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Brown Journal of World Affairs: What do you think is the role of economic growth in democratization? Do you think economic growth promotes democracy, democracy promotes economic growth, or some mixture thereof?
Larry Diamond: Take the first side of the relationship: economic growth that is sustained and broadly distributed, over time, does promote greater prospects for the emergence and maintenance of democracy. But there is no guarantee of this, particularly in the short run. The key is the long run—we know that the chances of sustaining democracy increase with economic development. By economic development, I mean the improvement of levels of well-being; education; quality of life; and per capita income, not just aggregate economic growth. If development continues at anything like the pace of the last 20 years in China, its prospects for democracy will be significantly increased—the same applies to Vietnam and to other countries. This does not mean that poor countries cannot be democracies. One of the striking features in the last 20 years is the number of low-income countries that have become electoral democracies. About two in every five states that have a low level of human development—either at the bottom of the distribution or the bottom third of all the countries that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) rates in human development—are electoral democracies today.
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