Russian electoral type event: 2011 (Duma)

[scoopa]

Alright, folks, it's time for a shock videos.

And you still talk about Democracy and free elections in Russia, folks?

Which Democracy??? Which "free elections" May be 10-20 years from now. We are approximately on equal level with South Korea of 1980th (with evolving economy under harsh military regime). If i remember correctly - South Korean military leaders finally went on trial and got harsh sentences after country finally became democratic. My only hope is we will have the same in Russia finally)))

Yeah, trying to implement democracies - or, more precisely, liberal constitutional regimes (in the classic sense, separation of powers, freedom of speech and press, etc.); democracies de per si aren't that important - in economically underdeveloped countries has very high failure rates. Unless they have a strong tradition of constitutionalism and capitalism. But generally countries have to become somewhat wealthy and have a solid middle-class and some tradition of private business entrepreneurship before becoming an irreversible democracy. There's a very interesting study about this from Przervowski and Limogi. They concluded GDP per capita has a very high correlation with the success rate of new constitutional democracies. One handicap for Russia is that countries which wealth creation is dependent on natural resources tend to do worse.

[scoopa]

Bull. Look at India.

But India is an outlier explained by the strong tradition of constitutionalism that I mentioned And the agrarian reform is very important: it created a strong class of landowners, private entrepeneurs. It's no coincidence that the democracy in India - which is very far from perfect - is more dysfunctional in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where land reform failed.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/world_politics/v049/49.2przeworski.html

Looking at the empirical evidence, democracies are way more likely to survive in affluent countries.

From that paper:

- the life expectancy of democracies in countries with the a GPD per capita (ppp adj. to 2000) below $1,500 is 8 years.
- if it's between $1,500 and and $3,000, it's 18 years.
- a GDP above $6,000 makes the democratic regime pretty much untouchable and a democracies with a GPD per capita above $9,000 never died - not a single one of them. However, out of the 69 poorest democratic regimes, 39 died within 10 years.

There's an excellent and seminal work on this issue, authored by the late Seymour Martin Lipset, "Some Social. Requisites of Democracy". It was written more than 50 years ago but it remains actual.

 http://www.jstor.org/pss/1951731