Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T11:03:26.025Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Endogenous democracy: causal evidence from the potato productivity shock in the old world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2020

Joan Barceló Open the ORCID record for Joan Barceló [Opens in a new window]  and
Guillermo Rosas Open the ORCID record for Guillermo Rosas [Opens in a new window]
Joan Barceló*
Affiliation:
Political Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Guillermo Rosas
Affiliation:
Political Science, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
*
*Corresponding author. [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite a high cross-country correlation between development and democracy, it is difficult to gauge the impact of economic development on the probability that autocracies will transition to democracy because of endogeneity, especially due to reverse causation and omitted variable bias. Hence, whether development causes democracy remains a contested issue. We exploit exogeneity in the regional variation of potato cultivation along with the timing of the introduction of potatoes to the Old World (i.e., a potato productivity shock) to identify a causal effect of urbanization, a proxy for economic development, on democratization. Our results, which hold under sensitivity analyses that question the validity of the exclusion restriction, present new evidence of the existence of a causal effect of economic development on democracy.

Keywords

Comparative political economycomparative politicspolitical institutions
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 650 - 657
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acemoglu, D, Johnson, S and Robinson, JA (2002) Reversal of fortune: geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, 1231–1294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Acemoglu, D, Johnson, S, Robinson, JA and Yared, P (2008) Income and democracy. The American Economic Review 98, 808–842.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, J, Corvalan, A and Spiegel, MM (2013) Income and democracy: evidence from nonlinear estimations. Economics Letters 118, 489–492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boix, C (2011) Democracy, development, and the international system. American Political Science Review 105, 809–828.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boix, C and Stokes, SC (2003) Endogenous democratization. In World Politics. Cambridge, UK, Vol. 55, pp. 517–549. doi: 10.1353/wp.2003.0019.Google Scholar
Brunk, GG, Caldeira, GA and Lewis-Beck, MS (1987) Capitalism, socialism, and democracy: an empirical inquiry. European Journal of Political Research 15, 459–470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burkhart, RE and Lewis-Beck, MS (1994) Comparative democracy: the economic development thesis. American Political Science Review 88, 903–910.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cervellati, M, Jung, F, Sunde, U and Vischer, T (2014) Income and democracy: comment. The American Economic Review 104, 707–719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conley, TG, Hansen, CB and Rossi, PE (2012) Plausibly exogenous. Review of Economics and Statistics 94, 260–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Long, JB and Shleifer, A (2011) Princes and merchants: city growth before the industrial revolution. Journal of Law and Economics 36, 671–702.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunning, T (2012) Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences. A Design-Based Approach. Strategies for Social Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Epstein, DL, Bates, R, Goldstone, J, Kristensen, I and O'Halloran, S (2006) Democratic transitions. American Journal of Political Science 50, 551–569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Food and Agriculture Organization (2002) Global Agro-Ecological Zones. Available at: http://www.fao.org/nr/gaez/en/.Google Scholar
Gundlach, E and Paldam, M (2009) A farewell to critical junctures: sorting out long-run causality of income and democracy. European Journal of Political Economy 25, 340–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heid, B, Langer, J and Larch, M (2012) Income and democracy: evidence from system GMM estimates. Economics Letters 116, 166–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyigun, M, Nunn, N and Qian, N (2015) Agricultural Productivity and Conflict: Evidence from Potatoes, 1400-1900 (Unpublished manuscript). September.Google Scholar
Lipset, SM (1959) Some social requisites of democracy: economic development and political legitimacy. American Political Science Review 53, 69–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Londregan, JB and Poole, KT (1996) Does high income promote democracy? World Politics 49, 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lundberg, AL, Huynh, KP and Jacho-Chávez, DT (2016) Income and democracy: a smooth varying coefficient Redux. Journal of Applied Econometrics 32, 719–724.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, MG, Jagger, K and Robert Gurr, T (2009) Polity IV: regime authority characteristics and transition datasets, 1800-2009 [Data file], October 10. Available on-line at http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/inscr.htm.Google Scholar
Moral-Benito, E and Bartolucci, C (2012) Income and democracy: revisiting the evidence. Economics Letters 117, 844–847.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nunn, N and Qian, N (2011) The Potato's contribution to population and urbanization: evidence from a historical experiment. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, 593–650.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Przeworski, A and Limongi, F (1997) Modernization: theories and facts. World Politics 49, 155–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Przeworski, A, Alvarez, ME, Antonio Cheibub, J and Limongi, F (2000) Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sovey, AJ and Green, DP (2011) Instrumental variables estimation in political science: a readers' guide. American Journal of Political Science 55, 188–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staiger, D and Stock, JH (1997) Instrumental variables regression with weak instruments. Econometrica 65, 557–586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weingast, BR (1995) The economic role of political institutions: market-preserving federalism and economic development. Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 11, 1–31.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Barceló and Rosas Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OZEQ77
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Barceló and Rosas supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Barceló and Rosas supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 210.6 KB