ABSTRACT
The central purpose of this study is to test the two research hypotheses formulated in Chapter 4 by empirical evidence and to see to what extent it is possible to explain the variation in the degree of democratization by the explanatory variables derived from the evolutionary resource distribution theory of democratization. The higher the explained part of variation, the more confidently it is possible to predict the prospects of democracy in single countries on the basis of explanatory variables. The study focuses on 170 contemporary countries (population 200,000 or higher) and on the situation in 1999-2001, but first I shall reanalyze the past relationship between the measures of democracy and explanatory variables over the period 18501998. Because the explanatory theory used in this study is assumed to be universal, it is plausible to expect that the relationship between the degree of democratizaton and the measures of resource distribution has remained more or less stable over time. The results of correlation analysis show how stable the relationship between variables has been. In the latter part of this chapter, some predictions made in previous studies will be reviewed in order to see to what extent they have been correct or wrong.
