Человеческое развитие и “взрыв” демократии: вариации изменений режимов среди 60 обществ

Abstract

Recently, scholars have been identifying a global “explosion” of democracy as a sharply distinctive period within Huntington’s Third Wave of democratization. So far the role of modernization has not been analyzed with particular regard to this out standing phase of democratization. Given that modernization has both economic and cultural aspects, we test two prominent theses. First, we test Przeworski and Limongi’s claim that transition to democracy does not derive from economic modernization. Using a graded measure of regime change, we present evidence to the contrary. Second, we test Inglehart’s finding that modern mass attitudes play a negligible role in promoting regime change to democracy. To the contrary again, we show that one aspect of cultural modernization, namely mass-level liberty aspirations has a positive impact on democratic change – even stronger than economic modernization. Third, we unfold the concept of Human Development to establish a more general argument of the causal mechanism in the modernization-democratization nexus. Our data cover 60 societies of the World Values Surveys, representing nearly 50 per cent of all regime changes in the world since 1972.