Fortin 18
that the interaction between GDP per capita and RPE is significant and negative: as GDP
per capita increases, the marginal effect that RPE has on democracy decreases.
Therefore, the relationship between RPE and democracy is conditioned by levels of
development, even though the coefficient for GDP per capita is not significant in the
baseline estimation. RPE has a larger effect in less advanced countries, although the
slope of the marginal effect is not steep. The third pair of columns of Table 3.2 reports
the results for the interaction between time and RPE. Even if the slope of the marginal
effect is almost flat, it is statistically highly significant. In this case as well, the
interaction is negative: the marginal effect of RPE on democracy decreases as years
advance. Together these findings confirm the hypothesis that for countries with lower
levels of development, the effects of relative political extraction levels were most
significant for democracy at the onset of independence.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Generally, the pattern of findings presented in this paper bolsters support for the
proposition that state capacity is one of the key explanations for levels of democracy
attained by postcommunist countries. Levels of infrastructure reforms and relative
political extraction—or simply put, the power to govern effectively—are positively
associated with higher levels of democracy over time. However, relative political
extraction has a higher marginal effect earlier in the transition in states with lower GDP
per capita, a finding that also has implications for the literature of postcommunism.
The less capacity a state has at its disposal, the more difficult it becomes to
perform the tasks associated with modern statehood (Easter, 2002). When a state cannot
fulfill its responsibilities effectively, its claims on the monopoly of violence and
resources can be more easily challenged. Given that survival is the primary concern of
office holders, two scenarios can emerge concerning the cost of state building (Robert
and Sherlock, 1999). When incumbents believe they have considerable support, state
building has acceptable opportunity costs. By contrast, when their support base is
narrower, politicians facing opposition are more likely to use state resources to attract
allies. In states that are weak and that face little competition from an institutionalized
civil society, leaders face few obstacles in using state power if they can agree with elites
Convention