Pricing
International Relations
No TL;DR found
Abstract
The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his as-sociates, that development causes democracy to last but not to come into existence in the first place. By dealing adequately with problems of sample selection and model specification, the authors discover that economic growth does cause nondemocracies to democratize. They show that the effect of economic development on the probability of a transition to democracy in the hun-dred years between the mid-nineteenth century and World War II was substantial, indeed, even stronger than its effect on democratic stability. They also show that, in more recent decades, some countries that developed but remained dictatorships would, because of their development, be expected to democratize in as few as three years after achieving a per capita income of $12,000 per capita. This article examines a general proposition about democratic legislatures—that their agenda will be cartelized by any majority government—in the context of a case study of the Brazilian Camara dos Deputados (Chamber of Deputies). The main question is to identify when consis- tent agenda control by a single majority coalition, as opposed to agenda control by shifting ma-jorities, has emerged in the post-1988 Camara. Consistent agenda control emerges routinely in parliamentary regimes: the government commands' a majority in the assembly; the legislative