Political Reform

It was predicted that economic liberalization is the first step towards political reform and hence to democratization. The fact that all the rich countries in the world are somehow democratic is to be taken as evidence to the validity of this predicament. The process works as follows: economic growth leads to urbanization and improvements in technology and infrastructure. These improvements facilitate communication and recruitment by new political groups. Growth also tends to lead to increased investment in education, which benefits the opposition by producing intellectual and sophisticated individuals from which it can recruit supporters. To remain secure, autocrats must raise the costs of political coordination among the opposition without also raising the costs of economic coordination too dramatically; since this could hinder economic growth and threaten the stability of the regime itself. The question is how autocrats managed to weaken the link between economic development and the path to political reform.

Oppressive regimes have discovered that they can suppress opposition activity without totally undermining economic growth by carefully rationing a particular subset to public goods, goods that are critical to political coordination but less important to economic cooperation. By restricting these goods, autocrats have insulated themselves from the political liberalization that economic growth promotes. Some of these restrictions could be internet-related activities, banning books on certain issues, altering facts in history curriculum books in schools and controlling the media coverage.

Historically, oppressive governments, seeking to banish those pushing for democratic change, have suppressed the provision of public goods, undermining their economies in the process. This was the dominant pattern in Asia and Africa until the 1980s, and it remains the case in many of the developing states in these two continents. Recently however, governments have