A number of recent empirical studies have cast doubt on the "modernization theory" of democratization, which posits that increases in income are conducive to increases in democracy levels. This doubt stems mainly from the fact that while a strong positive correlation exists between income and...

I study the role of population distribution on legislative apportionment. To the extent that legislative representation might be used to compensate small regions for being in a union, the more population-concentrated nations implemented more regional apportionment rules. However, this statement...

We study the decline of turnout by generational replacement and the composition of the new electorate in the post authoritarian Chile (1989-2008). High voting cohorts have been displaced by low voting ones. For those Chileans who lived under the authoritarian rule in the 80s average turnout...

We test the relation between income and democracy during the postwar period. We employ panel estimation methods that explicitly allow for the fact that the primary measures of democracy are censored with substantial mass at the boundaries. We find that the statistically significant positive...

A number of recent empirical studies have cast doubt on the "modernization theory" of democratization, which posits that increases in income are conducive to increases in democracy levels. This doubt stems mainly from the fact that while a strong positive correlation exists between income and...

This paper argues that right-wing parties have incentives to use institutions in order to limit political participation. Their strategic reasons are twofold, namely to reinforce stability and to bias the results against left-wing parties. We describe an explicit case of institutional engineering...