ory is the same: lack of access to the ocean retards commercial interchange with the rest of the world, slowing growth and reducing a population’s exposure to political norms such as democracy.
While looking at earlier research on the development of Democracy, Midlarsky (1995) highlights the importance of sea-borders on the development of democracy. These reasons are relevant, because they point to problems that states without sea-borders, those that are landlocked, would have. Midlarsky relates that an earlier quantitative study has demonstrates that democratic outliers, that is “those countries least well explained by domestic variables” were highly connected to the sea. States like Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Ireland, and Greece were much more democratic than predicted by existing models. However, these same states were islands (and so the opposite of land-locked) or peninsulas.
Another argument is that sea borders minimize the threat of war. That is, the more land borders a country has the more its chances of war are maximized (Starr and Most 1978). Summarizing the first study that found this, Lewis Richardson‘s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, Starr and Most explain:
Although Richardson reports a positive association between borders and war and eventually concludes that the relationship operates from frontiers toward war, he fails to develop explicit hypotheses or a theoretical explanation about why this relationship should be expected to exist. And an explicit level, however, Richardson’s argument appears to develop in two stages. First, he conceptualizes frontiers as creating opportunities for internation interaction. Quite simply, nations with large numbers of borders have greater opportunities for interacting with other countries than those countries which have only a few borders. Going a step further, Richardson then draws an analogy between war and murder. Asking why nationals tend to slay each other rather than foreigners, he concludes that the explanation lies in the very simple fact that nationals have few contacts with foreigners. One is most likely to be murdered by one’s close relatives and friends because close contacts and high levels of interaction provides opportunities for such actions. Returning to the problem of the border / war relationship, Richardson then makes the obvious linkages: if frontiers create opportunities for interaction, and the greater the opportunities the greater the level of actual interaction, then the greater the number of frontiers the greater the probability of war.
To demonstrate his theory of geographical influences on development, Midlarsky first gives the standard explanations or why Britain developed a democratic culture, including high average rainfall, geographic safety, industrialization, and land inequality:
England may be the archetypical example of a country that experienced very early democratization and that also embodies the four principal variables examined here. Average rainfall is consistently high. As an island nation, especially after the subjugation of surrounding peoples such as the Irish, Scots, and Welsh, she was relatively free from the threat of war. At the very least, she had leeway in choosing her time of entry into continental wars and with force sizes pretty much at her own discretion. The English economy, of course, industrialized earlier than any other, leading to a very high gross domestic product (GDP) / capita (CAP) and consequent impact on democracy. Also, land inequality, especially in terms of land holdings by the nobility, was substantial. … “No Continental landed elite in the nineteenth century owned so large a part of its nation’s territory as did the English” … His explicit comparisons are with the French, Spanish, Prussian, and Russian elites, all of whose societies, of course, democratized at much later dates than did the English.”
Midlarsky also cites another state that also had high rainfall, geographic safety, and industrialization yet veered towards authoritarianism. This demonstrates the role of another important factor that is central t