The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science by Harold Kincaid;Jeroen Van Bouwel;

Author:Harold Kincaid;Jeroen Van Bouwel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Table 14.3 Inequality and democratization: absolute test

Low inequality

X = 0 Medium inequality

X = 1 High inequality

X = 2

Democratization 19 21 29

No Democratization 34 41 29

Absolute test .35 .34 .50

Total 53 62 58

Source: Haggard and Kaufman 2016, inequality data Solt 2020

The absolute hypotheses would be that if there is medium-levels of inequality then there is democratization through the mechanism of mass mobilization. The relative hypotheses would be that they are more likely to occur in moderately unequal authoritarian regimes and via the mechanism of mass mobilization, ceteris paribus. Note that “relative” means relative to other paths to the outcome, and thus implicitly raises the issue of equifinality or other paths to the outcome.

Table 14.3 gives the same basic analysis as Table 14.2 above for the hegemony and balancing hypothesis. Now can begin to consider a stipulated causal mechanism. If a country is democratic for the entire inequality period, it is deleted; we are only considering the population of authoritarian regimes, seeing the conditions under which they might transition. We use the terciles of the inequality data for all authoritarian governments to constitute the inequality categories. Given that inequality changes quite slowly we have treated each country as one observation; we consider each of the three inequality categories as a “treatment.” If a country never changes inequality category and never has a transition, it counts as one observation of Y = 0. If there is a transition, then that constitutes a positive value on Y for the whole inequality period. If a country’s level of inequality changes to another category (tercile), however, that constitutes a new treatment. It is thus possible that a given country constitutes one observation if its inequality category does not change or potentially three or four observations if it changes inequality categories. Thus the number of years per observation, i.e., country-inequality category, can vary significantly depending on how long the country stays within a given inequality category. However, the number of years in each inequality category overall is based on equal treatment: because we use the terciles of authoritarian regime years, the basic categories have basically the same number of years.

The X = 1 column focuses on the core Acemoglu and Robinson inequality hypothesis in its absolute form. The X = 0 as well as the X = 2 columns present the incidence of transitions which do not occur at intermediate levels of inequality. As with the hegemony example above the key thing is the percentage of democratizing cases in the X = 1 column. The medium inequality column does not pass the absolute test, with the proportion of cases being about one-third. For the relative test the statistic for the table is not significant either indicating that the proportions for the other columns are not radically different. It is higher for the high inequality category, but there is no difference between the low inequality category and the medium at all.

The game theory model in the book might be read to make an absolute claim regarding the high and low inequality columns: there should be no transitions in these situations.

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