Accounting for Variation in Income Inequality and Democracy across Levels of Development.

This paper uniquely builds on previous research on cross-national democracy and income inequality. The refinement of multivariate cross-sectional time-series models that explain variation in both democracy and income distribution has proceeded to the point of incorporating variables that represent cross-national economic structure. These variables include ordinal scales of economic openness as published by the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation and interval-level measures of governmental economic activity such as public sector size. However, given issues regarding the limited time frame and reliability and validity of the economic openness variables, and the limited country coverage of public sector spending variables, one can question the applicability of the findings of these models to a broad swath of developing countries over a lengthy time period. Developing countries tend to be less well-represented in these cross-national models. Yet the most interesting over-time variation on income distribution, democracy, and openness is in the developing world. I propose to make the case for proxying economic openness and governmental economic activity through a measure of economic development such as GDP per capita or energy consumption per capita. This will considerably broaden the developing country coverage and time frame of the study. Additionally, transitions toward capitalist development in developing countries can be more fully examined. I will use Heckman selection models of economic development to test whether or not the democracy-income inequality relationship changes across development levels. The resulting paper will be a unique advance on better accounting for cross-country, cross-development variation in income inequality, democracy, and capitalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]