Rudra and Haggard: Globalization, Democracy and Effective Welfare Spending in the Developing World

Rudra, N, and S Haggard. 2005. Globalization, democracy, and effective welfare spending in the developing world. Comparative Political Studies 38, no. 9: 1015.

"The results show that social spending in 'hard' authoritarian regimes is more sensitive to the pressures of globalization than in democratic or intermediate regimes" (1015; from abstract).

"Our findings cast substantial doubt on the hypothesis that globalization necessarily has an adverse effect on welfare spending in developing countries. We find that political institutions and the rules governing political competition matter. In the face of increasing trade openness, in particular, authoritarian regimes are less generous than democracies with respect to social spending and do worse with respect to several key social performance indicators. Also of significance, we find that under conditions of globalization, 'intermediate' authoritarian regimes show different social spending patterns than 'hard' authoritarian regimes and in some cases, behave more similar to democracies" (1017).

Rudra, N. 2008. Welfare states in developing countries: unique or universal? The Journal of Politics 69, no. 02: 378-396.

Rudra further promotes a distinction between three types of welfare states in LDCs: productive welfare (promote market development), protective welfare (protect select interest groups) and combinations of the above.

Ross: Does Oil Hinder Democracy?

Ross, M., 2001. Does Oil Hinder Democracy? World Politics, 53(3), 325-361.

As per the title of the article, Ross wonders whether or not reserves of natural resources, specifically oil, would act as an impediment to the democratic process. He explores this quantitatively. He asks three specific questions: is this phenomena real? How does this claim work along two axes: geographic and sectoral? And finally, what is the causal mechanism? For the last question, he tests three independent variables: the rentier effect, the repression effect and the modernization effect.


Ross tests this using the Regime variable from polity data as a dependent variable. The independent variables are both oil and mineral stores. Ross then controls for income, Islam, the OECD, the dependent variable lagged 5 years and incorporates a variety of dummy variables.

“These tests support both the validity and the generality of the oil-impedes-democracy claim. They suggest the following: that a state’s reliance on either oil or mineral exports tends to make it less democratic; that this effect Is not caused by other types of primary exports; that this is not limited to the Arabian Peninsula, to the middle east, or to sub-Saharan Africa, and that it is not limited to small states. These findings are generally consistent with the theory of the rentier state” (346).

Ross then tests the hypothesis that the rentier state is the deeper driver of the oil-impedes democracy thesis.

There are four items that Ross claims to have found in this article: oil does impede democracy. This effect is not limited to the Middle East. Additionally, mineral gluts also have the effect of slowing democracy. Finally, Ross finds some support for each of the three possible causal drivers: rentier effects, repression and modernization.

Barber: Jihad v McWorld

Barber, B., Jihad v McWorld. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199203/barber?ca=9B5pyrSUsZedqmnhhRKhf/BSnLWQXUfactosEkJZ21E%3D.

*Note: pagination from a word document

“Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment” (1).

McWorld contains four imperatives: the market imperative, the resource imperative, the information-technology imperative and the ecological imperative. Each has a bearing on the changing nature of globalization.

Jihad is the other global power at work, and it represents a return to identity politics as can be seen in the myriad splinter-groups and break-away regions seeking independence.

Neither of these forces provides much room for democracy, as one is a totalizing and homogenizing power sweeping the world and the other is an authoritative, exclusive power rooted in identity politics.

Huntington: The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century

Huntington, S., 1993. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, University of Oklahoma Press.

Ch. 1: What?

“The transitions to democracy between 1974 and 1990 are the subject of this book” (5).

Huntington posits that the third wave of democratization began with the military take-over of the Portuguese Caetano dictatorship in 1974.

First off, Huntington must explain what he means by democracy, as many studies of, say, democratic peace suffer from an ambiguous or overly rigid metric. “Serious problems of ambiguity and imprecision arise when democracy is defined in terms of either source or authority or purposes, and a procedural definition is used in this study” (6). The core of democracies is the fact that leaders are selected not through means of heredity or power, but rather through competitive elections of the subjects who are to be ruled over. This procedural definition is not, however a panacea. There are many problems with its operationalization, though these may be less acute than other democracy definitions (such as those that rely on concepts of will, for example). The “minimal” definition of democracy used by Huntington is also not useful when exploring political stability or competence.

“A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period of time. A wave also usually involves liberalization or partial democratization of political systems that do not become fully democratic. Three waves of democratization have occurred in the modern world” (15).

The first wave of democratization described by Huntington occurred in the 1800s and lasted until the end of the first world war. This is described as a “long wave”. The reasons for this wave were increased voter participation, a decrease in restrictions to the ballot box and a general trend against monarchic rule. This wave was halted during the rise of the second World War, which saw a general rise in fascism and communism. The second wave of democratization occurred directly after the end of WWII. This represented a marked rise in democracies that were previously fascist during the war. Eastern European countries, however, remained clearly authoritarian. There were signs of democratic growth in Latin America. This all turned around in the “second reverse wave” which, according to Huntington, lasted from 1958-75. There was a increase in authoritarianism and military coups through Latin America and Africa. However, Huntington sees this as being turned around, as noted at the beginning of this abstract, with the overthrow of the Portuguese government in 1974. This brought about a third long-wave of democratization that involved anti-colonial democratic and anti-authoritarian democratic movements throughout the world, eventually bridging with the fall of the USSR and the increased democratization of many of the former Eastern Bloc states.

Milner and Kubota: Why the Move to Free Trade?

Milner, HV, and K Kubota. 2005. Why the Move to Free Trade? Democracy and Trade Policy in the Developing Countries. International Organization 59, no. 01: 107-143.  

This article traces two global trends that emerged out of the 1970’s and attempts to casually link them using statistical methods. The first trend that is highlighted is the increase in democracy. The second trend that she highlights is the global reduction in tariffs. Her dependent variable is the later, and independent the former.

She initially looks at alternative explanations for changing economic policies. Some focus on economic crises. Others talk about external, ideational pressure emanating from hegemonic forces. Finally, and oddly multicolliniar with her second example, some examine the rise of neoliberal policies as being a force that contributes to decreases in tariffs. She rejects these as being sufficient to explain the global decrease in trade tariffs. For her, this change is accounted for by the increase in global democracy.

Firstly, she makes a causal claim about her variables and tries to construct a qualitative argument for why they are connected. She claims that democracies are better than autocracies at freeing governance from selective interest groups (113). She also claims that the “selectorate”, the group of people that legitimize and support the rule of a politician, changes sufficiently in a democracy. The selectorate in a democracy will be interested in more free trade because this will benefit the whole population. In an autocratic regime, the selectorate will be a small interest group and they will be more interested in promoting protectionist measures (115-7).

“Democratization will thus enfranchise a new group of voters with preferences for lower levels of protectionism” (116).

“In sum, in developing countries where autocratic governments depend on support from a small selectorate and thus are not responsive to the overall population, the governments can employ extensive protectionism. Democratization, however, may break down the old coalition supporting protectionism, and can thus lead to change in the status quo” (117).

She goes on to deploy a (relatively) large-n study of 179 countries, Polity IV democracy numbers and relatively weak tariff numbers (by her own omission – p. 122). She finds, through OLS analysis, that there is a correlation between levels of democratization and decreased tariffs. This, she concludes, links up with her qualitative account of how democracy causes reductions in tariffs.

A critique of this paper could go something like this: the causation that she highlights is not very strong, though it clearly does exist. However, this weak causation does not at all mean that her qualitative story is legitimate. The drivers of the linkage between democracy and reduced tariffs could be one of many things, and this research project does little to promote a humble approach to understanding why a slight quantitative correlation may be present.

It is really interesting that there is some correlation between her independent and dependent variables. However, her case is weakly made and her qualitative story is full of holes.