Abstract
Why are some countries democratic, and others not? What makes democratic political regimes rise? The main goal of this paper is to use game theoretical models and empirical findings to demonstrate the relationship between income inequality and democratization. This paper shows that a democratic transition becomes feasible when the inequality of conditions among individuals exists in the point that an authoritarian strategy to avoid redistribution under a democratic rule is not attractive to the wealthy any more. Also, this paper tests the hypotheses about the effects of income inequality on democratization with unbalanced pooled time-series cross-sectional data that cover 49 countries for 1970-2000. Empirical findings indicate that high levels of economic inequality are related to democratic governments more than authoritarian regimes.
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