Income and democracy: the modernization hypothesis re-visited via alternative non-linear models

This paper introduces a new approach to examine the relationship between income and democracy by employing panel count data models to explicitly allow for the fact that the primary indices of democracy are non-negative integers with upper bounds. We find evidence that though income and democracy are positively related the magnitude of the coefficient is extremely small implying that there is no evidence of a causal effect, and thus there is no support for the modernization hypothesis. Moreover, once we control for income endogeneity, the relationship between income and democracy turns to be insignificant or even negative. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015