A note on democratization: does history still matter?

Abstract

This article examines associations between historical factors and whether or not autocratic regimes in 1972 later democratized after controlling for current characteristics. Many historical factors are not relevant, although European influence as measured by the fraction of the population speaking a western European language is an exception and is positively associated with democratization.

Notes

¹ AJRY derive their democracy measure from the Freedom House index of political rights transformed to a 0–1 scale where higher values denote more democracy.

² SEC and GAP both come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. MUSLIM comes from La Porta et al. (1999).

³Barro (1999) also considers population size and the urban ratio as determinants of democracy, the latter being a measure of modernization. Inclusion of these controls does not change the findings of this article.

⁴ I do not consider models using a binary dependent variable (PD = 1 if a country became a democracy, zero otherwise) such as logit or probit models, since such models would not capture potentially important evolutions within each category, for example, a move from a totalitarian regime to one with some political freedoms.

⁵ Results are also robust to the removal of the regional dummies.

⁶ I focus on GADP since this index combines several institutional characteristics into one measure.

Table 2 Least square regressions (dependent variable is PD)

⁷ Settler mortality is not considered since data is not available for 37 observations.