SCR Sponsored Lecture: Income and Democracy: Short-Run Disengagement, Long-Run Democratization

6PM Senate Suite at Castle 

 Abstract: The literature on democratization has emphasized deep, time-invariant determinants, including colonial origin, legal tradition, religion, and kinship structures, as key drivers of democracy. In this presentation I argue that their importance does not automatically cancel the role of income in shaping political freedoms. Using a panel through 2020, we show that income retains a significant non-monotonic relationship with democracy across specifications incorporating colonial origin, quality of colonization, legal origin, religious composition, and kinship structures. A panel estimation using UK household data (Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey, 1991–2024) with individual fixed effects shows that rising wages reduce civic participation, an effect that fades at the top of the wage distribution. This suggests that improving economic conditions raise the opportunity cost of political engagement and induce citizens to disengage from politics, which at middle ranges of income results in an ultimate weakening of democratic scores. For wealthy households, the mechanism fades away, plausibly because citizens increasingly value increments in political freedom and stop substituting away activism for income-generating activities. Our macro-level estimations are consistent with these micro-findings from a short-run perspective (the decline builds up over about 25 years before fading). Yet across countries, income does positively correlate with democracy in the long run, hence implying that either income creates the required institutional setup to improve democratic rights, or else that in the long run the “critical junctures” view is true: institutions explain both income and democratic levels. 

Speaker 

Petros Sekeris, Associate Professor  at Toulouse Business School