Income and democracy: revisiting the evidence

It is well-known in the literature that income per capita is strongly correlated with the level of democracy across countries. In an infl uential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) fi nd that this linear correlation disappears once they control for country-specifi c effects focusing on within-country variation. In this paper we fi nd evidence of a non-linear effect from income to democracy even after controlling for country-specifi c effects. While a positive effect emerges for poor countries, this effect vanishes for rich countries.