[einarvollset]

Your first line is a truism that your main argument doesn't support, and your third paragraph is an appeal to "common sense" that isn't supported by data.

Ignoring those, your argument boils down to your opinion that voting has no impact on wealth or stability. That cannot be true, at least not unless you subscribe to a deterministic world view, surely?

[rflrob]

His argument is not that voting has no impact on wealth or stability, it's that you can't deconvolve voting's impact on wealth from wealth's impact on voting.

One could imagine a scenario where a Party X state had vastly impoverished natural resources compared to the typical Party Y state. It's conceivable that typical Party Y policies would have a worse outcome than typical Party X ones in that particular state, even if states that implement Party Y policies tend to have better outcomes overall. It's furthermore conceivable that even states that implement Party Y policies could do better if they had instead implemented Party X ones.

The flaw in this article isn't political, it's statistical.

edit: anonymized parties in the second paragraph.

[cperciva]

your argument boils down to your opinion that voting has no impact on wealth or stability

No. I'm not arguing that there is no causation. I'm arguing that the correlations noted by the author are not evidence of causation.