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 …

This prediction was not specific to China. Until quite recently, conventional wisdom has held
that economic development, wherever it occurs, will lead inevitably-and fairly quickly-to …

I. Introduction IF a dictatorship transitions to a democracy today, in the years that follow, will
its economy perform better or worse than that which would have occurred had it not …

Early in the post-World War II era, a majority of countries in East and Southeast Asia had
democratic political systems. Over time, however, many of these were supplanted by …

The collapse of communism is but one part of the much broader movement toward
democracy and free enterprise of the late twentieth century. Yet there is little understanding …

For Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics, it was clear:" The most
important thing that has happened in the 20th century is democracy." Yet today, for many …

Since the overthrow of Portugal's dictatorial regime in April 1974, the number of
democracies in the world has multiplied dramatically. Before the start of this global trend …

When Guillermo O'Donnell and I were writing Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative
Conclusion about Uncertain Democracies a quarter of a century ago, we had few cases and …

What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? The main question is whether the
observed close relation between levels of economic development and the incidence of …

Democracy (as Winston Churchill famously noted) is the worst form of government ever
devised—except for all the others. To many twenty-first-century readers this proposition may …