Why has democracy had so many problems in developing countries?
Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital suggests that capitalism (and by extension democracy) has a hard time existing without strong property rights.
I’d suggest reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman. It has been our government’s policy for many years (since the middle 1950’s) to keep third world nations in debt they cannot pay back. We do this by convincing them to take out loans to build infrastructure they can’t afford with “analysis” that shows their economy will grow enough to easily pay it back. It doesn’t, but they still have the debt. This makes them essentially indentured servants. We can then take their resources for very little money, and force them to vote as we wish in the UN. We talk them into these bad deals by making a few people at the top very, very rich, and making everyone else in the country very, very poor. Note that Asia is developing quite nicely now; Korea and Taiwan are real powerhouses. A country absolutely can bootstrap itself from poverty, but it’s very hard with a millstone of deliberately-induced debt. As others are saying, low corruption, strong property rights, strong contract law, and a good jus
Transition to a democracy requires that those who hold power give some of it up. They must therefore be more committed to the idea of democracy than to the idea of holding onto their power. Such leaders are extremely rare — well-meaning people usually don’t make it to the top in situations where might makes right — and those ruthless individuals already on top generally don’t have changes of heart. The only other possibility, I think, is economic. Wealth is a form of power, and as open trade permits wealth to become less concentrated in the hands of a supreme leader or a few wealthy feudal lords, democracy stands a chance. And, really, it probably can’t happen in a sustainable way without both conditions being present at once. But I think it’s worth pointing out that even fascism can be “democratic.” Sometimes, I think, the vast majority of people really do want all political power consolidated into a single governing entity. Seems to me such a model usually goes hand-in-hand with tr
