Which dimension of economic development spurred support to democracy? This study focuses on industrialization as the dimension triggering the process of “modernization”. It uses a new dataset on Napoleonic plebiscites under the second French Empire (1852-1870). The results in those plebiscites provide a detailed cross-departements (French main administrative units) measure of opposition to autocracy. This study uses the variations in the thriving French modernization to disentangle the effect of industrialization on the vote from the one of other dimensions of economic development. The results show that a ten-percent increase in industrialization reduced the share of “Yes” ballots by 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the 1870 plebiscite. An IV strategy using distance to the first city having adopted steam engines, access to coal and waterpower as instruments confirms causality. The baseline results are robust to controlling for other explanations of the vote and to using alternative specifications and estimation methods.

中文翻译：

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民主民主起来！拿破仑全民投票中由工业化主导的反对派

经济发展的哪个方面激发了对民主的支持？这项研究集中在工业化作为触发“现代化”过程的维度。它使用了第二个法兰西帝国（1852-1870年）下拿破仑全民投票的新数据集。这些公民投票的结果提供了详细的跨部门（法国主要行政单位）对独裁统治的衡量标准。这项研究利用了蓬勃发展的法国现代化进程中的变化，来将工业化对投票的影响与经济发展的其他方面之一区分开来。结果表明，在1870年的全民投票中，工业化水平提高了10％，“赞成”投票的份额减少了0.4至0.7个百分点。一种IV策略，它采用了到第一个采用蒸汽机的城市的距离，手段确定因果关系，获取煤炭和水电。基线结果对于控制投票的其他解释以及使用替代性规范和估计方法是可靠的。