Replication Data for: Industrialization and Democracy

I provide a new theory of the relationship between economic development and democracy. I argue that a large share of employment in manufacturing (i.e., industrialization) makes mass mobilization both more likely to occur and more costly to suppress. This increases the power of the masses vis-à-vis autocratic elites, making democracy more likely. Using novel manufacturing employment data for 145 countries over 170 years (1845-2015) I find that industrialization is strongly correlated with democracy, even after accounting for country and time fixed effects, time trends, theoretically-grounded controls, and other economic determinants of democracy (e.g., income and inequality). Unlike with other economic determinants the effect occurs on both transitions and consolidations, and is equally large after 1945. Importantly, many potential outliers (e.g., China, USSR, Latin America during ISI) have in fact never reached the level of industrialization that existed in West, South Korea, and Taiwan before democratization.