The Effect of Income on Democracy Revisited A Flexible Distributional Approach

We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democ- racy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (Am Econ Rev 98(3):808–842, 2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero–one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et al. ( 2008), some support for a positive association between income and democracy is found when assuming that the variance of explanatory variables is heterogenous. In particular, our results show that rising income is associated with a probability of becoming fully democratic, but income is not generally associated with the mean level of democrac