The Effect of Development on Democracy: A Critical Review on Recent Theories

In recent years many scholars have discussed the impact of development on democracy. In this article, by using a comparative study approach, we review the literature of the effect of development on democracy. We also, focus on recent debates, provided by Acemoglu (2001-2009) and his colleagues and Ingelhare and Welzel (2001-2009) who have offered two opposite views regarding the matter. Our aim is to compare the effective democracy with electoral democracy. While electoral democracy includes just the elections, Effective democracy includes genuine autonomous choice and the extent to which elites actually follow legal norms or elite integrity.This article shows that effective democracy will put an end to dispute about the effect of development on democracy and a minimum level of development is required for reaching to effective democracy. Therefore our findings theoretically reject Acemoglu and his colleagues’ view that development does not have any effect on democracy. Also, in this article it is shown that contrary to Ingelhare and Welzel’s theory there is not a linear relation between development and democracy and still many unsolved problems prevail.