Growing up, I was taught repeatedly that developing countries were poor and struggled to escape their poverty because their citizens didn't have sufficiently strong moral values (especially, the ability to strictly adhere to the rule of law) to sustain a prosperous society and so that was why they always ended up with corrupt leaders (who were merely representative of the average citizen).

As I got older, I started to see democracy as more of an ideal than a reality. It seems that very few countries have actually implemented democracy correctly. Politicians are rarely representatives of 'average' citizens of a country; instead, they are often representatives of the worst among them.

It's a plausible hypothesis that government officials of 'developing' countries are not really elected, but are in fact installed there by western powers in order to facilitate the plundering of resources from those countries by those same western powers. Based on this model, the politicians who govern developing countries are encouraged to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens and for the benefit of western powers.

I now think that it's naive to assume that democracy always works and that politicians are always accurate representatives of the people over which they govern. Recent elections in developed countries have shown us how quickly a government can become corrupted by financial interests to serve only those financial interests at the expense of its citizens.

I'm now realizing that what I was taught growing up was wrong. The moral fiber of the average citizen doesn't necessarily get carried over to its political class; especially in the short term. It appears that any government of any country can be corrupted if the right kinds of perverse financial or career incentives are introduced into the system.

That said, I do think that the prosperity of regular citizens of a country has a lot to do with how good the system is at preventing corruption from taking hold of its political class — But I think that it has more to do with the design and scale of the system itself than the attitude of its participants.