287— The Question for the Modernization Theory

In general, democratic countries have higher economic growth than non-democratic countries. The primary reason for this theory is that democracy and capitalism are mostly the two sides of the same coin. Thus, democratic countries can promote economic growth easier than authoritarian regimes. Most developed countries adopt to democracy while there are a lot of developing countries which do not have democratic political institution and adopt authoritarian regimes. For example, most countries in Middle East do not adopt democracy and overall GDP is not as high as developed countries like the US and European countries. However, some Middle Eastern countries that have rich oil resources are relatively rich compared to other developing countries adopting democracy. In addition, the recent economic development of China should not be overlooked. Although China does not adopt to democracy, GDP of China is the second largest in the world following the US. This is because China started adopting capitalism while maintaining authoritarian political institution. Therefore, just being a democratic state does not seem to directly lead to the high economic growth. Based on questions above, I would like to measure how democracy influences economic well-being, considering other variables that should be controlled. I used statistics indicating the relation between democracy and GDP per capita from IBM SPSS Statistics