Verbatim Mac

Impact – democracies less war

Democracies less violent, more protective of human rights and less prone to war

Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, 2016

(Larry, “Democracy in Decline: How Washington Can Reverse the Tide”, Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug 2016, Volume 95, Issue 4, pages 151-159, accessed via ProQuest, GDI-JG)

Although democracy promotion may have fallen out of favor with the U.S. public, such efforts very much remain in the national interest. Democracies are less violent toward their citizens and more protective of human rights. They do not go to war with one another. They are more likely to develop market economies, and those economies are more likely to be stable and prosperous. Their citizens enjoy higher life expectancies and lower levels of infant and maternal mortality than people living under other forms of government. Democracies also make good allies. As Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has written, "Not every democracy in the world was or is a close ally of the United States, but no democracy in the world has been or is an American enemy. And all of America's most enduring allies have been and remain democracies."∂ Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, are inherently unstable, since they face a central dilemma. If an autocracy is successful-if it produces a wealthy and educated population-that population will construct a civil society that will sooner or later demand political change. But if an autocracy is unsuccessful-if it fails to generate economic growth and raise living standards-it is liable to collapse.

Impact – democracy key to economic development

Democracy spurs economic growth and social development—historical success of democracies proves

Radelet, holds the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 2015

(Steven, “THE RISE OF THE WORLD’S POOREST COUNTRIES”, Journal of Democracy, October 2015, Volume 26, Number 4, accessed via ProQuest, accessed 7/14/17, GDI-JG)

Since the end of the Cold War, the pattern has changed: Most of the developing countries that have been making steady economic and social progress have been democracies. While there are important exceptions such as China, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Vietnam, increasingly they are exactly that-exceptions. Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Moldova, Mongolia, the Philippines, Poland, Senegal, South Africa, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, and dozens of other developing countries are showing that democracy and development progress go hand in hand. The relationship between the two is one of both cause and effect. Democratic governments are more responsive to citizen needs and thus have the political motivation to create more opportunities for economic and social progress. At the same time, progress tends to create greater pressures for increased political participation, political accountability, and democracy.∂ Although the benign-dictator argument continues to have appeal (especially in light of China's success), it has several weaknesses. From a simple strategic point of view, signing up with a dictator is a risky proposition. Though you may desire a "benign" Lee Kuan Yew or Deng Xiaoping, you are far more likely to end up with a not-so-benign Robert Mugabe, Mobutu Sese Seko, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Anastasio Somoza, or Islam Karimov. While there are a few exceptions, most autocrats just get nastier over time, and economic performance deteriorates. And then you are stuck with political repression and economic disaster.∂ In addition, for most people around the world freedom and selfgovernment are critically important in and of themselves. Amartya Sen made this case persuasively in his 1999 classic Development as Freedom. I lived in Indonesia for four years in the early 1990s during the Suharto regime, and I regularly heard elites argue that Indonesians just wanted economic development and did not care much about democracy. But then the Asian financial crisis erupted, and citizens seized the opportunity to rise up, at great personal risk, and to throw Suharto out. Contrary to the old argument, it turned out that Indonesians wanted both democracy and development. Today, that is what they are getting, as they are well into more than a decade of vibrant (though imperfect) democracy alongside rapid (though imperfect) development.∂ Moreover, the argument that authoritarian governments have achieved better economic performance is increasingly hard to sustain, especially over the long run. The growth rate for the developing-country democracies since 1995 has averaged 3 percent per person, while for the nondemocracies, it has averaged 2.9 percent-essentially identical on average, but the nondemocracies have much greater variance. (As per capita growth rates, both of these are high by historical standards.) Sure, China, Rwanda, Vietnam, and several other countries have recorded rapid growth in recent years. But so have some democracies, including Botswana, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Panama, and many others. Perhaps their growth rates have not been quite as spectacular as China's, but by any global historical standard they have been extremely good. Meanwhile, many authoritarian governments have presided over disastrous economies with negative growth rates.∂ Recent research suggests that, overall, democracies outperform nondemocracies, especially in the long term. That has been the pattern in sub-Saharan Africa since the mid-1990s. John Gerring and his associates found that democracy-particularly if it endured and strengthened-added about 0.7 percentage points to annual growth rates over time. Similarly, Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors have concluded that countries that democratize tend to increase their GDP per capita by about 20 percent over twenty to thirty years.10