Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990

by José Antonio Cheibub, Michael E. Alvarez, Adam Przeworski

Book Overview

Is economic development conducive to political democracy? Does democracy foster or hinder material welfare? These two questions are examined by looking at the experience of 135 countries between 1950 and 1990. Descriptive information, statistical analyses, and historical narratives are interwoven to gain an understanding of the dynamic of political regimes and their impact on economic development and other aspects of material welfare. The findings,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521793793
• ISBN13: 9780521793797
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Sophisticated and brilliant

It's a marvellous book. I took a course last year with Limongi about the book and it was great. The main feature I like in the book is the sophisticated discussion about selection bias in comparative politicas and how to avoid it. In fact the methodological discussions in it are fundamental to all schollars reaserching in comparative politics. However, I think that some improvement could be made to the book in some statistical techniques used, and also in the reproducibility of the reasearch. Nowadays I would love to hace access to the code used to run regressions (altough I suspect they did it in SPSS), just to name one improvement possible on reproducibility. Besides, I think they should explicitly had treated some time correlation problem in their data. Despite that, It is a great book and fundamental in any reasearch in comparative politics.

Monumental Work!!!

Too many conjectures and too many theories have been addressed concerning the relationship between polities and material well-being in the world. But they have been raised without a proper test of them, without empirics. This book completely cleans all kinds of intellectual garbages, clarifies the existing arguments, and above all provides a series of the sohpisticated tests. Adam Przeworski and his comrades did a marvelous job.