Is Economic Development a Prerequisite of a Functioning Democratic System?
Is Economic Development a Prerequisite of a Functioning Democratic System?
In the world of political science, it is an inherent feature of the discipline that academics will seek a universally applicable theory to explain phenomena that occur within the political sphere. Seymour Martin Lipset did just that in his article Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy, published in the American Political Science Review in 1959. In this, he made the claim that forms of behaviour in social groups have certain specific outcomes, which can be measured and tested by empirical means, and then generalised from to create a hypothesis. From this he derives that in a democratic state “one must be able to point to a set of conditions that have already existed” before the state became democratic that differentiated it from states that did not go down the path of democracy.1 According to Lipset, from this one can then deduce that those conditions led to the rise of democracy within those nations. Specifically, he applied this to examine the relationship between economic development and democratisation – as well as the long-term endurance of democratic regimes. By studying numerous occurrences of this instance, and the associated statistical data, he concluded that the former was necessary for the latter to occur. This essay seeks to challenge this theory and the assumptions and analyses on which it is based. It will firstly look at whether a correlation between economic development and democratic change or survival exists or whether or not real-world politics is simply too inconsistent and unpredictable to fit this kind of broad, homogeneity-seeking model, secondly at whether or not this correlation, if there is one, follows the cause-effect paradigm laid down by Lipset, thirdly, what the tools used for providing the empirical data used by this theory are and whether or not they impart problems within the process, and then finally whether
In the world of political science, it is an inherent feature of the discipline that academics will seek a universally applicable theory to explain phenomena that occur within the political sphere. Seymour Martin Lipset did just that in his article Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy, published in the American Political Science Review in 1959. In this, he made the claim that forms of behaviour in social groups have certain specific outcomes, which can be measured and tested by empirical means, and then generalised from to create a hypothesis. From this he derives that in a democratic state “one must be able to point to a set of conditions that have already existed” before the state became democratic that differentiated it from states that did not go down the path of democracy.1 According to Lipset, from this one can then deduce that those conditions led to the rise of democracy within those nations. Specifically, he applied this to examine the relationship between economic development and democratisation – as well as the long-term endurance of democratic regimes. By studying numerous occurrences of this instance, and the associated statistical data, he concluded that the former was necessary for the latter to occur. This essay seeks to challenge this theory and the assumptions and analyses on which it is based. It will firstly look at whether a correlation between economic development and democratic change or survival exists or whether or not real-world politics is simply too inconsistent and unpredictable to fit this kind of broad, homogeneity-seeking model, secondly at whether or not this correlation, if there is one, follows the cause-effect paradigm laid down by Lipset, thirdly, what the tools used for providing the empirical data used by this theory are and whether or not they impart problems within the process, and then finally whether