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Title: Democracy and Development : Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge Studies in the Theory of Democracy) by Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi ISBN: 0-521-79379-3 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting Work
Comment: I had a love/hate relationship with this book. First, and this is purely a stylistic point, I believe it could have been far better edited. It was an avalanche of statistics, statistical analyses, and presented results without a lot of discussion of why relationships emerged. Their first goal -- showing development does not "cause" democratization is, I believe, a revamp of earlier published work. It is, nonetheless, an important finding that is worth repeating.
More interesting is the relationship between dictatorships and demography, but, again, aside from a little theorizing and a few statistical tests I believe the authors do little to shed much light on why different regimes affect demography differently. They begin to flesh out an argument the crux of which revolves around the ability of democratic polities to "commit" to providing social welfare over the long run, but this seems to run counter to their initial dismissal earlier in the book of the Neo-Institutional economics claim put forth by Douglass North, among others, as to the importance of institutions in "binding the hands of the sovereign."
Finally, their results do show that democracies tend to survive in wealthy states, in essence becoming "unkillable" after a certain level of wealth is reached. They do little to really explain why this is, but the result gives credence to Lipset's thesis that devolpment, at the very least, helps sustain democracies.
Overall I liked to book and would reccommend it as an assigned book in a comparative politics/political economy class.
Rating: 5
Summary: Monumental Work!!!
Comment: 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.
Rating: 2
Summary: A Major Book With Only a Minor Contribution
Comment: This will clearly be a major book within political science and political economy. Unfortunately, the book's prominence will be due more to the preeminence of the lead author, Adam Przeworski, than to the scholarly contribution of the work. The bulk of the book is a series of statistical analyses that probe the effects of regime type (democracy or dictatorship) on a series of dependent variables. While the book is competent and this is an interesting topic, it is also a topic which has been studied in depth in the existing literature. In fact, dozens of journal articles over the last five years address the questions that drive this book, and many of those articles make use of better data and are methodologically more sophisticated than "Democracy and Development." If this book has a genuine professional contribution to make, it will probably consist in drawing more attention to other people's better, more innovative work on the same subjects.
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