Inequality and Democratic Survival

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy endures in rich countries but is unstable in poor ones. Building on Ansell and Samuels (2014), we suggest that the sources of democratic stability lie not just with a country’s aggregate level of wealth, but also with its distribution. However, we conceive of inequality and its political impact differently from previous work, which has focused on the median voter’s demand for redistribution. In our democratic durability depends on contestation between competing economic elites, not between a unified elite and the relatively poor median voter. This leads to novel implications: Land inequality is associated with democratic collapse, but income inequality has no such effect. Empirical results support this “elite-competition” model of democratic survivability, providing novel insight: Countries that democratize with low or high income inequality are likely to remain democratic, to the extent that the landed elite is weak. Wealthier countries are less likely to break down but not solely because there is less pressure for redistribution, but because different patterns of land inequality tend to be associated with different levels of development. Paper presented for American Political Science Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA, 2nd-6th September, 2015. Preliminary work, please do not cite without authors’ permission. ∗Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions, Nuffield College, and Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Email: [email protected] †Distinguished McKnight Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota. Email: [email protected]