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In this paper, we study the effect of a low level of democracy on the degree of trade openness, based on a sample limited to developing countries. We use the original measure of trade openness recently built by Squalli and Wilson (2011). This measure reflects trade outcome reality by capturing two dimensions that together precisely describe trade openness. The estimates are carried out using the two-step Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) system with robust standard errors corrected for finite samples using Windmeijer’s (2005) correction procedure. Over the period between 1995 and 2010, our results show that openness is a decreasing function of the level of democracy. This seems to suggest that the democratization process initiated in the developing countries in the 1990s has not yet made it possible for them to accelerate their trade openness.