The Agricultural Roots of Autocracy and Democracy

This paper hypothesizes that inherent agricultural land productivity explains contemporary levels of autocracy and democracy. In particular, intermediate levels of productivity are associated with democracy, whereas a legacy of either low or high agricultural productivity is associated with autocracy. Our cross-country empirical results using data from up to 148 countries support this notion. The finding of an inverted U-shaped relationship holds up to a battery of robustness tests, and are supported by sub- national data from the US and India. Moreover, the persistence of the association is documented by utilizing data from pre-colonial societies