A lunch in Warsaw was the beginning of a brilliant career

Chinas economic development is proceeding apace. Only recently, a Chinese

company bought Volvo and the Chinese middle class is rising fastbut so far,
the power of the Communist Party is unassailed and economic development is
occurring with the aid of the Communist-controlled government. In India, the
worlds second-largest country in terms of population with more than a billion
people, economic growth is explosive. Unlike China, however, India has against
all odds been a working democracy since independence from Great Britain.
Long one of the poorest countries in the world, India is well on the way to
greater prosperity for her people.
What are the connections between democracy, dictatorship and economic
development? Is an authoritarian regime necessary to get the economy going
Chiles development under General Pinochet is an oft-cited exampleand
should democracies thus be worse at bringing people out of poverty and need? Is
the rise of democracy dependent upon a certain degree of economic
development? And what does it take for a new and fragile democracy to survive
and stabilize?
Polish-American political scientist Adam Przeworski has devoted his scholarly
life to the interplay between economics and politics. This year, Adam
Przeworski is awarded the prestigious Johan Skytte Prize, the Nobel Prize of
political science for elevating standards of scholarship in the analysis of
relations between democracy, capitalism, and economic development. The
prize will be awarded this year for the sixteenth time by the Johan Skytte
Foundation at Uppsala University. Previous winners include Elinor Ostrom, who
was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Adam Przeworski was born in Poland in 1940 as the Second World War raged.
He has described his childhood in Communist Poland and during the Cold War
by saying that everything was political. His early encounters, first with
communism in Poland and later with capitalism in the United States, shaped the
mind that now stands out as one of the most astute and prolific in political
science.
Like many of the foremost scholars and scientists of our age, Przeworski has
been working for decades in the United States, where he teaches and conducts
research at New York University. He came to the United States as an adult,
when as a 20-year-old student at Warsaw University with a degree in philosophy
and sociology he was enticed to come to Northwestern University, where he
eventually received his Ph.D. As so often in life this critical transition happened
by pure accident. A Northwestern professor visiting Warsaw invited the young
Przeworski to lunch and asked if he wanted to go to the United States to study
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political science. I dont remember if I had the smarts to ask him what political
science was: I didnt know what it was, Przeworski related in a 2005 interview.
I was twenty years old and I would have gone anywhere to do anything.
The environment at Northwestern became Przeworskis first real contact with
political science, a subject that was not taught at universities in Communist
Poland. He returned to Warsaw, was given the opportunity to defend his
American doctoral dissertation in Poland, and was once again invited to the
United States by the University of Pennsylvania to participate in an international
research project. There he remained and came to spend, like many other winners
of the Johan Skytte Prize, many happy years at the University of Chicago, a
unique institution and a place committed to the pursuit of ideas. You could
walk into the office of the dean and say: Look, Ive been sitting on this project
for five years. Im sick and tired of it, and Im close to finishing but I need some
time off. And you walked out with time off.
Przeworski, somewhat disparagingly termed a Western Marxist by the
orthodox, took his place at the seminar table in earnest in 1980, when he
published Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon in the New Left
Review. The problem statement and lines of argument were well known among
the academic Left. Przeworski brought forward the classic controversial issues
that caused schisms between revolutionary Communists and reformist Social
Democrats, and between orthodox Marxists and so-called revisionists. At first,
he was met with dense silence, eventually by condemnation. This was not true
Marxism.
His question of whether Social Democracy could have done better, and if so
how, was not answered with references to the foundational documents of
Marxism. Przeworski argued there were empirical lessons that could, with
theoretical acumen and methodological imagination, be transformed into general
insights. In a series of works, whose main results are collected in two books
Capitalism and Social Democracy and Paper StonesPrzeworski developed an
analysis that clarified the implications of Social Democracy, having chosen to
work within the confines of bourgeois democracy and universal suffrage. He
stressed the necessity of class compromisethat the workers movement must
include more social groups in their electoral base and not only manual
workersand why the welfare state with strong emphasis on redistribution was
probably the best the workers movement could aspire to.
In parallel with his American career, Przeworski has sustained contact with his
native Poland. As early as 1986, long before most others, he began to sense
radical transformations in the air that once they broke through to the light of day
in 1989/1990 took almost everyone by surprise, politicians and political
scientists alike. The walk in Warsaw on that day in June 1986 with Jerzy Wiatr,
a friend and a Communist, was an eye-opener. Wiatr told him that the
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Communist Party had begun to initiate economic reforms, and Przeworski

concluded that this must be the final nail in the coffin of the planned economy
model. Once the reform ball had started rolling there was, as he saw it, no going
back. He was right.

Przeworski began to develop strategic analysis through game theory and

modeling arguments early on with his analysis of Social Democracy. He was
able to study the choices political actors make within the confines of given
structural conditions. Parties and unions may make different choices, of course,
but they move within certain preset structures (historical and cultural), and thus
cannot make simply any choice they like. This type of analysis of strategic
action, which recognizes that our actions are largely governed by what we
believe others are going to do, was pioneering and something Przeworski further
developed, including in the understanding of democratization in Central and
Eastern Europe. Democracy and the Market (1991) contains several almost
eerily prescient analyses of how things were going to play out in postCommunist Europe: analysis performed not in hindsight, but when the
transformations had only just begun.
In one of his most distinguished books, Democracy and Development (2000),
Przeworski and his colleagues (Alvarez, Cheibub and Limongi) take the
understanding of issues of democracy and economics to new empirical heights.
The starting point is to describe reality as meticulously as possible. This is
difficult, and underestimated, but only by doing this first can we later identify
what needs to be explained. By delving into the great challenges of our time,
how political regimes, institutions and economic development are intertwined,
and doing it with unfailing precision and sophistication, Przeworski approaches
something as unusual in political science as clear answers to complex questions.
Many have tried this before, but with more comprehensive empirical material
from all over the world and over time (1950-90), and better statistical analysis
than before, Przeworski is helping to answer these questions in a way that will
be impossible for future scholars to outdistance.
What then are Przeworskis answers to the questions we asked at the beginning?
Should dictatorships, which need not consider special interests or a disappointed
electorate who vote initiators of painful reforms out of office, be better than
democracies at promoting economic growth? No, says Przeworski, but nor are
they worse than democracies in this essential respect. During the years in focus,
there are examples of countries that have achieved spectacular economic
development: Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, Greece, Portugal, South Korea, and
Malta. Two of them, Taiwan and Singapore, were dictatorships and South Korea
was for much of the time. Two were democracies (Japan and Malta), and the
remaining threeThailand, Portugal and Greeceswung back and forth
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between democracy and dictatorship. On average, total income grew at the same
rate in both types of regimes.
But surely democratized countries must first have achieved a certain level of
economic development? Firstly, the economy, then democracy. No, answers
Przeworski and thus shoots holes through yet another tenacious belief that has
dominated the social sciences for decades. There is no clear empirical
connection between a countrys level of development and the commencement of
processes toward democratization, as once claimed by modernization theory.
Przeworskis results, to return to the example of China, say that despite the
countrys incredible economic development, we cannot expect democratic
development to follow. It is at least equally likely that China will remain a
dictatorship, albeit an increasingly prosperous one, unless forces other than the
specifically economic trigger democratization. Nor will strong economic
development in Russia automatically shore up the countrys now tottering
democratic institutions.
However, once in place, how is democracy secured? Przeworskis analyses
show that the key to democratic survival is, yes, economic development. Above
a certain economic threshold, which Przeworski himself sets at 4,000 dollars
per capita and year, no democracy has thus far failed. If democracy arises at all,
it will be fragile as long as income levels are very low. India is therefore
something of an enigma in democracy studies: despite its (former) extreme
poverty, the country has remained democratic for more than 60 years. At the
same time, we know from Przeworskis research that, thanks to economic
development, Indian democracy is becoming more secure all the time.
That it is economic development that as good as guarantees the survival of
democracy is a fundamental insight, and for many reasons one that calls
attention to economic policy and poverty reduction as one of the most crucial
global problems today. In every aspect we examined, the differences between
poor and rich countries are enormous, Przeworski writes in Democracy and
Economic Development. Poverty reduction, which covers everything from
microloans to vaccines and public healthcare, should in other words be the focus
of world interest now more than everbut unfortunately it is not.
Adam Przeworskis interest in life-and-death issues has advanced political
science. Empirical brilliance, theoretical acumen, and methodological
imagination are united in this scholar of political science, who once journeyed to
the United States of America for doctoral studies in a subject he had never heard
of.
For the Prize Committee: Li Bennich-Bjrkman, Johan Skytte chair in
Eloquence and Government, Uppsala University; Jrgen Hermansson, professor
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of political science, Uppsala University; Bo Rothstein, professor of political

science, University of Gothenburg.