Political Systems And Economic Development In Sub-Sahara: A Multivariate Time Series Analysis

Abstract

Lipset’s definition (1959) of democracy was used to test the correlation between economic development and the adoption of democracy among countries. Individual country analysis was conducted, followed by regional analysis and a significant positive correlation coefficient of 0.5 was obtained.  This showed that as the level of economic development increases, the level of democracy equally increases in Sub-Sahara Africa.  One limitation of this study is that it is important to note that if this analysis is conducted on an individual country basis, such a causal relationship might not fully exist and, therefore caution should be taken when interpreting these empirical results.