous book. I took a course last year with Limongi about the book and it was great. The main feature I like in the book is the sophisticated discussion about selection bias in comparative politicas and how to avoid it. In fact the methodological discussions in it are fundamental to all schollars reaserching in comparative politics.

However, I think that some improvement could be made to the book in some statistical techniques used, and also in the reproducibility of the reasearch. Nowadays I would love to hace access to the code used to run regressions (altough I suspect they did it in SPSS), just to name one improvement possible on reproducibility. Besides, I think they should explicitly had treated some time correlation problem in their data.

Despite that, It is a great book and fundamental in any reasearch in comparative politics.

Monumental Work!!!
Too many conjectures and too many theories have been addressed concerning the relationship between polities and material well-being in the world. But they have been raised without a proper test of them, without empirics. This book completely cleans all kinds of intellectual garbages, clarifies the existing arguments, and above all provides a series of the sohpisticated tests. Adam Przeworski and his comrades did a marvelous job.