"A crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats"--

In this paper we revisit the central finding in Comparative politics that the greater the per-capita income of a country, the more likely it is to be democratic. We argue that the existing empirical literature fails to treat seriously the fact that income and democracy are jointly determined in...