Income Inequality and Democratization Revisited: Comment on Muller

M uller's (1995) conclusion that income inequality has a major impact on rates of democratization continues a line of thought from Muller (1988) and Muller and Seligson (1994), and is at odds with our earlier empirical results (Bollen and Jackman 1985a). The major difference between Muller (1988) and Muller (1995) is that he is now more concerned with accounting for changes in democracy, whereas in the earlier paper he sought to explain of stable democracy. To measure change in political democracy, Muller (1995) uses 1965 and 1980 measures of developed by Bollen (1980, 1993), in lieu of his own earlier years of stable democracy measure. Muller's analysis is not compelling, on two counts. First, he fails to provide a convincing rationale for the hypothesized link between inequality and rates of democratization. Second, using his data, we find that his results are not robust, but instead are sensitive to plausible respecifications of the model.