The influence of socio-economic determinates on democratization in Asian Countries

Abstract

The thesis investigates the variation of socio-economic development toward democratization, aiming to achieve more understanding of factors which might have an influence on this political transition in Asian countries. In particular, it concentrates on four determinants of economic development and three determinants of social development, namely, Human Development Index (HDI), industrialization, urbanization, economic equality, education, gender equality and freedom of expression. Using country-level data from twenty-four Asian nations in the period from 1990 to 2015, this paper applied the fixed effects model as an analysis technique to examine the hypotheses. The results reveal that four out of seven socio-economic factors are found to have effects on the progression of democratization in Asia. Moreover, these significant variables also perform a positive correlation with the level of democracy, which is similar to these predicted hypotheses. On the other hand, industrialization, urbanization and gender equality is not supported by the model, indicating that there is no significant influence on the level of Asian democracy.