- a different racial makeup
- a very different slavery history
- a very different post-colonial history
1. "different racial makeup" - The ethnic composition of the Dominican population is 70% mixed race, 18% white, and 12% black; while 95% of the Haitian population is black.
Here is a breakup of the maternal (Y) and paternal (mtDNA) breakdowns of the antilles
Dominicans are mixed-race and, subjectively speaking - extremely beautiful imho
Dania Ramirez is an example - and shows the mixing of races.
The Dominicans have forged their own culture that is heavily Hispanic.
2. "colonial history" - the Spanish didn't have the same kind of racial rigidity the French had. They intermarried. They also didn't create a whole-scale slave economy. NOTE that this is also why Santo Domingo was poor, while Saint-Dominique became the wealthiest colony in the New World - yes, it was richer and produced more wealth than the North American colonies combined
3. "post-colonial history" - Haiti had to brutally fight and fight and re-fight for its independence against a brutal French state (in comparison the English were far less brutal in their colonies) . That, coupled with the colonial history led to Haiti being a very militaristic state that controlled the entirety of Hispaniol from 1822 to 1844, ignoring the Dominicans Spanish language, Catholic religion and cultural differences, which led to the Dominicans fighting for freedom from Haiti in 1844 and the Dominicans seeing the HAITIANs, not the Spanish as oppressors
BOTH had innumerable coups, but since the 1960s the DR has been stable and corruption stable.
This is reflected in the GDP per capita growth since the 1950s
