State and Prospects of Democracy in the Sadc Region : Correlation between socioeconomic factors and regime stability in the Southern African Development Community

This work focuses on the correlation between socioeconomic factors (economic growth, affluence, inflation, income inequality, ethnic and religious structure of population, level of education) and stability of political regimes in the SADC (Southern African Development Community) region. The work is based on several democracy theories concerning correlations between socioeconomic factors and the state of democracy, while the particular hypotheses are applied to the 15 SADC member states. The aim is to determine whether socioeconomic factors influence regime stability and whether they have any impact on survival of democracy in already democratic countries of the region, but also on potential future democratization of non-democratic and semi-democratic countries, and thus on stabilization of the region.