The democratic transition

By F. Murtin, Romain Wacziarg. Journal of economic growth (Boston), 2013

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with rising levels of democracy. We find that primary schooling, and to a weaker extent per capita income levels, are strong determinants of the quality of political institutions. We find little evidence of causality running the other way, from democracy to income or education.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba686ded5e0d44b126a5f8a8d0ede6f14ad08442

Citations in the corpus

• Long-Term Determinants of the Demographic Transition, 1870–2000 (2013, unknown): “Murtin and Wacziarg (2011) find that the diffusion of literacy is largely explained by economic growth.”
• The Kuznets curve of human capital inequality: 1870–2010 (2012, unknown): “Indeed, education stands as a key factor of production that determines individual workers’ productivity, drives the pace of technological progress [1] and triggers key externalities such as the demographic transition [23] or democratization [24].”