What factors determine the degree to which a country is democratic? This study in the European Journal of Political Economy uses a set of graphs and tables to present the pattern of democracy in the world, using the Gastil Index. A statistical analysis is then conducted. Regression techniques are used to analyse the effect on democracy of a number of variables. Poverty, Communism and the Muslim culture are revealed as the main barriers to democracy. Bayesian probability methods make explicit the concept of the ‘risk’ of countries being undemocratic. The analysis investigates whether the dynamics of the democratic deficit of the Muslim countries is stationary or transitory.
The Gastil Index, as used in the study, is the democracy index most often used by economists, notably in studies explaining growth. However, all results in the paper generalise to the Polity Index and to the Vanhanen Index. The statistical analysis uses two techniques. The first is standard regression analysis. The second is Bayesian probability theory, which focuses on the concept of an (absolute) democratic deficit for a country group, and of a (relative) democratic gap between country groups.
The main conclusions of the study can be summarised as follows:
- The study compared the main pattern in the data with the predictions from the literature concentrating on the link between income and democracy. It concluded that the results reported in the literature suggest that the causal link from democracy to the level of income is quite weak.
- The study also aimed to ‘explain’ the current level of democracy through five variables, namely the initial level of income, religion, oil, communism and democracy. It identified three main barriers to democracy: poverty, communism and Muslim culture.
- It was demonstrated that the effect of income was sufficiently large to explain the democratisation that has taken place. However, the collapse of communism in most of its former range can be explained as being due to pressures generated by rising incomes.
- It has been demonstrated that the concept of an (endogenous) democratic transition does not explain the main pattern in the data. The same results were reached in both a cross-country setting and a dynamic panel estimate. The later estimates showed that the level of democracy adjusted slowly to rising income.
- The study was to use the methods of Bayesian probability analysis to make explicit the concept of the ‘risk’ of countries being undemocratic. Here, the distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim countries was used to show that, by 2004, a country which was undemocratic was more than twice as likely to be Muslim than one which was highly or moderately democratic.
- Using a complementary concept of risk, it was shown that by 2004, even though only a third of the world’s countries were Muslim, the chance of an undemocratic country being Muslim was 85% of the chance of an undemocratic country being non-Muslim.
- The study also examined the dynamics of the gap between the level of democracy in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. It was found to be large, but not stationary. This gives the hope that it may start to fall, but now it appears to be widening.
