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Notes -
Assertion without evidence (I don't have time to read an entire book, sorry).
Russia was only getting more corrupt under its democracy and it's hardly the only example. Egypt had a brief fling with democracy that set it back decades. And all democracy seems to have done in South America is make it easier for the cartels to buy national governments.
As for Poland and the like, you seem to be forgetting that they were highly civilized functional countries in their fairly recent (generally non-democratic) past. A better explanation seems to be that those countries were doing well due to a myriad of reasons (good genes, cultural capital, etc...) until they got hit by the communism stick. After communism was gone, they reverted to their mean.
The comments on Ukraine are pure speculation. It's democracy certainly didn't seem to be helping given the multiple color revolutions and the constant conflict between it's two halves. Of course these would have been problems anyway but what's your evidence that Democracy made any of this better?
I'd say it's not particularly fair to give no evidence yourself, ignore the evidence I gave, and then claim "assertion without evidence". But fine, a book is indeed pretty long.
If you look at the corruptions perceptions index, apart from a few exceptions (that Why Nations Fail goes into), the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly democratic, and the most corrupt countries are overwhelmingly authoritarian, or at the very least anocratic. This includes nonwhite countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Most Latin American countries have very flawed democracies that tend to slide in and out of despotism, but the more consolidated and well-functioning ones like Uruguay also have less corruption.
I don't know what you're saying with the Polish example. Communism was bad due to inefficient markets, but also because it engendered a secretive and authoritarian society, which is where corruption flourishes. The move to democracy slowly started fixing that.
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