Copyright © 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. World Politics 49.2 (1997) 155-183 Modernization: Theories and Facts Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi * Tables Introduction What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? Do democracies emerge as a consequence of economic development? Does rapid economic growth destabilize democracies? Is there some level of development beyond which democracies are more likely to fall? Is European history unique or is it repeating itself in contemporary less developed countries? Our purpose is to distinguish two theories that relate economic development and democracy and to examine some facts in light of these theories. While ultimately the interesting questions concern the mechanisms that mediate between economic development and the dynamics of political regimes, we must nevertheless identify the facts to be explained before plunging into explanations. Hence, we stick as close as possible to elementary descriptive patterns. We pose the question narrowly, examining exclusively the impact of development, rather than seeking broadly to explain the dynamic of political regimes. Hence, we deliberately ignore factors such as religion, colonial legacy, position in the world system, income distribution, or diffusion, which have been found by others to influence the incidence of democracy. We believe that our question is important in its own right, that it lends itself to divergent answers, and that it raises methodological issues that are not well understood. In Section I, we reconstruct two alternative views of the relation between development and democracy, both put forth by Lipset, 1 and we count the cases that fit them. In Section II we examine the vulnerability [End Page 155] of democracies to economic crises. In Section III we consider the most important substantive criticisms of Lipset's views, and in Section IV we study methodological criticisms. Methodological and political reflections close the paper. Appendix 1 explains our classification of regimes, while Appendix 2 spells out the analytics of regime dynamics. I. Economic Development and Democracy Lipset's observation that democracy is related to economic development, first advanced in 1959, has generated the largest body of research on any topic in comparative politics. It has been supported and contested, revised and extended, buried and resuscitated. And while several articles in the recent Festschrift to Lipset proclaim conclusions, neither the theory nor the facts are clear. 2 Even a glance at the aggregate patterns, such as Figure 1, shows that the relation between levels of development and the incidence of democratic regimes is strong. 3 Indeed, a probit analysis of regimes conditional only on the per capita income, to Access provided by University of California, San Diego Page 1 of 17Adam Przeworski and Fernando Papaterra Limongi Neto - Modernization: Theories and F...10/5/2006http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v049/49.2przeworski.htmlwhich we refer throughout as the level of development, correctly classifies 77 percent of 4,126 annual observations. 4 The probability that this classification is not generated by chance is greater than 0.99. Yet there are two distinct reasons this relation may hold: either democracies may be more likely to emerge as countries develop economically, or they may be established independently of economic development [End Page 156] but may be more likely to survive in developed countries. We call the first explanation "endogenous" and the second "exogenous." Since we are dealing with only two regimes, democracies emerge whenever dictatorships die. 5 Hence, to assert that democracies emerge as a result of economic development is the same as to say that dictatorships die as countries ruled by them become economically developed. Democracy is then secreted out of dictatorships by economic development. A story told about country after country is that as they develop, social structure becomes complex, labor processes begin to require the active cooperation of employees, and new groups emerge and organize. As a result, the system can no longer be effectively run by command: the society is too complex, technological change endows the direct producers with some autonomy and private information, civil society emerges, and dictatorial forms of control lose their effectiveness. Various groups, whether the bourgeoisie, workers, or just the amorphous "civil society," rise against the dictatorial regime, and it falls. The endogenous explanation is a "modernization" theory. The basic assumption of this theory, in any of its versions, is that there is one general [End Page 157]process of which democratization is but the final stage. Modernization consists of a gradual differentiation and specialization of social structures that culminates in a separation of political structures from other structures and makes democracy possible. The specific causal chains consist of sequences of industrialization, urbanization, education, communication, mobilization, and political incorporation, among innumerable others: a progressive accumulation of social changes that ready a society to proceed to its culmination, democratization. Modernization may be one reason the incidence of democracy is related to economic development, and this is the reading most commentators impute to Lipset. 6 His most influential critic, O'Donnell, paraphrases Lipset's thesis as saying that "if other countries become as rich as the economically advanced nations, it is highly probable that they will become political democracies." 7 Democracy, then, is endogenous, since it results from development under authoritarianism. According to this theory, the sequence of events one would expect is one of poor authoritarian countries developing and becoming democratic once they reach some level of development, a "threshold." Yet suppose that dictatorships are equally likely to die and democracies to emerge at any level of development. They may die for so many different reasons that development, with all its modernizing consequences, plays no privileged role. After all, as Therborn emphasized, many European countries democratized because of wars, not because of "modernization," a story repeated by the Argentine defeat in the Malvinas and elsewhere. 8 Some dictatorships fell in the aftermath of the death of a founding dictator--a Franco, for instance--who had been