ABSTRACT
The scholarly attention devoted to the relationship between economic development and democracy was initially motivated by the search for the ‘preconditions’ (Karl 1990: 2–3) or ‘requirements’ (Landman 2001) of democracy. Focusing on both the ‘old’ democracies in the northwest triangle of Europe and North America and the ‘new’ democracies in the rest of the world, this research seeks to identify the key factors that help explain both the emergence and maintenance of democracy. Among the many factors that have been identified to account for democracy, the level of economic development continues to intrigue comparativists. This chapter compares the key efforts that examine this link between economic development and democracy to demonstrate whether or not different methods lead to the same result. It examines studies that compare many countries, those that compare few countries, and single-country studies. The discussion of each method of comparison focuses on how different theories specify the dependent and independent variables and nature of the relationship, how the analyses measure the concepts, the different problems that the analyses encounter, and the different results they obtain.
