Democracy in Hard Places by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Puzzle of Timor-Leste

Nancy Bermeo

When Timor-Leste voted for independence in 1999, the deck seemed stacked against successful democracy.* The nation had a miniscule middle class, over 40 percent of the population lived on less than 55 cents per day (UNDP 2002), fewer than 50 percent were literate (Millo and Barnett 2004), and life expectancy was only forty-eight years (Karatnycky 2002). Only seventeen countries on the planet had worse human development indicators (Harris and Goldsmith 2011). When it held its first national elections in 2002, Timor-Leste’s GDP per capita was distressingly distant from the average for other nominally consolidated democracies. Figure 6.1 illustrates this using a seventeen-year threshold for consolidation (Svolik 2015, 717). Seen in the light of the vast literature linking democracy’s longevity to economic development, Timor-Leste was the quintessential outlier.

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