The Dynamics of Democracy, Development and Cultural Values

Abstract

Over the past decades many countries have experienced rapid changes in their economies, their democratic institutions and the values of their citizens. Comprehensive data measuring these changes across very different countries has recently become openly available. Between country similarities suggest common underlying dynamics in how countries develop in terms of economy, democracy and cultural values. We apply a novel Bayesian dynamical systems approach to identify the model which best captures the complex, mainly non-linear dynamics that underlie these changes. We show that the level of Human Development Index (HDI) in a country drives first democracy and then higher emancipation of citizens. This change occurs once the countries pass a certain threshold in HDI. The data also suggests that there is a limit to the growth of wealth, set by higher emancipation. Having reached a high level of democracy and emancipation, societies tend towards equilibrium that does not support further economic growth. Our findings give strong empirical evidence against a popular political science theory, known as the Human Development Sequence. Contrary to this theory, we find that implementation of human-rights and democratisation precede increases in emancipative values.

Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?

“…This implies, that (1) and (2) describe the time evolution of quantities which are relative and not bare measures. The steady-state fixed point would evolve on the other side if D and V had been measured in absolute terms [17] and not, as done here, relatively. The renormalization of the steady state to (1, 1) does hence encompass the secular backdrop of declining democratic values [21].…”

“…The time t will be measured in years. We remain here on a relative abstract level, noting however that standard country-specific indicators [17,18] for both democracy and values may be taken as proxies for D and V . Alternatively one may consider the level of economic development, instead of the cultural dimension, as the basic variable interacting with the state of the democracy [19].…”

Ambiente Institucional E Responsabilidade Social Corporativa Na Cafeicultura Africana

“…Outros estudos identificaram a estrutura política dos países, notadamente a existência de democracia, entendida como um processo que garante a liberdade política aos cidadãos e assegura a divisão dos poderes, como fator causador de desenvolvimento (Spaiser et al 2014;Heo & Hahm, 2015;Neudorfer, 2015;Ranganathan et al, 2015;Shyam et al, 2015). Auer (2013) identificou o efeito da geografia e modo de colonização sobre as instituições econômicas.…”

Sequential Requisites Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Sequential Relationships in Ordinal Data

“…and time-series cross-section methods (Beck 2008). There also exists a more novel approach using Bayesian modelling to construe dynamic systems indicating flow of change Spaiser et al 2014). As mentioned before, we have also suggested a number of methods, graphical and analytical (Lindenfors et al 2015).…”