IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/intecp/978-1-349-24076-0_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

On the Relationship between Economic Development and Political Democracy

In: Democracy and Development

Author

Listed:
  • John E. Roemer

    (University of California)

  • Salvador Barberà

    (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

Abstract

Until the mid 1970s, with the notable exceptions of India and Costa Rica, only highly developed economies enjoyed political democracy. Many theories have been proposed to explain this apparent relationship between development and democracy. I think they can be divided into two groups. The first consists of those theories based upon the growth of the power of a class, or the formation of a coalition of classes, in whose interests democracy, or extending the franchise to the masses, lies. Some argue, for instance, that the working class is the engine of democratic transformation, and working class power grows with development, which induces the formation of trade unions. Others argue that the bourgeoisie is the engine of democratic transformation — they need the masses to side with them against the landed aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie grows with development. For theories of this kind, Moore (1966) and Stephens (1994) provide a cogent account. The second category of theories explains the advent of democracy by some kind of change of preferences of citizens. For instance, with education, people come to value civil liberties more, and there is, therefore, an obvious relation between development and democratic yearnings.

Suggested Citation

  • John E. Roemer & Salvador Barberà, 1995. "On the Relationship between Economic Development and Political Democracy," International Economic Association Series, in: Amiya Kumar Bagchi (ed.), Democracy and Development, chapter 2, pages 28-57, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-24076-0_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-24076-0_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. G. Bellettini, 1995. "Aggregate uncertainty, political instability and redistribution," Working Papers 213, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    2. Bellettini, Giorgio, 1998. "Aggregate uncertainty, political instability and income redistribution," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 14(1), pages 19-33, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-24076-0_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.