The Impact of Economic Development on Democracy
跨国统计研究发现经济发展与民主之间存在稳健关联，本文通过比较历史研究证实因果关系，认为资本主义发展通过改变阶级结构、壮大中产阶级和工人阶级并削弱地主阶级来促进民主。
Any account of the social and economic conditions of democracy must come to terms with the central finding of the cross-national statistical research: a sturdy (though not perfect) association between economic development and democracy. To tackle these questions of causation, we adopted a strategy of analytic induction based on comparative historical research. Our program of comparative historical research confirmed the conclusion of the cross-national statistical analyses of the correlates of political democracy: the level of economic development is causally related to the development of political democracy. However, the underlying reason for the connection, in our view, is that capitalist development transforms the class structure, enlarging the working and middle classes and facilitating their self-organization, thus making it more difficult for elites to exclude them politically. Simultaneously, development weakens the landed upper class, democracy's most consistent opponent.