Suchergebnisse

We revisit and critically reevaluate the widely accepted modernization hypothesis which claims that per capita income causes the creation and the consolidation of democracy. Existing studies find support for this hypothesis because they fail to control for the presence of omitted variables. Controlling for these factors either by including country fixed effects in a linear model or by including parameterized random effects in a nonlinear double hazard model removes the correlation between income and the likelihood of transitions to and from democratic regimes. In addition, the estimated fixed effects from the linear model are related to historical factors that affect both the level of income per capita and the likelihood of democracy in a country. This evidence is consistent with the idea that events during critical historical junctures can lead to divergent political–economic development paths, some leading to prosperity and democracy, others to relative poverty and non-democracy.

In Europe, people from post-Soviet countries tend to hold more negative attitudes toward immigration than people from Western societies. This pattern is also evident in the former East and West Germany. In line with the modernization hypothesis, previous research shows that worldviews have become more liberal across generations in Western societies over the last century. This study examines whether such processes of liberalization have taken place at a different pace in Western societies and in post-Soviet societies. To this end, I assess whether changes in attitudes toward immigration across birth cohorts differ between residents of post-Soviet countries and inhabitants of other types of welfare states. Using data from the European Social Survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, and the German General Social Survey, this study shows that the pattern of later-born cohorts holding more liberal attitudes toward immigration is less pronounced in post-Soviet states than in other types of welfare states. These findings have implications for research on attitude change over time and the long-term persistence of communist practices, behaviors, values, and norms.

The Innovation Pause Hypothesis is developed in the article. According to this hypothesis, the current crisis can be explained by the exhaustion of possibilities of existing general purpose technologies and by the delay of new ones in combination with overoptimistic expectations due to a long period of rapid economic expansion. If this hypothesis is correct, then it is quite plausible that a significant period of time will be required before fast growth is restored in Western economies. Russia gets an additional chance to decrease the gap between Russian and Western economic productivity provided that an efficient mechanism of technology borrowing is created. An appropriate strategy must include a set of measures aimed at: increasing the countrys adaptive capacity; designing an interactive planning system in order to develop large-scale modernization projects; increasing the capital accumulation rate by stimulating savings and improving the credit system.