the diffusion of democracy, 1946–1994

The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946–1994John O’Loughlin,* Michael D. Ward,** Corey L. Lofdahl,***

Jordin S. Cohen,**** David S. Brown,***** David Reilly,******Kristian S. Gleditsch,****** and Michael Shin*******

*Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder**Department of Political Science, University of Washington***Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)****School of International Service, American University

*****Department of Political Science, Rice University******Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Political Science,

University of Colorado, Boulder*******Department of Geography, University of Miami

We examine the relationship between the temporal and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion inthe world system since 1946. We find strong and consistent evidence of temporal clustering ofdemocratic and autocratic trends, as well as strong spatial association (or autocorrelation) ofdemocratization. The analysis uses an exploratory data approach in a longitudinal framework tounderstand global and regional trends in changes in authority structures. Our work reveals discretechanges in regimes that run counter to the dominant aggregate trends of democratic waves orsequences, demonstrating how the ebb and flow of democracy varies among the world’s regions. Weconclude that further analysis of the process of regime change from autocracy to democracy, as wellas reversals, should start from a “domain-specific” position that dis-aggregates the globe into itsregional mosaics. Key Words: Democracy, political change, spatial diffusion, regional effects, LatinAmerica, Africa, measures of democracy, space-time autocorrelation

Adam Michnik, a leader of Solidarity, ob-served during the June 1989 electioncampaign that the parliamentary elec-

tions in Poland would spell the end of the “Sta-linist-totalitarian system” (Garton Ash 1990:11).Solidarity’s triumph in these elections, bringingthe first noncommunist government to EasternEurope in more than forty years, was soon fol-lowed in Hungary by the first formal dissolutionof a ruling East European communist party. This“rip in the Iron Curtain” thereafter allowed a largenumber of East Germans to go to West Germany,and once these events were set in motion, politi-cal developments in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakiaquickly led to elections and new governments.Within two years of the 1989 Polish elections, theshortest but most dramatic period of democrati-zation led to changes in regimes from the GermanDemocratic Republic to Tajikistan. This demo-cratic surge was part of a “Third Wave” of democ-ratization that began about fifteen years earlier inSouthern Europe and spread to Latin America inthe 1980s (Huntington 1991). The global rippleeffects of this regime change, accompanied by

liberalization of national economies and economicglobalization, have altered dramatically the na-ture of international politics, including relationsbetween states and international institutions.

In this article, we examine the changes in thegeographic distribution of political regimes sincethe end of World War II. We use a spatial-diffusionframework for our study because it allows us toemphasize the interconnections among temporaland spatial changes. Using an empirical measureof democracy derived from democratic andauthority structures, we map and graph changesin the number and nature of political regimes toexplore the spatial and temporal regularities andoddities of the process of democratic diffusion.Subsequently, we turn briefly to case studies ofSouthern Africa and Latin America to illustratethe democratic diffusion process and the relation-ships between the external (foreign policy) con-text and the domestic political environment ofthe countries in these two regions. Based on ouranalyses, we speculate about the further diffusionof democratic norms and institutions and thepossibility of a reversal of the recent trend.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(4), 1998, pp.545–574©1998 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

In our study, we employ the methods of ex-ploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) (Anselinand Getis 1992) to track time-space changes inthe global topology of democracy, and calculateaggregate statistics of change to identify regulari-ties in patterns over time. We do not seek to assessthe cross-national relevance of any particularexplanatory variable to democratization, nor dowe conduct detailed historical examinations ofthe idiosyncratic national circumstances of indi-vidual states. Instead, we analyze aggregatetrends with a view toward identifying regionalconcentrations as well as temporal and spatialeffects within an endogenous framework. We usecase studies of changes in Latin America andAfrica to illustrate the rate and nature of democ-ratization in wider local and global contexts. Toour knowledge, there is no current overview ofthe long-term trends across the globe of the wavesand reversals of political regime change. Partialstudies by Huntington (1991) and Starr (1991)suggest a process of change that is regular, pre-dictable, and unstoppable. Our aim in this articleis to examine such changes in authority structuresand regimes over time and space.

The Geopolitics ofDemocratization

Since 1989, Western countries, especially theU.S., have promoted the virtues of parliamentarydemocracy (e.g., Talbott 1996), the constructionof civil societies, and the opening of nationaleconomies to a neoliberal world order. Increas-ingly, western organizations often threaten to tieforeign aid to the establishment of competitiveelections and removal of restrictions on civil lib-erties, as well as to the establishment of monetaryand fiscal measures (Stokke 1995). Not all“democratic” developments have been devoid ofproblems. Old ethnic rivalries have resurfaced,authoritarian leaders have occasionally returnedto office via the ballot box, drastic economic andsocial cleavages have persisted while new oneshave emerged, and powerful elite and corporateinterests have engaged the political process(Kaplan 1997). Yet the benefits of proceduraldemocracy, of elections over power seizure, ofdivision of powers between executive and legisla-ture, and of protection of individuals against statepower hold wide appeal. In the democratizingworld of the late twentieth century, competingideologies have been largely dismissed. In the

perspective of contemporary world leaders, anincreasingly democratic world appears to offerbetter prospects for peace, human rights, geopo-litical stability, and increased trade and economicdevelopment.

About sixty percent of the countries in theworld-system now have democratic procedures,compared to about twenty-eight percent in 1950(of a total of fifty polities).1 The “democraticpeace” hypothesis holds that countries that aredemocratic do not fight each other because of theinstitutional and public-opinion constraintsplaced on political leaders (Chan 1997). Humanrights have been tied to democratic practices (Poeand Tate 1994; Arat 1991), and some commen-tators have even argued that the right to democ-racy is an emerging international norm (Franck1992). Even skeptics find it hard to ignore theprofound consequences of preeminence of de-mocracy in a new era. At the global level, thestruggle for political, economic, and social rightssince the end of the eighteenth century can beviewed as part of a long-term process. In theaftermath of the French revolution, Georg Wil-helm Friedrich Hegel surmised that changes inconsciousness and shifts in ideology would beprofoundly important. Fukuyama (1992) adoptsthis Hegelian logic to anticipate a world withoutsignificant political conflict as a result of theadoption of democratic norms. Democratization,in this view, is a product of attitudinal and cul-tural change. What is missing from the Fukuyamainterpretation of the democratization wave is aconsideration of the processes of democratic tran-sition and the struggle for political rights in con-temporary societies. Braumoeller (1997), forexample, uses survey analysis to probe the geopo-litical questions emerging from “liberal national-ism” and associated democratic change in Sovietsuccessor states. The linkage of domestic con-texts and national geopolitics helps to clarify theeffects of the new regimes on the post-Cold Warworld and especially on regional conflict forma-tions (Kolossov and O’Loughlin 1998).

Procedural versus SubstantiveConceptions of Democracy

From its Athenian origins, democratic theoryhas been associated with direct participation, po-litical equality, and popular sovereignty. Al-though the city-state was by no means a perfectdemocracy by contemporary standards, it has

546 O’Loughlin et al.

served as a reference point for much of the latertheoretical debate. The liberal tradition empha-sized constraints on state power and the develop-ment of civil society. Although not necessarilycoincident with modern notions of democracy,the liberal tradition pushed support for politicaland civil rights and liberties, and (eventually) forthe concept of institutionalizing representation asa means of ensuring a popular mandate.

Democracy has been written about widelysince the end of the French Revolution. Mostregimes in the world today claim to be demo-cratic, in some sense of the word. Much socialscience also presumes to address questions thatrelate to the theory or practice of democracyaround the world in various locales at varioustimes. In such instances, the meaning of the termmay become so malleable that it is difficult toascertain how widely differing conceptions andaspects of democracy may be reconciled. Indeedthat may not be possible. We elaborate our ownconceptions, recognizing that different ap-proaches may yield different results. For somepurposes, it is useful to separate substantive andprocedural definitions of democracy, in order toassess the performance, prerequisites, and thepromise of democratic rule. Obviously, one’s defi-nition or meaning associated with the term de-mocracy will affect the evaluation of the extentto which democracy exists in the contemporaryworld. Our approach is to focus on the institu-tional bases of democracy, though we recognizethat this avoids questions of substantive democ-racy, of inclusion, and participation in a broadersense beyond the “narrow” realm of politics.

The contending, substantive approach, whichexamines democracy in terms of desirable sub-stantive outcomes such as wealth, power, justice,equality, and inclusion, draws on a wide intellec-tual heritage of liberal as well as radical modernand postmodern theory, ranging from Aristotle,through de Tocqueville, to Bobbio (1989). Usinga substantive approach focuses attention on theextent to which one can observe these and otherputatively desirable outcomes as manifestationsof the scope, breadth, and quality of society. Inthe literature on democratization, numerousstudies detail struggles for the extension of politi-cal power (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). Geogra-phers have tackled questions that directlyconfront the meaning of “democracy” by exam-ining the experiences of excluded groups andtheir attempts to extend democratic principles toeconomic and nonformal political arenas (Mar-

ston and Staeheli 1994; Agnew 1995; Staeheliand Cope 1994; Kofman 1995; Painter and Philo1995; and Brown 1997). Geographers have beenstrongly influenced by theorists of “radical de-mocracy,” who wish to expand the definition ofdemocracy to include principles of economicequality and social opportunity (Gould 1988;Bobbio 1989; Held 1991; Cohen and Arato 1992;Mouffe 1992).

Taken to its extreme, defining democracy interms of its outcomes becomes somewhat tauto-logical and risks losing analytical leverage. Forexample, if we define democracy in terms of theprovision of adequate health-care, it becomesdifficult to learn about democracy independentlyof learning about health-care systems. Thus,many substantively based studies of democracymay also be viewed as studies of civil society(Cohen and Arato 1992). Occasionally, the ex-tent to which scholarship on civil societies (Al-mond and Verba 1989; Putnam 1993) informsdemocratic theory may be mistaken for investiga-tions of the institutional mechanisms of democ-racy as a system of decision making.

In this research, we employ a procedurallybased definition of political democracy, since weare primarily interested in changes in institutionalstructures in contemporary and historical socie-ties. We do not seek directly to assess the effectsof such change on particular substantive out-comes. We also believe that a separate assessmentof political and economic democracy is moremeaningful if each component is treated as ana-lytically, if not empirically, distinct.

Generally speaking, democracy is widely meantto refer to systems that encourage inclusion, par-ticipation, open competition, and institutional-ized constraints. Empirical studies of politicaldemocracy and democratization in this proce-dural tradition have revolved around: (a) politi-cal competition, or the extent to which structuresand institutions of the state permit open compe-tition for political power and protect the basicpolitical rights afforded the individual; (b) partici-pation, or the extent of meaningful inclusion ofindividuals and diverse groups within the system;and (c) the issue of liberties and the rule of law,or the extent to which certain political and civilrights of individuals are guaranteed within thesystem. The relative importance accorded eachcomponent differs among studies, and in somecases, the influence of one characteristic is sub-sumed within the realm of another.

The Diffusion of Democracy 547

The theoretical emphasis on competition, par-ticipation, and liberties is reflected in many con-temporary studies of democracy. Our interest isin generating a big picture of the broad outlinesof institutional democracy around the world, andfor this task, binoculars seem more appropriatethan microscopes. We focus, therefore, on fourbasic, comparative dimensions of institutional de-mocracy that apply to contemporary and histori-cal polities (countries) to provide a roughassessment of political democracy. These are: (a)constraints on the executive decision makers of apolity; (b) the extent of competition among po-litical forces; (c) the regulation of political par-ticipation; and (d) the openness of recruitmentinto the decision making bodies. These are de-rived from a broader theory of authority relationsinitially developed to examine authority patternsof any social unit, including national politicalsystems (Eckstein and Gurr 1975).

In particular, five explicit measures of thesecomponents are employed. We gauge the com-petitiveness of political participation rangingfrom societies with suppressed participation tothose that exhibit a highly competitive nationalpolitical process. The regulation of political par-ticipation ranges from societies with strong re-strictions on who can participate and the extentof their participation to societies with regular andinstitutionalized forms of popular participation,such as elections. We are also interested inwhether chief executives are chosen by selectionor election. If the process of executive recruit-ment is open, procedural democracy is enhanced,and we gauge this as well. Finally, we assesswhether there are institutional constraints on thepower of chief executives from alternative politi-cal institutions such as independent legislatures;more constraints are seen as enhancing proce-dural democracy. We create a summary measureof democracy (defined in Appendix I) that re-flects each of these components. This measure iswidely employed in comparative studies of proce-dural democracy in political science, and is dis-cussed in Jaggers and Gurr (1995) and Gleditschand Ward (1997). These data evolved from whatwas originally a study of political-system persist-ence and change (Gurr 1974). These data areavailable in the Polity III database.2

Our democratic measures do not tap the radi-cal democracy notions of justice and develop-ment. More pertinent for our approach, they donot directly assess the level of inclusion or extentof political participation. Neither do they directly

gauge the provision of political or civil liberties.The institutionalized democracy and autocracyscales, however, have been found to correlatehighly with other specific measures of inclusion,liberties, and freedoms (Jaggers and Gurr 1995).Since the institutional measures are more broadlycomparable and widely available for a large sam-ple of countries over a long period of time, theyact, for us, as a useful surrogate for participationand political and civil liberties. In this study, weuse the difference between the institutionalizeddemocracy and autocracy scales as a general in-dex of level of democracy.

The Polity III database is an attractive alterna-tive to other datasets in the examination of globaldemocratization trends. While many alternativedata sources employ dichotomous measures ofdemocracy and autocracies, using a continuum oftwenty-one possible scores for a given state, eachranging from –10 to +10, avoids the pitfall ofhaving to impose arbitrary threshold values fordemocratic versus nondemocratic status. Unlikemany alternative dichotomous indicators of de-mocracy and autocracy, the democracy scale al-lows us to consider degrees of democracy andautocracy, as well as to observe relatively smalldiscrete regime changes. Second, its measures aresynthetic rather than reductionist, allowing acontinuum that distinguishes dimensions of de-mocracy and autocracy.

Third, the data are consistent with numerousother measures of regime type, political liberties,and human rights practices (Gleditsch and Ward1997; Jaggers and Gurr 1995). Several alternativetypologies of regime types have been developed.Alvarez et al. (1996) distinguish between limitedand despotic, and autonomous and heteroga-mous regimes, as well as varying degrees of con-testation. Gasti l (1990) highl ights twocomponents of a democratic system: politicalrights or political structures, and civic rights orcivil liberties. The extent to which these areidentified and protected within a state suggeststhe extent of democratic practices. Others havecited the relative power of elite and nonelite(Bollen 1980), the presence of free and fair elec-tions (Downs 1957), the extent of participationin terms of voter turnout (Lerner 1958;Vanhanen 1997), and political accountability askey indicators of level of democracy. TatuVanhanen (1984), in his study of the emergenceof democracy, has tried to operationalize Dahl’s(1979,1989) two dimensions of democracy andempirically measure these as joint indicators of


political democracy. The high intercorrelationamong the Polity III measures and other specificindicators of democratic character (Bollen 1993;Jaggers and Gurr 1995:475) gives us confidencethat the patterns and trends identified in thecourse of our study are generally representativeof democratic developments.

Fourth, Polity III is rapidly becoming the stand-ard dataset of choice in studies of democracy andassociated phenomena. A representative list ofstudies using these indicators may be found inJaggers and Gurr (1995:470). The Polity IIIdataset provides information for all polities andhas a low threshold (500,000 inhabitants) for theinclusion of a country in the international system.

Beyond these justifications, the most compel-ling motivation for the use of the Polity III datafor our research is that the measures are intendedto have broad comparability across space andtime. Scores with contextual nuances that privi-lege local circumstances in each country wouldactually impede comparisons with the experi-ences of other countries.

The Growth and Spreadof Democracy

A shift in the tone of research on democrati-zation occurred between the 1950s and 1980s(Shin 1994). While the earlier period was char-acterized by searches for the “conditions andprerequisites” of democracy, research in the pastdecade has emphasized the dynamics of demo-cratic transition and consolidation. For the ex-amination of the large literature on democraticstructures, a useful classification is based on geo-graphic scale. Global or macrolevel perspectivesexamine democratization as part of a large-scaleprocess eventually reaching all peoples in allstates. The process may either be related to anindependent causal factor or be self-generating.Mesolevel or regional perspectives, such as that ofDeegan (1994), hold that, since the globe is amosaic of different regions and states, some re-gional contexts are more amenable to politicalchange than others. An identification of the fac-tors by region will facilitate an understanding ofwhy some contexts are mostly democratic(Europe) while other contexts are not (MiddleEast). Microlevel or state-oriented views, such asthat of McDonough et al. (1986), examine theconditions promoting democracy cross-nation-ally. By correlating independent economic and

social characteristics with broad indicators of de-mocracy, a general cross-sectional model is ex-pected to predict where future democratizingtrends are likely to be seen.

A Eurocentric perspective views the spread ofdemocracy as the political outcome of the spreadof capitalism from its European core in the cen-turies after 1500, associated with the Enlighten-ment and the spread of European traditionsthrough colonialism.3 The succession of worldleaders (the Netherlands in the seventeenth cen-tury, the United Kingdom in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, and the U.S. in the twenti-eth century) each promoted a respective globalideology (Modelski and Perry 1991; Taylor 1996).The U.S. has been especially forceful in the post-1945 period as the promoter of liberal democracy(Robinson 1996). The economic-political rela-tionship is reciprocal. Capitalist states typicallylaud democracy as a superior form of politicalorganization. The stable, bipolar system of theCold War collapsed in 1989, and with it fell theonly concerted long-term opposition, that ofcommunism, to a world-system of democraticstates.

At the mesolevel, certain types of regionallyclustered states are more susceptible to democra-tization than other regions due both to internalconditions and to “snowballing” or contagioneffects from neighbors. The internal conditions inneighboring countries are typically similar andthus provide similar impetus toward regime tran-sition along the lines argued in the so-called“social requisites of democracy” school emanat-ing from the work of Lipset (1959, 1994) andothers. The essential indicator, a growing GDPper capita, reflects a widening of the middle class,an increase in educational levels, urbanization,and an economy that is industrializing and diver-sifying. In a global economic downturn, develop-ing countries become especially attractive as sitesfor capital investment as a strategy to reduce costsand maintain profits in an increasingly competi-tive world-economy. Foreign investment insemiperipheral states, leading to deeper incorpo-ration into the world-economy, can undermineauthoritarian regimes by creating a mercantilistclass that demands greater political voice.

According to Bergesen (1992), semiperipheralstates are more constrained than core states intheir responses to global recession. With statelegitimacy already low, the strains of economicrecession can topple governments. Politicalchanges to accommodate some opposition, as


well as to show a more democratic face to theoutside world, offer a way to reduce internalunrest. Some scholars, however, hold that thistype of external intervention serves only to pro-mote nominal “low-intensity democracies,” orminor political change without modifications tothe underlying political and social structures. Theresult, according to this view, is a state sympa-thetic to foreign interests and susceptible to ex-ternal markets (Gills et al. 1993). Bergesen(1992) and Boswell and Peters (1989) attributethe temporally coincident and geographicallyconcentrated wave of democratization in LatinAmerica and East Asia in the 1980s and in East-ern Europe after 1989 to the mobilization of in-ternal opposition. Because of the regionalclustering of states of similar economic, social,and political character, the same external influ-ences have region-wide impacts.

Advocates of the world-systems and economicperspectives on political change, however, do notusually consider another regional factor. Neigh-boring states are typically oriented to the samepolitical-economic policies; in the language ofspatial analysis, they share a regional positivediffusion effect or a regional learning curve (Shin1994:152–53). Starr (1991), as well as Modelskiand Perry (1991), detected demonstration effectsin analyses of regime changes towards democra-tization over time; however, neither study directlyconsidered possible internal factors nor examinedthe regional heterogeneity of the world-system.Starr (1991) found some evidence of regionaleffects, but his simple counting of transitionsacross eight world regions does not allow confi-dence in the results. Instead, Starr (1991:371)concludes “although we might posit emulationvia awareness of events throughout the globalsystem, those same diffusion effects were takingplace at a regional level for some of the worldsystem” (his emphasis).

At the microlevel scale, we can divide theanalysis of the factors promoting democratic tran-sition into external and internal sets. Thoughthere have been many studies of war diffusionlooking at external influences (Starr and Most1976; Siverson and Starr 1990, 1991; Kirby andWard 1987; O’Loughlin and Anselin 1991), toour knowledge, only Starr’s (1991) study hasexplicitly examined the spatial diffusion of de-mocracy.4 The impact of external effects on tran-sitions has been frequently hypothesized, butdespite evident empirical examples of internal-external linkages in Eastern Europe in 1989 (Gar-

ton Ash 1990), no comprehensive examinationof these linkages has yet been completed.

Many studies of democratization are devotedto comparing the internal conditions of stateswith their level of democracy. The central rela-tionship between state attributes and level ofdemocracy examined by researchers is the hy-pothesis that economic growth moves authoritar-ian regimes toward democratic values.Schumpeter (1950) saw the “natural affinity” be-tween capitalism and democracy and did notthink it coincidental that together these systemsemerged from feudal society. While he believedthat socialism could be compatible with democ-racy, he accepted that, “Whatever democracythere was . . . developed historically in the wakeof both modern and ancient capitalism” (Schum-peter 1950:129). In this view, freedom of individ-ual choice is the underlying rationale of bothdemocracy and capitalism (Coe and Wilber1985).

Beginning with Lipset (1959), and reinter-preted and extended in Lipset (1994) and Lipsetet al. (1993), the “social requisites of democracy”school has dominated the study of democratiza-tion. Vanhanen (1984, 1990, 1992, and 1997)estimates that dozens of statistical studies of therelationship between democracy and domesticsocial and economic factors have managed con-sistently to “explain” sixty to seventy percent ofthe variance in the democracy score. Controllingfor many other factors—Huntington (1991) liststwenty-seven factors that are statistically relatedto democracy—the independent effect of a risingGDP per capita has been consistently supported.The central argument of the “social requisites”school is that social and economic conditions ina state constrain the opportunities for estab-lishing and maintaining democratic institutions.These conditions are not fully determinative,however, leaving room for choices and for politi-cal alternatives (Vanhanen 1992). Social andeconomic conditions, in turn, can be changed bypolitical decisions, so that some indecision re-mains about the causal direction, that is, whetherrising wealth is a cause or an artifact of politicalchanges.

Lipset et al. (1993:158), citing supportive stud-ies (Cutright 1963; Bollen 1979, 1980, and 1983;and Bollen and Jackman 1985), statistically testvarious nonlinear relationships between wealthand democracy to show that an N-shaped curveoffers a very good fit. They also show that indirecteffects may be present in addition to the influence


of increasing GDP per capita. They emphasizethat economic development alone will not alwayslead to democracy since national experiences andstructures also matter. Other studies of the effectsof rising personal wealth on democratic scoreshave found a U-shaped pattern for a study of 132Third World states (Hadenius 1992). Further,colonial traditions (Lipset 1994) and religion inthe form of Protestant, Catholic, and Islamictraditions (Bollen 1979; Huntington 1991; Lipset1994) show significant statistical relationshipswith the level of democracy, after controlling forGDP per capita. Results have generally been con-sistent, and the basic Lipset model has been sup-ported using more advanced statistical methods(Burkhart and Lewis-Beck 1994).

Despite general statistical support for the eco-nomic-democratization hypothesis, the processby which rising wealth is converted to a higherlevel of procedural democracy remains a matterof some dispute. All studies begin with the processof industrialization from traditional societies inwhich wealth is heavily concentrated in thehands of a landed elite. As the society industrial-izes, a growing bourgeoisie and urban proletariatemerges. This, in turn, causes the power of thelanded aristocracy to wane (Tilly 1978, 1984).The relative distribution of economic, intellec-tual, and other power resources among varioussections of the population is a fundamental factoraccounting for the variation of democratization.No group is able to continue to suppress its com-petitors and maintain its hegemony, so that de-mocracy is a rational compromise betweenroughly equivalent competing groups (Vanhanen1992).

While the notion of the decentralization ofeconomic and political power over the centuriesis widely agreed, the nature of the main actors inthe democratic transition is much disputed. Bar-rington Moore (1966) argued that the primaryinterest of the bourgeois class lies in the guaranteeof the infrastructure of continued capitalist devel-opment and accumulation as this class opposesthe proletariat and the traditional aristocracy.The bourgeoisie, therefore, wants a democraticstate that supports institutions that are universal-istic and liberal. Increasing personal wealth gen-erates a more educated, politically astute middleclass that will demand redress of an impotentpolitical position and will work to promote ademocratic state. O’Donnell et al. (1986) andPrzeworski (1991) offer more empirical evidencefrom Latin America and Eastern Europe for the

notion of the urban bourgeoisie as a key actorin democratic transitions. Other social scientistshave nominated other social groups, usually ur-ban-based, as instrumental in generating politicalchange from authoritarian to democratic govern-ment forms. Rueschemeyer et al. (1992) contendthat the bourgeoisie favored democracy only incertain cases. According to their comparativehistorical studies, the working class in many casesplayed an instrumental role in bringing aboutpolitical democracy. Competing class interestscan promote or resist democratization; the struc-ture, strength, and autonomy of the state appara-tus and its relations with civil society, as wellas the impact of transnational power, ultimatelydictate whether and how democratic transitionsoccur.

This review has shown how the various ap-proaches have produced separate inferencesabout the genesis of democratization. While mostattention has focused on the methodological di-vide between the historical and statistical ap-proaches, our review has argued that the failureto integrate various levels of analysis (state, re-gional, or global) has also generated an unneces-sary splintering of the democratization literature.Recognition of external effect is growing; “a dif-fusion, contagion, or demonstration effect seemsoperative, as many have noted, one that encour-ages democracies to press for change and authori-tarian rulers to give in” (Lipset 1994:16). LikeStein Rokkan (1984:132), writing about nation-building in Europe, we believe that most casestudies of democratization are “too atomizing . . .(treating) each case in isolation without takingaccount of its connections with its surroundings,of the geopolitical position of the area in question.I began to study the links in space among thedifferent cases and became convinced of the de-cisive importance of interregional relationships”(his emphasis). Our work explores the separateand overlapping effects of the global, regional,and neighboring trends towards democracy overthe past half-century in a spatial diffusion frame-work.

Diffusion and Democratization

As described by Brown (1981), an unnecessarycleavage in the diffusion literature has developedbetween innovation in-situ developments onthe one hand (emphasis on local and regionalcontexts) and diffusion processes (emphasis on


external effects) on the other. As a diffusionprocess, democratization can be examined by fo-cusing on the internal characteristics of a coun-try, including the growth of inclusive political andcivil rights, as well as institutions that supportthese social elements. Such a perspective mightexplain how democracy spreads across localitieswithin a particular country. This local study wouldnot, however, explain why democracy spreadsbetween countries unless there were some globalforces and structures generating similar pressuresin different locales, as in a hierarchical diffusion.The institutions and norms that comprise democ-racy, the states and societies that are susceptibleto change, and the sociopolitical landscapes ofcountries across the globe, modified at a varietyof scales by internal and external actors, are theobjects of measurement and evaluation. As notedabove, the traditional study of democratizationtypically isolates an individual factor or is limitedto an individual country. “Galton’s problem”(whether observations with similar structuralsimilarities may be dependent among geographicunits as a result of common external influencesupon the units, rather than reflecting underlyinginternal structural characteristics—Galton 1889)remains an unanswered issue in the study ofdemocratization.

Approached as a diffusion process, democraticchange can be viewed in terms of two importantelements: namely, the transfer of information andits reception. An analysis of the transfer processesinvolves a consideration of communication chan-nels, external promoters of democracy, and inter-nal facilitators, as well as the barriers to its spread.Democratization can be viewed as a possible out-come of the ebb and flow of information at do-mestic, regional, and global scales. Theseinformation flows are part of a web of interactionsrelated to geographic proximity, trade, diplo-macy, and contingent historical circumstances(Pollins 1989). Linguistic, cultural, psychological,religious, and ideological differences often serveas barriers to these information flows, leading toa differentiated political mosaic across the globe.The quality and cost of particular communicationchannels, as well as the activities of promotersand opponents, affect the extent to which politi-cal information is shared and ultimately influencewhether democracy is implemented.

The characteristics of receivers determinewhether institutional and normative changes areeventually implemented. As with other socialphenomena, the potential receiver must choose

between adopting or rejecting the innovation(Rogers 1995). With large-scale political change,there is a significant difference with other diffu-sions because the decision to adopt or not is oftenmade at an institutional level (head of state orlegislative body), and it is thus not an aggregateoutcome of individual decisions. The process ofdemocratization is intimately tied to the emer-gence and success of social movements (Markoff1996). The study of collective action focuses onthe relevance of communication behavior andopportunity structures for mobilization, and ex-amines the importance of domestic charac-teristics such as socioeconomic conditions,regime stability and coherence, and political op-portunity or repression. Additionally, adoption ofdemocratic change is often a function of theelite’s perceptions of the relative benefits, com-patibility, complexity, and suitability of democ-racy in the local context.

The decision to initiate or resist democraticchange thus hinges on a combination of condi-tions in the receiving state, local perceptions ofdemocracy as an alternative to the existing politi-cal system, and the outcomes of the struggles bycompeting groups for their preferred political re-gime styles. Less specific attention has been de-voted to the role of barriers to adoption, animportant element in the geographic approach toinnovation diffusion. Distance is an importantrestraint on communication between adopters,promoters, and information receivers, and diffu-sion processes can be channeled more quickly insome directions than others because of cultural,language, social, or religious barriers (Gould1969). Starr (1991) has called for the carefulinvestigation of these barriers in the study ofdemocratization.

In many instances, democratization has beencoerced, promoted, or instituted by outsideforces. One historical examination of sixty-oneindependent states identified only three that gen-erated democracy through independent inven-tion: Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.(Whitehead 1996). The remaining fifty-eightcountries experienced varying degrees of externalinfluence. Through incentives offered, sanctionsthreatened, or use of force, a promoter can inducedemocratization. In this century, internationalorganizations, private foundations, corporations,and individual governments have all taken activeroles in the promotion of democracy. The patternof diffusion in this instance is more predictableand is based predominantly on the interests of the


promoters. In recent decades, the U.S. has beenan active promoter of transitions towards democ-racy (McDougall 1997). For example, the demo-cratic wave of approximately twenty countries in1989 was widely perceived as a mark of the suc-cess of “Pax Americana” (Agnew 1993; O’Lough-lin and van der Wusten 1993).

Studies of diffusion typically find the temporalpattern of adoptions to an innovation resemblean S-shaped curve, with few adopters in theearlier periods, a rapid increase in adoptions inthe middle years, and slow acceptance of theinnovation by laggards (Gould 1969; Morrill et al.1988). By the early 1990s, more than half of theworld’s countries exhibited democratic charac-teristics; a diffusion model suggests that furtherdemocratization should increase more graduallyas saturation is approached. The S-curve is mostappropriate for relatively stable populations. Itdoes not adequately address situations with rec-ognizable waves of innovation and reversals, as isthe case of the diffusion of democracy. Once youhave smallpox, you are no longer susceptible. Thesame is not true of democracy. In this case, thespatial context is constantly expanding since thenatural limits of the bounded logistic curve keepmoving upward as more polities are created.

The applicability of the classic diffusion modelis limited for our purposes since we are concernedwith aggregate adoption by countries rather thanthe changing opinions of individual citizens. Mostdiffusion studies (including those by geographers)focus on individuals and their adoption rate, suchas farmers in Sweden (Hagerstrand 1967), or ofthe spread of disease (Cliff and Haggett 1988).Important elements such as the nature of thediffusion mechanism (hierarchical, contagious, orrelocation), the slope of the S-curve of adoption,the role of information providers, relative accessto information, and the constraints imposed byopposition forces correspond quite poorly to ouremphasis on adoption of authority structures inpolities. A disjuncture between centrographicmethods of analysis used by geographers for thestudy of individual adopters and spatial-statisticalmethods appropriate for the study of aggregateadoption is therefore apparent.

Five prototypes of diffusion can be identified inthe work on democratization (Huntington 1991;Modelski and Perry 1991; Starr 1991): (a) adap-tive innovation—as countries see the benefits ofdemocratization for earlier adopters; (b) emula-tion—where the uncertainties of democratizationare lessened by the examples provided by other

states; (c) promotion—as a country is coerced orconvinced to follow the example of a powerful orrevered prototype; (d) expansive communica-tion—in which polities learn about the elementsof democracy; and (e) local context— in which theinternal readiness of a state for acceptance ofexternal stimuli is related to its domestic condi-tions. Each of these forms has distinctive dynamicproperties. Adaptive innovation can inhibit de-mocracy if the previous democratic experience ofa neighbor or similar state has been a failure.Emulation typically operates in a hierarchical pat-tern based on the power hierarchy in a region.The promoter of democracy is typically driven byself-interest rather than by a consideration of theinternal conditions in the adopting state. Theexpansive communication model is limited by thefact that since more than fifty-six percent of allexisting polities are now democratic, it is notlikely that nonadopters are unaware of the exist-ence of the idea of democracy, but more probablethat they have not adopted due to local circum-stances. The adoption or nonadoption of newforms of government is dependent on the natureof complex local conditions. The ability to distin-guish between different forms of diffusion is im-portant for further understanding of the spread ofdemocracy. Isolating individual, local factors isproblematic because both internal and externalfactors, as well as the regional setting of thecountry, clearly deserve consideration.

Geographic Measures in aChanging International System

The international system has grown and ex-panded markedly since the early nineteenth cen-tury, with the number of polities increasing from31 in 1815, to 56 in 1900, to 157 in 1994, and 158by the beginning of 1998. Given the politicaldependence of extensive geographic areas priorto decolonialization and the extensive territorialrearrangements caused by World War II, we limitour study to the post-1945 era. The changingboundaries of existing states and the arrival ofnew states into the international system createopportunities and problems for spatially based,cross-national statistics. In-situ developments inmember states of the international system gener-ate no conceptual spatial difficulty, since thetopology does not change except in the caseof dramatic boundary shifts. Only the politicalvalues assigned to each country change. New


states entering the international system with as-sociated changes of international borders presentmore of a challenge. Spatial statistical analysistypically assumes that the topology remains con-stant. While this constant topology is usually thecase (for example, in studies of American coun-ties or states where the borders of the geographicunits remain constant throughout the study, andthe number of cases is the same at the end as atthe beginning of the study period), this conditionis obviously not met for international borders overany reasonable time span.

The modern era (1815–present) has wit-nessed both the rearrangement (e.g., Germanyin 1918) and disappearance (e.g., Prussia in1870) of established polities, as well as theemergence of many new states (e.g., the processof decolonization of Africa after 1957 and theindependence of fifteen former Soviet republicsin 1991). Since the implementation of diffusionmodels assumes a fixed underlying geography,such models will not be applied easily to bigchanges over long periods of time, but will bemore appropriate in situations in which eitherthe timeframe or the spatial context is rela-tively tightly constrained (or both). To makethis issue more specific, consider the calcula-tion of the spatial correlation using the widelyemployed measure of spatial association,5 Gi*.A dynamic map of changing political terrain inthe world makes temporal comparison of spa-tial-statistical measures virtually impossible be-cause the size of the contiguity matrix on whichthe index is based changes from year to year. Inour study, the spatial units (polities) becomemore numerous over time. Thus, if country B,a neighbor of A, enters the world-system at alater date, the Gi*, value for A is thereforealtered by this additional neighbor and the Gi*values cannot be compared across time sincethey are normalized differently at each point intime.6 The issue is similar to the well-known“modifiable areal unit problem” (Fotheringhamand Wong 1991; Fotheringham 1997), but ismagnified by the relative stability and salienceof national borders. One approach to the chal-lenges posed by the dynamic world politicalmap would be to treat each year as statisticallyindependent. This option would be suitable forstudying spatial autocorrelation but ignores thetemporal aspect of diffusion and completelymisses space-time interactions. Spatial andtemporal aspects of diffusion must be acknow-

ledged and analyzed, both separately and to-gether.

In order to compute the spatial measures,7Moran’s I and Gi*, we needed to choose aspatial weight metric. Unlike many geographicstudies that typically use a distance metric,such as the inverse of the squared inter-cen-troid distance, we chose the contiguity metricbecause of the specific nature of the study. Inearlier studies of diffusion in international poli-tics, comparison of different metrics has indi-cated the superiority of the land border (orshort sea distance) as the preferred metric(Most and Starr 1980; O’Loughlin 1986; Kirbyand Ward 1987; Gochman 1991; Siverson andStarr 1991).

Our method of deriving weights used anArc/Info® macro program to generate a conti-guity matrix from each of the Arc/Info cover-ages of the changing world map. Generating thecontiguity matrices for every year (1946–1994)requires several separate steps. True physicalcontiguities are first generated for the sixArc/Info coverages, 1946–1954, 1955–1974,1975–1989, 1990, 1991–1992 and 1993–1994,that are required to take boundary changes intoaccount. A new coverage is required when anew border is added or removed in the interna-tional system, such as the effacement of theinternational border between North and SouthVietnam in 1975. After the coverages werecreated, they were checked for a range of errorsincluding nonmatching of polygons and poli-ties, so that (e.g.) the Brazilian polygon actuallyreceives Brazil’s data and neighbors. Otherchecks included identification of countries andterritories that are not part of the Polity IIIdataset (e.g. Greenland) and a check of reflex-ivity of contiguities (e.g., France is a neighborof Germany and vice-versa). Islands and coun-tries with no proximate neighbors were alsochecked, and some were connected based onphysical proximity.8 After the construction ofthe six meta-matrices containing all possible con-nections between the countries, the matriceswere reconstituted as yearly contiguity matricesby determining which polities are in the system inan individual year and then configuring the meta-matrix to correspond to that configuration. Poli-t ie s can there fore become temporarypolitical-geographic islands as their neighbors fallout of the international system or if they are codedas “in transition” in the Polity III data.9


The Changing Distributionof Democracy

The three maps in Figure 1 summarize thechanging distribution of democracy since 1946.10

The dominant features of the maps are the growthof the world-system shown by the reduction ofcolonies (empty cells) over time, especially in the1960s; the growth in the number of stronglydemocratic states (scores greater than 8) overtime; and the relative frequency of “reversewaves” towards autocracy (examples include In-dia between 1972 and 1994, Egypt between 1950and 1972, Turkey between 1950 and 1972, Vene-zuela between 1972 and 1994, Indonesia between1950 and 1972, and Brazil between 1950 and1972). Other notable features on the maps in-clude the strong, though imperfect, correlationbetween wealth and strong democratic statusand, as a corollary, the concentration of stabledemocracies in North America, Western Europe,and Australasia/Japan. The most dramaticchanges have occurred in Latin America (partlydemocratic in 1950, to autocratic in 1972, tomostly democratic in 1994), Eastern Europe/So-viet Union (partly democratic in 1994), and sub-Saharan Africa (from colonial status to autocracyin 1972 to a mixed democratic-autocratic set ofpolities in 1994). Though the maps confirm thegeneral impression of the growth of democracy,many important reversals demonstrate that theprocess of democratization is not uniformly oneof growth and geographic spread.

The geographic patterns in Figure 1 and inother sample years can be summarized by thewell-known measure of geographic clustering,Moran’s I. The number of polities, mean democ-racy score, and the Moran’s I value for selectedyears from 1946 to 1994 are shown in Table 1. Theaverage democracy score fell after 1946 to a lowof –2.403 in 1977 and increased again to itsmaximum of 2.98 in 1994. The temporal trendsare consistent, with the only significant breakpoints in 1990–1991. The independence of manystates in Africa in the early 1960s led to a sizabledecrease in the aggregate extent of democracy inthe mid-to-late 1960s as preindependence ar-rangements for democratic polities collapsed.The increase in democracy in the late 1970s and1980s is an indication of Huntington’s (1991)“Third Wave” of democratization, though thebiggest increase in the global measure postdatesHuntington’s pinpointing by about 5 years. The

spatial autocorrelation measure, Moran’s I, is sig-nificant at p ≤ .05 for all years. Caution must beused in interpreting the Moran’s I values overtime since the value is dependent on the numberof cases. Regardless of the overall level of democ-racy in the world-system, democracies are geo-graphically clustered. With the big increase in theaverage democracy score after 1990, the Moran’sI statistic is decreasing as more countries havebecome democratic and the obvious geographicclustering of the Cold War period has ended.

A noteworthy development in quantitative ge-ography has been the development of methods toidentify and measure local differences across a setof spatial units; rather than global measures ofclustering, such as Moran’s I, local indicators ofspatial association (termed LISA by Anselin1995) are increasingly used to dissect the globalstatistic into its local components. The reversalof emphasis from similarity to differences allowsthe production of local statistics that can bemapped to help in the identification of the placesthat contribute most to the overall pattern (Foth-eringham 1997). In diffusion studies, the calcula-tion of local spatial statistics enables pinpointingof “hot spots.” The Gi* statistic (Ord and Getis1995) allows detection of local pockets of spatialdependence, which may not be apparent in globalstatistics, like Moran’s I, or even on maps of thephenomenon of interest like those in Figure 1.The measure and its display allow us to addressthe idiosyncrasies of local contexts. The methodis ideally suited to the ESDA strategy of calcula-tion, visualization, and mapping in a GIS frame-work and is part of a growing trend of integratingspatial analysis and GIS (Anselin and Getis1992). The Gi* statistic is therefore a case-by-case measure of spatial association and distin-guishes between correlation of low-low values ofdemocracy (a low value in a country similar to lowvalues of its neighbors) and high-high correlation.

The maps of the local indicators of spatialassociation in Figure 2 clearly identify the cluster-ing of democratic and autocratic polities in 1950,1972 and 1994. With a consistent mean value ofthe Gi* statistics of .32 across the years of thestudy, we define democratic regions on the mapsof Figure 2 as positive values greater than 1.5 andautocratic regions as values less than –1.0. In1950, the democratic regions were small andscattered, consisting of only a few polities inNorth America, Australasia, and NorthwesternEurope; by contrast, the autocratic region waslarge and centered in the Communist countries


of Eastern Europe and the adjacent Middle East.South America is a region of moderate autocracy.By 1972, the democratic region was still limitedto the three small regions (North America, Aus-

tralasia, and Northwestern Europe), while thestrongly autocratic region has shifted to most ofAfrica north of Zambia. The Communist coun-tries and South America are regions of moderate

1950

1972

1994

MostAutocratic

MostDemocratic

Democracy Scale

-10 -6.5 8.5 10White denotes no data. Gray with black cross hatching denotes a country in transition.

0

Figure 1. Geographic distribution of democracy scores, 1950, 1972, and 1994.


autocracy. By 1994, with 157 polities, the globehas dichotomized into two regions. The demo-cratic zone includes the Americas (though Mex-ico and Cuba are outliers), Western and SouthernEurope, and Australasia. The autocratic zone in1994 has consolidated since 1972 and is contigu-ous from Southern Africa through the MiddleEast to central Asia and China.11

The use of local indicators of spatial correla-tion thus allows a clear identification of the spa-tial division of the international system intodemocratic and autocratic zones at the end of thetwentieth century. There is, however, no cer-tainty that this division is stable. The changes ofthe past half-century show that reversals are pos-sible, maybe even likely, notwithstanding thedemocratic momentum of the past decade. In-deed, as noted in an earlier study (Lichbach1984), monotonic transitions toward democracyare something of a historical rarity, rather thanthe rule.

One challenge to this interpretation of demo-cratic scores is that the clustering is an artifact ofthe distribution of rich and poor countries on theworld map. As we noted earlier, GDP per capitais correlated with the presence of democracy, andtherefore, it is plausible that the maps in Figures1 and 2 are surrogates for the distribution ofwealth. To check this hypothesis, we examined

the link between these two variables in a sampleof more than 4000 cases from 1953 to 1992. Weused the POLITY III data along with the purchasing-power parity data on GDP per capita—in 1985international dollars—taken from the NationalBureau of Economic Research.12 The expectedrelationship between wealth and democracyemerged strongly in both regressions.

We then examined whether the residuals fromthe 1992 sample are spatially random. The Mo-rans’ I statistic for these residuals showed evi-dence of strong spatial clustering (I=0.264,Z=2.8, p-value =0.005). Furthermore, using thelocalized Gi* measures, we find evidence ofstrong, and statistically significant, local cluster-ing of high values in Latin America and strongclustering of high negative values in WesternAfrica, as well as other more limited clusters. Thissimple procedure provides an important confir-mation of the geographic clustering of politieswith similar democratic scores, even when themost consistent predictor of democracy (eco-nomic development) is controlled. It thus pro-vides a strong indicator of the effects ofgeographic location on the type of regime.Though we cannot claim to have ruled out biasfrom all possible omitted variables, these resultsdo confront the most obvious challenge to thediffusion hypothesis: that the clustering of politi-cal authority characteristics is solely a function ofthe clustering of nations on the basis of their GDP.Even controlling for GDP per capita, there re-mains strong clustering of the political democracyscores.

Temporal Diffusion of Democracy

The general international trend towards de-mocracy has not been without reversals. The longview of changes in regimes since 1815, catego-rized as democratic, autocratic, or in transition,is shown in Figure 3. Democracy’s growth hasoccurred in fits and starts, with shifts towardsdemocracy in the nineteenth century followed byshifts towards authoritarianism between 1920and 1935 and again between 1950 and 1975.Such reversals happen in two ways. First, groupsof countries once democratic may revert en masseto more authoritarian governmental forms, as inmany African countries in the mid-1960s. A sec-ond way occurs when groups of newly formedstates enter the international system withauthoritarian forms of government and become

Table 1. Distribution of Moran’s I scores forselected years between 1946 and 1994.a

Year N Mean Democracy Values Moran’s I

1946 76 1.111 0.3201947 77 0.844 0.3481948 81 0.378 0.4131949 86 0.089 0.4651950 87 0.195 0.4431955 92 0.118 0.3971960 109 –0.245 0.4371965 128 –1.041 0.3081970 135 –1.504 0.3971975 141 –2.044 0.3821977 142 –2.403 0.4141980 142 –1.724 0.4281985 142 –1.156 0.4801986 142 –0.941 0.4641987 142 –0.971 0.4601988 142 –0.775 0.4501989 142 –0.496 0.4991990 141 0.887 0.5591991 155 2.181 0.5381992 156 2.301 0.4731993 157 2.711 0.3761994 157 2.980 0.369a All of the Moran’s I values are significant at p # .05.


1950

1972

1994

i*

White denotes no data

G Spatial Correlation

-4.0 -1.0 1.5 4.0.32Mean

AutocraticRegions

DemocraticRegions

Figure 2. Geographic clustering of democracy scores, 1950, 1972, and 1994.


more democratic over time, as in the formerSoviet Union. The most dramatic absolute andproportional shift to democratization has oc-curred in the past decade (Figure 3).

Huntington (1991) identifies three periods inhistory (1828–1926; 1943–1962; 1974–present)during which liberalization and partial democra-tization have occurred. “Waves” are identifiedwhen changes toward democracy clearly outnum-ber changes towards autocracy. Each wave ofdemocratization has been followed by a period ofreversals in which some countries reverted tonondemocratic rule (1922–1942; 1958–1975).This trend, which is recognizable in Figure 3, hasbeen described as reverse waves: “In one sense,the democratization waves suggest a two-step-forward, one-step-backward pattern. To dateeach reverse wave has eliminated some but notall of the transitions to democracy of the previousdemocratization wave” (Huntington 1991:25). Inidentifying the repeated incidence of temporallyproximate regime changes, Huntington(1991:30) takes democratization waves and re-versals as manifestations of a more general phe-

nomenon in politics. At certain historical periodsor “critical junctures,” similar events happenmore or less simultaneously within differentcountries or political systems.

Further evidence of the ebb and flow of democ-ratization is provided in the wire-frame diagram(Figure 4). In this diagram, only those politiesexhibiting changes are displayed; in other words,only nonzero values of democracy are shown. Thespine of the graph between –3 and +4 indicatesthat most shifts are small; relatively few greatershifts are visible, and these are confined to the1968–1975 period for changes towards autocracybut are more temporally diffuse for changes to-wards democracy. Viewing the wire-frame fromits separate perspectives clearly shows the devel-opment of the rise of authoritarianism in Africaduring the 1960s and early 1970s and the markedtrend towards democratization between 1988 and1994. The “waves” of democracy had an associ-ated counterpart, namely the diffusion of autoc-racy. This relationship is most obvious insub-Saharan Africa during the 1970s and 1980s,when only a few countries, such as Senegal and

DemocracyIn TransitionAutocracy

Regime Emergence and Change (1815 - 1994)

150

100

50

Num

ber

of P

oliti

es

1820 1840 1850 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

0

Per

cent

age

of P

oliti

es 1.0

Figure 3. Changes in regime types, by number and proportions, 1815–1994.


Botswana, were not classified as authoritarian(Figure 1). There is no obvious theoretical reasonwhy a democratic wave must be offset by anauthoritarian wave, but empirically, this seems tohave been the case both in the 1970s and in thelate 1980s and early 1990s (Figure 4).

Looking more closely at the negative changeson the graph during more recent periods(1993–1994), there are a few failed experiencesin democratic governance (Gambia and the Co-moros Islands), but most other changes are small(shifts of one or two points on the 21-point scale).Contrary to many popular expectations, there areonly a few cases of mild retrenchment away fromdemocracy in the Soviet successor states. Theearlier wave of retrenchment away from democ-racy visible on Figure 4 occurs during the1968–1973 period in recently independent colo-nies, mainly in Africa or in semiindustrializedsocieties. The largest negative changes in thedemocracy score occurred in Lesotho, Malaysia,Somalia, and the Philippines, but substantialshifts towards autocracy also occurred in Kenya,Chile, Thailand, Zambia, South Korea, and Turkey.

On the positive side of Figure 4, our dataillustrate a corresponding increase in democrati-

zation during the 1969–1970 period in formercolonies making advances toward greater politi-cal democracy, such as Malaysia and Benin. Dur-ing the period 1980–1985, the beginning of thethird wave of democratization is visible in LatinAmerica, with large changes in Bolivia, Uruguay,Brazil, and Argentina; Turkey also made consid-erable progress towards procedural democracywith a transition to civil rule. Later, in the1988–1994 period, the graph indicates the lag-gard democracies in Latin America (Paraguay,Chile) as well as the arrival of the third wave ofdemocracy throughout Eastern and CentralEurope (Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hun-gary, and Russia), and to a lesser extent, in Asia(Taiwan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Fiji, andSouth Korea) and Africa (Algeria, Zambia, andLesotho).

In examining the relationship between tempo-ral and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion, ourwork also shows discrete changes in regimes thatrun counter to the trends of waves or sequences.One hypothesis is that internal domestic circum-stances drive the democratic transition, whileexternal influences affect the consolidation ofautocracy. An alternative hypothesis is that both

1994

19541960

1970

1980

1990

18

15

10

5

1

2.6

0

1954

1994

-18 -1 181

2.6

Sm

ooth

ed F

requ

ency

0

Democratic Change

Year(Image split and rotated above)

2.6

0

1994

1954 -18

-1

1960

1970

1980

1990 -5

-10

-15

Sm

ooth

ed F

requ

ency

YearNegative

DemocraticChange

YearPositive

DemocraticChange

Sm

ooth

ed F

requ

ency

Figure 4. Distribution of negative and positive changes in democracy scores, 1954 to 1994.

Y


internal and external influences have impacts,but inertia overrides other considerations. Bothhypotheses have a spatial component; the re-gional clustering of states with similar charac-teristics (or spatial heterogeneity across theglobe) shows a clear correlation with regions offailed democratic consolidation or of democraticimplementation. Africa in the late 1960s andearly 1970s presents an example of such a clus-tering of failed efforts of democratization. Givendomestic economic constraints, it is not surpris-ing that autocracy continued. It is more difficultto explain how some countries in a region offailed democratic consolidation managed to gofrom rhetoric to reality by maintaining and con-solidating the democratic ideals present at theirindependence.

One of the most distinctive features of Figure4 is the large number of countries that underwentsignificant positive democratic change between1988 and 1994. Although Bolivia, Argentina,Turkey, Uruguay, and Brazil registered largeswings in the democracy values during the early-to mid-1980s, a more pronounced period of tran-sition occurred after 1988. In 1988, South Korea,Pakistan, and Hungary witnessed positivechanges on the democracy scale of five points orgreater. The trend continued elsewhere in 1989for Paraguay, Poland, and Algeria. Althoughthese changes represent significant democraticshifts, it was the devolution of the Soviet Unionand developments in Eastern Europe that led tothe most concentrated wave of democratization.Of the nine changes in 1990, two-thirds occurredinside this region.

Despite popular impressions, shifts to democ-racy were not confined to Eastern Europe after1989. In 1990, Zambia, Bangladesh, Taiwan, andNepal registered considerable gains, and 1993and 1994 saw important movements towarddemocratic institutions in Africa, especially inLesotho, Malawi, and Mozambique. A positivenet change on the democracy scale does notnecessarily mean that the country is democraticat time t; rather, it indicates that there has beena greater shift toward democracy than towardautocracy. Categorizing the net changes in thedemocracy scale between 1978 and 1994 by re-gion indicates almost unanimous change in LatinAmerica, where all except Venezuela have posi-tive changes; 30 of the 33 sub-Saharan Africanstates increased on the democracy scale; and thecountries of Eastern Europe showed large in-creases (over +10; see Table 2). Between 1958

and 1974, only Burkina Faso registered a positivenet change on the democracy scale. More indica-tive of an aggregate trend towards authoritarian-ism, seventeen African countries had netnegative scores between 1958 and 1974. LatinAmerica’s turn toward authoritarianism is repre-sented by the negative democracy values that halfof the Latin American countries showed between1958 and 1973. Eight Latin American states (no-tably, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Gua-temala, and El Salvador) showed a positiveincrease on the democracy scale.

Spatial-Temporal Diffusionof Democracy

Having shown temporal and spatial patterns ofdemocratization separately, we switch now to aspace-time framework, since temporal cascadesof democracy and authoritarianism have a stronggeographical character. Whitehead (1996) con-nects temporal shifts in regime change to spatialspread, identifying five sequences of democratiza-tion, concentrated in short periods of time andalso regionally clustered. These are (a) WesternEurope, (b) the Caribbean, (c) Spain/Portugaland South America, (d) Central Europe (fol-lowed shortly by Eastern Europe), and (e) Africa.Similarly, “sequences of democratic breakdown .. . [have occurred] in Latin America in 1947–9or 1963–6, or in West Africa in the mid-1960’s”(Whitehead 1996:6). Whitehead’s research iden-tifies this “contagion” of regime change, examinesthe external influences or relevance of factors of“control,” and considers the connections be-tween domestic and international forces in termsof “consent.”

To see the interrelationships among geographi-cal and longitudinal changes in the distributionof democracy, we charted its spatial-temporalcorrelation from 1946 to 1994 (Figure 5). Thisthree-dimensional figure can be examined inthree ways: (a) for the same year (holding timeconstant), looking at changes with increasinggeographic distance or lags (spatial autocorrela-tion); (b) for the same spatial lag (holding dis-tance constant), looking at changes over timewith increasing temporal lags back to 1956; and(c) examining the intercorrelation between spaceand time with increasing spatial and temporallags. To clarify the distributions, we use magentafor significant positive autocorrelation and cyan


for significant negative correlation; significanceis at the .05 level.

The values displayed on Figure 5 show therespective time-space lagged correlation with the1994 level of democracy. Using the 1994 democ-racy values as a base, we can identify changes inthese values back through the 48 years of theseries to 1946, as well as across 9 spatial lags, theminimum number of spatial lags needed to spanthe globe. As an example, consider the democ-racy values for Brazil. To produce Figure 5, wecombined the 49 correlations of the yearly valuesfor 1994 and each of its values for the previousyears, as well as the correlation of Brazil’s 1994democracy values with those of its contiguousneighbors (lag 1), two-step neighbors (lag 2), andon up to 9 spatial lags for all years, with similartime-space correlations for the other 156 politiesin the study.

The dominant picture of the distribution isstability across space and time. Moving back in

time from 1994, the plateau of values for lags 1–9is gradually sloping for about 35 years (back to1960). The changes in the global distribution ofdemocracy following the entry of the Africanstates have already been noted. The correlationsurface plunges to a sink of significant negativecorrelation coefficients with a time lag of morethan 35 years from 1994 and with more than 5spatial lags from the state under consideration.Not surprisingly, a comparison of temporal andspatial lags shows that time offers a better predic-tion of democratic status than propinquity. Thelevel of democracy at t-1 for a country has a highercorrelation with the current value than eithercurrent or earlier values for neighboring states.The graph suggests that the future calibration ofan endogenous predictive space-time modelshould include a few temporal predictors and twospatial lags as well as interactive terms.

The decrease in the correlation coefficientbackward through time for the same spatial lag is

Table 2. Net Changes in Democracy Score between 1978 and 1994.a

Latin America Africa Europe

Country Net Change Country Net Change Country Net Change

Uruguay 18 Cen. Af. Rep 17 Hungary 17Argentina 17 Malawi 17 Ger. Dem. Rep. 17Haiti 16 Benin 15 Albania 16Chile 15 Lesotho 15 Spain 16Bolivia 15 Mali 15 Bulgaria 15Paraguay 14 Niger 15 Czech. Rep. 15Brazil 14 Zambia 15 Poland 15Ecuador 14 Madagascar 14 Russia 15Nicaragua 14 Mozambique 14 Rumania 12Panama 14 Guinea-Bissau 13 Belarus 3El Salvador 14 Congo 11 Slovakia 2Dominican Rep. 9 Senegal 7 Greece 2Guatemala 8 Ethiopia 6 Moldova 1Honduras 7 Ghana 5 Yugoslavia 1Guyana 5 South Africa 4 Croatia –5Peru 5 Comoros 3Mexico 3 Gabon 3Colombia 1 Ivory Coast 3Venezuela –1 Rwanda 3

Uganda 3Cameroon 2Kenya 2Togo 2Chad 1Mauritania 1Mauritius 1Swaziland 1Tanzania 1Zaire 1Sierra Leone –1Zimbabwe –10Gambia –17

aThe table lists only those countries that registered a change; it does not include polities with zero net changes.


very gradual to about 1960. It matters littlewhether the spatial lag is 1 or 9. The biggestdecreases are in the range of zero to 15 temporallags without any spatial lags (correlating the val-ues for the same country over time). At time lag10 and spatial lag zero, the correlation coefficientis still +0.7. In contrast to the temporal correlo-gram, the spatial correlogram shows a dramaticdecline in the coefficients from the zero to thefirst spatial lags. At the first time lag, the declineis from .9 to .7, but it is consistent all along thevalley between the zero and first-order spatial lag.Most interesting is the increase in the correlationcoefficients from the first to the second-orderspatial lag, as shown by the small ridge on thediagram. After the second-order lag, there is avery gradual slope with increasing spatial lags(back to lag 9). Geographic distance does nothave much effect on the overall distribution ofdemocracy scores, with the values of politiesstrongly correlated to the values of all neighbor-ing states in the region and stretching to distancesup to 9 lags. After the 1960s, the distribution ofdemocracy around the world was clustered inlarge regional masses. By 1994, as was seen inFigure 2, this spatial heterogeneity is evident onthe world map with two large regional concentra-tions of democracy and autocracy.

The space-time diagram shows a high degreeof regularity and evenness across time and space

dimensions. This bodes well for the developmentof a diffusion framework for the study of thegrowth of democratic regimes over time.While we are not yet able to state the exactnature of the diffusion process (contagiousversus hierarchical, for example), the three-dimensional distribution in Figure 5 permitsconfidence that the changes are regular andhighly dependent in space and time. Thoughit might be too much of a stretch to claim thatthe process is one of “democratic dominoes”(Starr 1991), since such geometric regularityof spacing and timing is rare in internationalpolitics, we can agree with Starr that diffu-sion should have a central role in a “broadlinkage politics framework” that integratesdomestic factors with global, regional, andneighboring external influences. Geographi-cal proximity increases the number of inter-actions that can promote democracy orauthoritarianism between countries; thecloser countries are to each other, the greaterthe number of possible linkages throughwhich democracy can be promoted or spread.

The Diffusion of Democracy inAfrica and Latin America

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was easyto claim that a zeitgeist dominated the interna-tional scene. The foreign policy of the U.S. andits allies combined with the crises of authoritar-ian regimes in some world-regions to push thedemocratic agenda. Linz and Stephan notedthat “when a country is part of an internationalideological community where democracy isonly one of many strongly contested ideologies,the chances of transitioning to and consolidat-ing democracy is substantially less than if thespirit of the times is one where democraticideologies have no powerful contenders”(1996:74). Through an examination of recentchanges in regimes in Latin America and Af-rica, we offer several plausible explanationsthat might account for the patterns thatemerged so clearly in the aggregate data. We arenot challenging previous attempts to explainthe rise of democracy or authoritarianism inany particular country. Rather, we are lookingfor plausible explanations that might accountfor the spatial autocorrelation prominent in ouraggregate results in Figures 4 and 5.

0

1946 9

1994

-0.2

Co

rre

lati

on

(19

94

Ba

se)

Spatial lagsTime

1

0

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

5

-.2 -.1 0 .2 .3 1.0

.5

Spatio-Temporal Correlation

Figure 5. Correlogram of democracy scores in space(9 lags) and time (48 lags).


Africa

During 1978–1994, the southern Africanstates of Malawi, Lesotho, Zambia, and Mozam-bique made some of the most pronounced move-ments towards democracy (Table 2). Theirproximity or inclusion in the Front Line States(FLS) suggests that developments in and aroundSouth Africa generated dramatic shifts in South-ern African politics. Zambia, Mozambique,Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland—and later postinde-pendence Zimbabwe13 and Namibia—have a his-tory of inst i tut ional i z ing cooperat ion,collaboration, and high-level communicationdating back to the early 1970s. Zambia played anessential role in the liberation of Zimbabwe, An-gola, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa,and after its independence in 1980, Zimbabweperformed a similar demonstration effect for bothSouth Africa and Namibia (Scarritt and Nkiwane1996). These countries share a colonial and post-colonial history where diffusion and mobility ofpeople, labor, and ideas have been the normrather than the exception. The Southern AfricanDevelopment Coordination Conference(SADCC) re-formed itself into the Southern Af-rica Development Community (SADC) in 1992.

The fragility of democratic institutions de-creases the chances of successful democratic con-solidation, and the risks of reversal appearmagnified in Southern Africa, a “potential,though very fragile, zone of democratizing gov-ernments and economic recovery” (Lewis1996:129). Other spatially clustered factors, suchas ethnic divisions, poverty, environmental deg-radation, economic difficulties, and colonial his-tory, increase the difficulty of consolidation.Without institutional stability or established tra-ditions, democratic consolidation seems unlikely.Postindependence Africa lacked either experi-ence with democratic processes or establishedpolitical institutions. Though British coloniesgenerally had a somewhat stronger foundation forpolitical institutions, their postindependence ex-istence was fleeting; French colonies had fewinstitutions, and the Lusophone colonies and theBelgian Congo were even less prepared. The co-lonial powers appeared generally relieved to begranting independence. Despite some efforts to“impose” democratic transitions on former colo-nies, little preparation was given to the postinde-pendence period. The stakes for power werehighest, the likelihood of democratic consolida-tion lowest, and the existence of democracy most

tenuous in the turbulent 1960s. Through theinstitutionalized cooperation against South Af-rica, the FLS/SADCC countries were able toexercise some influence over each other. Joseph(1997) notes that most “ruler conversions” tookplace under duress, a last-minute grasp at poweras African leaders began to advise each other onhow to hold democratic elections without beingvoted out of office.

In order to examine the interrelationships be-tween adjoining regions and to detect any cross-regional transfer of democratization, we graphedthe average democracy score for selected worldregions, two at a time (Figure 6 A–D). The graphsare scaled so that the zero point on the democracyscale divides the graphs into four zones. With astarting point of 1960 (when most African statesbecame independent), we can examine the leadand lag effect of each of the regions and alsoidentify four kinds of trends toward democratiza-tion, autocratization, or combinations of both.14

Africa is a laggard region in democratizationcompared to Latin America (Figure 6A). Thespatiotemporal shift in the average regional de-mocracy in the top-left graph shows clearly thatLatin America has consistently maintained ahigher score since 1960. Both regions becamemore autocratic for the first 16 years of the series,but after 1977, Latin America first and thenAfrica (after 1989) became more democratic. Bythe end of the study period, the average level ofdemocracy for Latin America (+7.2) was signifi-cantly higher than the mean African level, whichbarely reached zero. Though not geographicallycontiguous, Latin America and Africa wereclearly affected by the “winds of change.” Withthe end of the Cold War, the global discoursechanged to an ideology of political democracy.Latin America had been the scene of many sur-rogate conflicts between the superpowers duringthe Cold War (especially Central America in the1980s), but the trend towards democratizationwas firmly established by 1980. Africa, by con-trast, preoccupied with the South African strug-gles, became the target of a type of “aid-hostagedemocracy” after 1990 as Western aid donorsmade foreign aid conditional on political reforms,multiparty elections, and economic liberalization(Diamond 1994). The effects seen in Figure 6Amight be attributed to this promotion ofdemocracy.

A comparison of two major subregions withinAfrica (West and Southern Africa) sheds morelight on the trends towards democratization in


the continent. The top-right graph (Figure 6B)shows that Southern Africa (south of Zaire) hasbeen consistently more democratic than WestAfrica (sub-Saharan states west of Cameroon).Until 1970, the average value on the democracyindex was positive for Southern Africa comparedto the negative value for the West African states,but both subregions become increasingly auto-cratic between independence and 1989. A no-ticeable democratic trend in West Africa in themid-1970s proved short-lived. After 1989, bothregions demonstrated a democratic trend thatseems to have stalled in West Africa while con-tinuing strongly in Southern Africa. By 1994, thetrend-line had come full circle to a point veryclose to its initial state in 1960. West Africa is stilla region of autocracy in the mid-1990s (also seeFigure 2).

The constraints on regime options in contem-porary Africa are many. For example, Botswanaobviously ranks high on the democracy score used

in this article, as well as on civil-liberty indicators,but an argument that political representation hasnot been matched by other democratic indicatorsfinds substantial evidence. One of the few Africanstates that has maintained a functioning multi-party system, Botswana nevertheless has hadone-party dominance from the 1960s to the1990s, though opposition representation has in-creased slowly over time (Bratton and van deWalle 1997; Good 1992). Yet the presence of aparliamentary system and high voter turnout hasnot been matched by the growth of civil society,as expansion of the state apparatus over the pastquarter-century has reduced the pool of civic ac-tivists, who have been incorporated into the stateapparatus (Stedman 1993). Unlike many Africanstates, Botswana is small and, ethnically, rela-tively homogeneous. These differences, as well asideological competition during the years of theCold War that generated a bipolar lineup of theAfrican countries, make Botswana a problematic

8

Cen

tral

Am

eric

a

South America-8

-8

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

6

-6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8

1987

19751960

1977

1989

1994

1981

19891984

1982

Asi

a

Latin America-8

-8

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

6

-6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8

1985

1960

1977

1990

1994

1980

1974

8

Wes

t Afr

ica

Southern Africa-8

-8

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

6

-6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8

19601991

1989 1967

1994

19651970

1979

1993

1972

8La

tin A

mer

ica

-8

-8

-6

-4

-2

0

2

4

6

-6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8

Africa

1963

1960

1977

1992

1994

1985

Spatio-Temporal Shifts in Democracy

A B

C D

Figure 6. Shifts in democracy scores by regions. (A) Latin America and Africa, (B) West and Southern Africa; (C)Asia and Latin America; and (D) Central and South America.


example of the success of Western notions ofdemocracy in the continent.

South America

In Latin America, the same countries thatturned toward authoritarianism in the 1960s and1970s (Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil) allbecame democratic by 1990. Both trends came toLatin America before continuing to other parts ofthe globe; the autocratic wave of the early 1960sarrived in Africa later in the decade, while LatinAmerica’s democratic wave of the 1980s occurredin much of Africa and Eastern Europe about ahalf-decade later.

A number of specific events, internal politicaldevelopments, and economic crises conspiredagainst South American democracy in the 1960sand early 1970s, producing a wave of authoritari-anism and a series of military coups across theentire region—Brazil in 1964, Argentina in 1966,Peru in 1968, Uruguay in 1971, and Chile in 1973.Although specific events triggered the variousmilitary coups throughout the region, underlyingstructural causes also played an important role.According to O’Donnell (1973), the perceivedneed to “deepen” industrialization, switchingfrom the import-substitution phase of industriali-zation to a more capital-intensive form of accu-mulation, required more authoritarian forms ofgovernance. Authoritarian regimes were able todirect investment towards capital goods, transfer-ring resources from labor to capital through re-pression (O’Donnell 1973). Although this thesishas been challenged, it is generally agreed thatdemocracy was undermined by economic prob-lems such as dwindling foreign reserves, wildlyfluctuating prices in export products, growingdebt, and inflation (Stepan 1971, 1973). In addi-tion to economic factors encouraging the rise ofauthoritarianism, an important change in militarydoctrine espoused by the U.S. spread across LatinAmerica and redefined the role of the military inpolitics.

Within the context of economic crisis andpolitical stalemate in the late 1950s came risingdemands from previously excluded social groups.The successful Cuban revolution attracted sig-nificant notice in the military barracks through-out the continent. In Brazil, the “rhetoric ofmobilization and radicalization . . . in the wake ofthe Cuban revolution, was feared by many officersas the prelude to the destruction of the traditional

army” (Stepan 1971:154). Partly in response todevelopments in Cuba, U.S. military assistanceprograms to Latin America increased their focuson counterinsurgency, as military leaders beganto study the close connection between povertyand the political discontent that fostered guerrillamovements throughout the region. Formally es-tablished in 1949 with the help of a U.S. militarymission, Brazil’s Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG)brought together military officers and civilianswho studied subjects normally outside the mili-tary’s immediate interest, such as economic de-velopment and civic action. In addition totraining in Brazil, high-ranking officers tookclasses in the U.S. (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas).In the years leading up to the military coup in1964, then, a growing segment of the militaryestablishment and elite sectors of society shareda similar educational experience. The militarygained new confidence in its ability to directBrazil’s economic and political development, andshifted the bounds in civil-military relations afterthe overthrow of President Goulart in 1964(Stepan 1971).

Similar political-economic dynamics soontranspired in Peru and Argentina. Although thePeruvian military implemented a very differentset of policies from the Brazilian military regime,its self-declared role in society was similar. InPeru, the Center for Higher Military Studies(Centro de Altos Estudios Militares, CAEM) per-formed virtually the same function as Brazil’sESG, and the military seized power in 1968 in partto prevent what they viewed as an inevitablepeasant revolution. In a chaotic political situationexacerbated by economic crisis, the Argentinemilitary seized power in 1966. Although some-what more fractionalized than their Brazilian andPeruvian counterparts, the leading group withinthe Argentine military sought to address the sameproblems that preoccupied their Latin Americanneighbors. “The real enemy no longer was exter-nal aggression or even an internal military threat,but rather po—itical or ideological dissent andeconomic underdevelopment, both of whichthreatened the ‘breakdown of national internalcohesion’ ” (Smith 1989:41).

While internal political and economic devel-opments formed the basis of authoritarian rule inLatin America during the mid- to late-1960s,these trends were part of a wider diffusion ofsociopolitical and economic difficulties at theregional and global scales. Nevertheless, the dif-fusion of a new military doctrine aimed at domes-


tic insurgency contributes to an explanation forthe rise of authoritarianism in Latin America.Geographical proximity was central to the processin two ways. First, similar economic challengesand crises in the region facilitated the spread ofsolutions that, at first, seemed successful in curb-ing rebellion. Military establishments sought in-stitutional survival, and Brazil provided onepossible model. Second, through military assis-tance and training programs, U.S. administra-tions helped the Latin American military forcesfight left-wing movements in the Western hemi-sphere by promoting the U.S. view of security. Atthis stage, the U.S. external promotion wasauthoritarian, and it was not until the CarterAdministration came to power in 1977 that U.S.policy changed to the promotion of democracy asthe natural political ally of capitalist develop-ment. During the succeeding Reagan administra-tion, this policy was reversed, as the “second ColdWar” was fought through proxy forces in manyparts of the Third World, including Latin Amer-ica (O’Loughlin 1989).

Innovations in political institutions continueto spread throughout Latin America. Begun as aninstitutional feature to limit the power of strong,personalist regimes, constitutional prohibitionsagainst presidential reelection have started tochange. Once Argentina’s battle with inflationwas over and President Menem had successfullychanged the Argentine constitution to allow hisreelection in the late 1980s, Brazil and Peru fol-lowed suit in what amounts to a local demonstra-tion effect. Constitutional changes allowing thepresident to run for a second term took placeunder very similar circumstances, particularly inArgentina and Brazil.

In addition to innovations in the politicalrealm, economic policy convergence has beenparticularly pronounced in Latin America. Theprivatization of public utilities in the energy andtelecommunications industries has swept LatinAmerica in the last five years. Much of the gov-ernment sell-off stems from the need to cut soar-ing government budget deficits to reassureforeign investors. Although each country’s priva-tization scheme varies widely in size and scope,Chile’s economic success has clearly encouragedother Latin American countries to adopt similarmeasures. In addition to common economic andpolitical conditions, the spread of institutions andideas in Latin America clearly benefits from shar-ing a common language, which in turn facilitates

the transmission of information across LatinAmerica via television.

A comparison of the democracy scores of twoThird World regions, Latin America and Asia, ispresented in Figure 6C. As in the African-LatinAmerican comparison, Latin America had beenmore democratic and had developed a trend to-ward democracy sooner (1977 compared to 1985in Asia), while both regions became significantlymore autocratic between 1960 and 1977. By1994, the mean score for Asia had risen to +1.8while the score for Latin America exceeded +6.0.While modest economic growth in Latin Americaof the past decade has been paralleled by changestowards democracy, the correlation between po-litical and economic change is much weaker inAsia. One significant difference between the con-tinents is the role of the major external promoter.For Latin America, the U.S. has pushed a demo-cratic agenda since the Reagan Presidency as acorollary of economic, military, and developmentaid; Japan, as the major aid-giver in Asia, doesnot tie aid to politics as directly and contributessubstantial foreign aid to repressive regimes(Grant and Nijman 1997).

The final graph (6D) compares the spatiotem-poral trends for the two regions of Latin America,Central America (north of Colombia) and SouthAmerica (south of Panama). Since 1977, thepoint at which both regions shifted from the trendtowards more autocracy to a trend towards moredemocracy, the mean democracy values for bothregions have developed in a symmetrical manner,tracing a 45-degree slope to the upper right. Since1977 and especially since 1982, the regional av-erages have been similar. We can conclude thatLatin America is one of the most homogeneousof the world’s regions with respect to the levelsand trends of democratization.

The case studies reported here stress externalinfluences on democratization, especially theroles played by regional superpowers, extrare-gional agents, and the interconnections betweenthe political elites of the polities. As a conse-quence of propinquity, the states of the regionsshare economic and social similarities, and byrelying solely on geographic proximity as a predic-tive tool, one might expect similar political out-comes. But as we have shown earlier in the article,democratic scores cluster geographically morethan expected by similar rates of economic devel-opment. Snowballing seems fairly common asnew political ideologies roll through the regions,as witnessed in the examples of military repres-


sion in Latin America, the collapse of preinde-pendent democratic rules in Africa in the 1960s,and the trends towards democracy in both re-gions, in the mid-1980s in Latin America andafter 1989 in Southern Africa. Common to bothregions is a contextual element that draws uponregional similarities and reinforces them byspreading political ideology between polities in aregular fashion.

Conclusions

We began our work by pointing to some appar-ent deficiencies in existing research on regimechanges and the transitions to democracy andautocracy. While much valuable work has beencompleted on the mechanisms of democratiza-tion, democratic theory, the particular conditionsin states undergoing transitions, and the conse-quences of democracy in foreign policy and eco-nomic development, an overarching view oftrends and global patterns is missing. In this paper,we have provided evidence that the trends since1945 are not uniformly towards democracy.Though both the ratio and number of democra-cies in the international system are at the highestlevels ever recorded, the so-called “third wave”democratization is a recent phenomenon, which,like previous waves of democratization, is suscep-tible to reversal. In the longer perspective of thepast half-century, we noted both geographic andtemporal clustering of autocracies as well as de-mocracies.

In this article, we have provided strong andconsistent evidence of the temporal cascading ofdemocratic and autocratic trends, spatial cluster-ing of regime types, and strong temporal-spatialautocorrelation. This latter clustering is mostclearly visible in the space-time correlogram inFigure 5, but it can also be discerned in the studiesof regime changes in Southern Africa and LatinAmerica. Our exploratory spatial-data analysispresents visualization of the principal patternsand summary statistics indicating the nature ofthe trends. In an accompanying movie availablefrom our web site, we have shown how the ebband flow of democracy is regionally variable. LikeStarr (1991), we conclude that analyzing regimechange will benefit from a “domain-specific” po-sition. We caution against assuming that “univer-sal laws” govern the growth of democracy. It

remains important to recognize that the processis apparently affected by regional and local con-textual elements that remain important.

A second caution relates to the search for asingle, dominant form of diffusion. The spread ofdemocracy appears to be facilitated by elementsshared by countries with similar characteristics.We provided one illustration of this contextualelement in the diffusion of a national-securitydoctrine in the Latin American case study. Inother cases, severe economic crises strike a groupof countries with similar accumulative and pro-ductive processes, leading to a new kind of politi-cal dynamics that challenge the existing statestructures; this type of transition is witnessed inthe events in Eastern Europe after 1989 (Boswelland Peters 1989). Finally, cooperation in regionaleconomic and political organizations facilitatesthe transmission of democratic as well as authori-tarian institutions. Our discussion of southernAfrica illustrates this externally induced changein regime type. Since the diffusion of democracyis transmitted through different channels withineach region, there may not be a single conduitthrough which democracy diffuses.

We stressed the important role played by exter-nal conditions in the promotion of both autocracyand democracy. The common mode of researchrelating the economic and social characteristicsof a country to the political characteristics of itspolity unfortunately ignores both external agencyand regional contagion. Our study suggests theneed simultaneously to incorporate the spatialeffects on regime change in order to build a morecomplete picture of the timing and nature of politi-cal changes. Future work may profitably examinethe goals and techniques of promoters as a meansof determining future democratic locations.

The late twentieth century is a time of Janus-like reflection, one where we might both lookback at the political developments of the pasthundred years and forward to the next century.While our century, by most criteria, has been themost violent in history in terms of destruction ofhuman life, whether it marks a major transitionin the dominant mode of political arrangementswithin countries—from seizure, appointment, orinheritance of power to rule by elected repre-sentatives; from autocrats without power limita-tions to political leaders subject to all sorts ofconstraints—remains to be seen. Though morepeople are living under democratic rule and havethe associated civil liberties such as freedom of


expression, prior reversals suggest caution tothose who are prematurely celebrating the victoryof western-style liberal democracy. For this rea-son, we did not use our space-time framework topredict likely outcomes for the next few decades;any simple projection of the trends of the pastdecade is very likely to be well off the mark.

The spread of democratization brings with itmuch reckless speculation. Western leaders havecharacterized these changes as important ideo-logical victories that bring the world to a consid-erably safer state of affairs. One scholar hassummarized the statistical evidence as producinga result as “close as anything we have to anempirical law in international relations” (Levy1988:662). Democracies do not tend to fight warsagainst one another directly. Will this mean ademocratic world will be one without global war-fare? Classic liberal philosophical thought (i.e.,Immanuel Kant 1795[1991]) has been broughtback into play in an early twentieth-century tra-dition (e.g., Wilsonian idealism) in order to attackthe main tenets of realism in a post-Cold Warcontext. Whether norms or institutions or both willultimately be seen as the mechanism standingbehind democratic peace is unclear. What ouranalysis adds to this line of research is the soberingresult that not only is democratization not ineluc-table, but the regional contexts within which itoperates are clearly very powerful, showing evi-dence of both ebbs and flows as well as stronginertia. Indeed, we have found that a regionalcontext is important in understanding the linkbetween regime change and violent conflict (Gle-ditsch and Ward 1998).

Will a democratic world be more prosperous,especially if democratic norms and institutionsmitigate global and regional conflicts? Will it betrue that democrats avoid war with other demo-crats, even if all nondemocrats come to resideonly in the history books? Whatever the largertrend is, our results show that simple extrapola-tion of democratization is likely to miss importantand interesting results away from the broad cor-relation, results likely to be guided by the powerfulspatial clustering of democratic changes.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National ScienceFoundation grant, SBR-9511577. The research was

undertaken in the Program on Political and EconomicChange, Institute of Behavioral Science, at the Univer-sity of Colorado, in the context of a graduate researchand training initiative on “Globalization and Democ-racy.” The work was also supported by the NationalScience Foundation (EHR9553453) and by the Gradu-ate School of the University of Colorado at Boulder.Faculty and students in the Program have created asplendid interdi£wciplinary environment that sup-ported our research, and we thank them, especially ourfaculty colleagues, Richard Jessor, Edward S. Green-berg, and Lynn Staeheli. Jim Robb of the GeographyDepartment’s Cartographic Lab produced the finalversions of the figures with his characteristic grace andélan, though we were afraid to ask him to change thegraphs one more time. The comments of the Annalsreviewers were helpful in clarifying our arguments andpresentations.

Appendix I Coding Rules for Polity III Politi-cal Democracy (adapted from Jaggers and Gurr

1995:472)

DemocracyAuthority Characteristic “Points”

Competitiveness of Political ParticipationCompetitive 3Transitional 2Factional 1Restricted –1Suppressed –2

Regulation of Political ParticipationRegulated 0Factional or Transitional 0Factional/Restricted –1Restricted –2Unregulated 0

Competitiveness of Executive RecruitmentElected 2Transitional 1Selected –2

Openness of Executive RecruitmentElected 1Dual: Hereditary & Elected 1Dual: Hereditary & Designation –1Closed –1

Constraints on Chief ExecutiveParity or Subordination 4Intermediate 1: between ↑ & ↓ 3Substantial Limitations 2Intermediate 2: between ↑ & ↓ 1Slight to Moderate Limitations –1Intermediate 3: between ↑ & ↓ –2Unlimited Power –3

Total Scores Ranging from Σ Democracy–10 to +10 “Points”


Notes

1. The term “polity” was made popular by DavidEaston (1965), who distinguished among threelevels of analysis in political systems: the authori-ties, or the individuals who hold power, the re-gime, or the state apparatus, and the polity,broadly taken to include the institutional, politi-cal structure. Each higher level subsumes eachprior, lower level.

2. Polity III is a compendium of measures of politicalparticipation, competition, and regulation. Thetotal number of country-years in the dataset is6,068 for the period 1946–1994. Six percent of thecases (i.e., 342 country-years) are assigned missingdata values because polities were in transition orexperiencing internal civil conflict or externalinvasion.

3. Indeed, the European origins of liberal democracyis reflected in the concern expressed by Africancommentators such as Nyerere (1994), Makinda(1996), and Monga (1996), who challenge thepossibility of transporting democracy as a particu-lar form of political organization to a differentcultural environment.

4. An unpublished study by Gleditsch (1996) foundthat the association between a country’s level ofdemocracy and that of its contiguous neighborswas of a substantive magnitude comparable tothat of the relationship between level of democ-racy and level of economic development (as meas-ured by energy consumption) for a pooled samplefrom 1953 to 1993.

5. The Gi* statistic is defined as:

, j ≠ i where wij

denotes element i,j in a binary cotiguity matrixand xj is an observation at location j. The Gi

*

measure is normally distributed and indicates theextent to which similarly valued observations areclustered around a particular observation i. Apositive value for the Gi* statistic at a particularlocation implies spatial clustering of high valuesaround that location; a negative value indicates aspatial grouping of low values. For technical de-tails, see Ord and Getis (1995).

6. We thank Arthur Getis for his discussions with uson this point.

7. Moran’s I is given by

where is an

element of a row-standardized spatial-weight ma-trix that indicates whether or not i and j arecontiguous. The significance of Moran’s I is as-sessed by a standardized z-score that follows anormal distribution and is computed by subtract-

ing the theoretical mean from I and dividing theresult by the standard deviation.

8. The following examples date from 1990 but arerepresentative of the contiguities made for allyears. The U.S. is a land neighbor of Mexico andCanada and a neighbor of Russia and Cuba byvirtue of a short maritime separation. To providea trans-Atlantic link, the U.S. is made contiguousto the U.K., based on cultural and political simi-larity. Other connections not obvious are Cuba toHaiti, Jamaica, and Mexico; Madagascar to theComoros and to Mozambique; the Comoros toTanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar; Indone-sia to Malaysia and Singapore, Australia, Philip-pines, and Papua New Guinea; Australia to NewZealand; Japan to Russia, China and the Republicof Korea; Trinidad to Venezuela; Cyprus to Turkey,Lebanon and Syria; and Taiwan to China. Iceland,Mauritius, and Fiji remained as islands with noneighbors in the international system.

9. The contiguity matrices used in our study areavailable in ASCII format from the http://www.colorado.edu/IBS/GAD/Data/Cmats.html. Notethat these matrices do not include the U.S.–U.K.contiguity.

10. The maps in Figure 1 display the major changesover the half-century. Color maps of the distribu-tion of the democracy scores for each year can befound at http: / /www.colorado.edu/IBS/GAD/spacetime.html. We thank Barbara Butten-field for her advice in this map-making enterpriseand Dennis Ward for his multimedia authoringexpertise.

11. Statistical outliers like South Africa on the1972 and 1994 maps are caused by the isolatedlocation of a high value in a region of low valueson the democracy-minus-autocracy index, orvice-versa.

12. The GDP/capita data are from the PENN worldtables at http://www.nber.harvard.edu. The re-sults show that the extent of political democracyis a strong correlate of GDP per capita. The resultsof the regression are shown in Table A:

Table A. Democracy Score as a Function of GDPper Capita, 1953–1992

Variables Value St. Error T value Pr(>|t|)

(Intercept) –3.90 0.147 –26.49 0.0000GDP per

capita 0.0010 0.00003 37.8669 0.0000F(1,4272) = 1434

We also examined the cross-section of cases in1992, which show the same basic relationship: astrong positive association between higher levelsof GDP per capita and higher levels of democracy,as seen in Table B:

∑ ∑ +

∑ ∑

j ij j i ij ii

x j ij i if

w x w w x

n w w n

–

$ – / –

d ib gσ 2 2 1

nw

wx x x x

x xi j iji j ij

i j

i i∑ ∑

∑ ∑∑~

~ – –

–

b gd ib g2

~wij

~w


Table B. Democracy Score as a Function of GDPper Capita, 1992

Variables Value St. Error T value Pr(>|t|)

(Intercept) –1.1550 0.8700 –1.3276 0.1880GDP per

capita 0.0008 0.0001 7.3273 0.0000F(1,82) = 53.69

13. Zambia and Zimbabwe have a long history ofcooperation, dating from the colonial period andthe later incorporation of both into the Federationof Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953. These twostates were weakly linked via the Southern AfricaDevelopment Coordination Conference(SADCC) to other countries in the region sur-rounding South Africa.

14. The upper-left quadrant shows democratizationfor the region plotted on the vertical axis andautocracy as the dominant feature of the horizon-tal axis region; the bottom-right quadrant showsdemocratization for the region on the horizontalaxis and autocracy for the vertical axis region.Directions towards the upper-right of the graphshow that both regions are moving towards de-mocratization; a trend to the bottom-left quad-rant indicates more autocratization for bothregions. Specific years are marked on the graphsto aid in their interpretation.

References

Agnew, J. A. 1993. The United States and AmericanHegemony. In The Political Geography of the Twen-tieth-Century: A Global Analysis, ed. P.J. Taylor,pp. 207–38. London: Belhaven Press.

———. 1995. Democracy and Human Rights after theCold War. In Geographies of Global Change: Re-mapping the World in the Late Twentieth-Century,ed. R. J.Johnston, P. J. Taylor, and M. J. Watts,pp. 82–96. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Almond, G. A., and Verba, S. 1989. The Civic CultureRevisited. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Alvarez, M.; Cheibub, J. A.; Limongi, F.; and Przewor-ski, A. 1996. Classifying Political Regimes. Studiesin Comparative International Development 31:3–36.

Anselin, L. 1995. Local Indicators of Spatial Associa-tion - LISA. Geographical Analysis 27:93–114.

——— and Getis, A. 1992. Spatial Statistical Analysisand Geographical Information Systems. Annals ofRegional Science 26:19–33.

Arat, Z. 1991. Democracy and Human Rights in Devel-oping Countries. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Bergesen, A. 1992. Regime Change in the Semi-Periph-ery: Democratization in Latin America and theSocialist Bloc. Sociological Perspectives 35:405–13.

Bobbio, N. 1989. Democracy and Dictatorship: The Na-ture and Limits of State Power. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Bollen, K. A. 1979. Political Democracy and the Tim-ing of Development. American Sociological Review44:572–87.

———. 1980. Issues in the Comparative Measurementof Political Democracy. American Sociological Re-view 45:370–90.

———. 1983. World System Position, Dependency,and Democracy: The Cross-National Evidence.American Sociological Review 48:468–79.

———. 1993. Liberal Democracy: Validity and MethodFactors in Cross-National Measures. AmericanJournal of Political Science 37:1207–30.

——— and Jackman, R. 1985. Political Democracyand the Size Distribution of Income. AmericanSociological Review 50:438–57.

Boswell, T., and Peters, R. 1989. State Socialism andthe Industrial Divide in the World-Economy: AComparative Essay on the Rebellions in Polandand China. Critical Sociology 17:3–34.

Bratton, M., and van de Walle, N. 1997. DemocraticExperiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Com-parative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Braumoeller, B. F. 1997. Deadly Doves: Liberal Nation-alism and the Democratic Peace in the SovietSuccessor States. International Studies Quarterly41:375–402.

Brown, L. A. 1981. Innovation Diffusion: A New Per-spective. New York: Methuen.

Brown, M. 1997. Replacing Citizenship: Aids Activismand Radical Democracy. New York: GuilfordPress.

Burkhart, R. E., and Lewis-Beck, M. 1994. Compara-tive Democracy: The Economic DevelopmentHypothesis. American Political Science Review88:903–10.

Chan, S. 1997. In Search of Democratic Peace: Prob-lems and Promise. Mershon International StudiesReview 41:59–92.

Cliff, A. D., and Haggett, P. 1988. Atlas of DiseaseDistributions: Analytic Approaches to Epidemiologi-cal Data. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Coe, R. D., and Wilber, C. K. 1985. Capitalism andDemocracy: Schumpeter Revisited. Notre Dame,IN: Notre Dame University Press.

Cohen, J. L., and Arato, A. 1992. Civil Society andPolitical Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cutright, P. 1963. National Political Development:Measurement and Analysis. American SociologicalReview 28:253–64.

Dahl, R. A. 1979. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposi-tion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

———. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press.

Deegan, H. 1994. The Middle East and the Problems ofDemocracy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.


Diamond, L. 1994. Democracy. Africa Report 39:5,50–55.

Downs, A. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy.New York: Harper-Collins.

Easton, D. 1965. A Systems Analysis of Political Life. NewYork: John Wiley.

Eckstein, H., and Gurr, T. R. 1975. Patterns of Authority:A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry. New York:Wiley Interscience.

Fotheringham, A. S. 1997. Trends in QuantitativeMethods I: Stressing the Local. Progress in HumanGeography 21:88–96.

——— and Wong, D. S. 1991. The Modifiable ArealUnit Problem in Multivariate Statistical Analysis.Environment and Planning A 23: 1025–45.

Franck, T. M. 1992. The Emerging Right to DemocraticGovernance. American Journal of InternationalLaw 86:46–91.

Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man.New York: Free Press.

Galton, F. 1889. Comment on Edward B. Tylor’s “On aMethod of Investigating the Development of In-stitutions: Applied to Laws of Marriage and De-scent.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute18: 245–69.

Garton Ash, T. 1990. The Magic Lantern: The Revolutionof ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, andPrague. New York: Random House.

Gastil, R. 1990. The Comparative Survey of Freedom:Experiences and Suggestions. Studies in Compara-tive International Development 25:25–50.

Gills, B.; Rocamora, J.; and Wilson, R. 1993. LowIntensity Democracy: Political Power in the NewWorld Order. London: Pluto Press.

Gleditsch, K. S. 1996. Aspects of Democratization:Economic Development, Spatial Diffusion, andPersistence in Time. M.A. thesis, University ofColorado at Boulder.

——— and Ward, M. D. 1997. Double Take: A Re-Examination of Democracy and Autocracy inModern Polities. Journal of Conflict Resolution41:361–83.

——— and Ward, M. D. 1998. Democratization andWar in the Context of Time and Space. Typescript,Institute of Behavioral Science, University ofColorado.

Gochman, C. S. 1991. Interstate Metrics: Conceptual-izing, Operationalizing and Measuring the Geo-graphic Proximity of States since the Congress ofVienna. International Interactions 17:93–112.

Good, K. 1992. Interpreting the Exceptionality of Bot-swana. Journal of Modern African Studies 30:69–96.

Gould, C. C. 1988. Rethinking Democracy: Freedom andSocial Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society.New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gould, P. R. 1969. Spatial Diffusion. Washington: Asso-ciation of American Geographers.

Grant, R., and Nijman, J. 1997. Historical Changes inU.S. and Japanese Foreign Aid to the Asia-PacificRegion. Annals of the Association of American Ge-ographers 87:32–51.

Gurr, T. R. 1974. Persistence and Change in PoliticalSystems. American Political Science Review74:1482–1504.

Hadenius, A. 1992. Democracy and Development. NewYork: Cambridge University Press.

Hagerstrand, T. 1967. Innovation Diffusion as a SpatialProcess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Held, D., ed. 1991. Political Theory Today. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

Huntington, S. P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratiza-tion in the Late Twentieth-Century. Norman, OK:University of Oklahoma Press.

Jaggers, K., and Gurr, T. R. 1995. Transitions to Democ-racy: Tracking Democracy’s Third Wave with thePolity III Data. Journal of Peace Research32:469–82.

Joseph, R. 1997. Democratization in Africa after 1989:Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives. Com-parative Politics 29:363–82.

Kant, I. 1795. Perpetual Peace. Reprinted in I. Kant,Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbett,1991. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, R. 1997. Was Democracy Just a Moment?Atlantic Monthly December.

Kirby, A. M., and Ward, M. D. 1987. The SpatialAnalysis of Peace and War. Comparative PoliticalStudies 20:293–313.

Kofman, E. 1995. Citizenship for Some but Not forOthers: Spaces of Citizenship in ContemporaryEurope. Political Geography 14: 121–37.

Kolossov, V., and O’Loughlin, J. 1998. New Borders forNew World Orders: Territorialities at the Fin-de-Siècle. Geojournal 43(4): forthcoming.

Lerner, D. 1958. The Passing of Traditional Society: Mod-ernizing the Middle East. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Levy, J. S. 1988. Domestic Politics and War. Journal ofInterdisciplinary History 18:653–73.

Lewis, P. 1996. Economic Reform and Political Trans-formation in Africa: The Quest for a Politics ofDevelopment. World Politics 49:92–129.

Lichbach, M. I. 1984. Regime Change and the Coherenceof European Governments. Denver, CO.: Univer-sity of Denver Graduate School of InternationalStudies Monographs.

Linz, J., and Stepan, A. 1996. Problems of DemocraticTransition and Consolidation: Southern Europe,South America and Post-Communist Europe. Balti-more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lipset, S. M. 1959. Some Social Requisites of Democ-racy: Economic Development and Political Legiti-macy. American Polit ical Science Review53:69–105.

———. 1994. The Social Requisites of DemocracyRevisited. American Sociological Review 59:1–22.


———; Seong, K. R.; and Torres, J. C. 1993. A Com-parative Analysis of the Social Requisites of De-mocracy. International Social Science Journal16:155–75.

Makinda, S. M. 1996. Democracy and Multi-PartyPolitics in Africa. Journal of Modern African Studies34, 555–73.

Markoff, J. 1996. Waves of Democracy: Social Movementsand Political Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: PineForge.

Marston, S. A., and Staeheli, L. 1994. RestructuringLocal Democracy: Citizenship, Struggle, and Po-litical and Economic Reasoning. Environment andPlanning A 26:840–48.

McDonough, P.; Barnes, S. H.; and Lopez Pina, A.1986. The Growth of Democratic Legitimacy inSpain. American Polit ical Science Review80:735–49.

McDougall, W. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State:The American Encounter with the World since 1776.Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Modelski, G., and Perry, G. III. 1991. Democratizationin Long Perspective. Technological Forecasting andSocial Change 39:23–34.

Monga, C. 1996. The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Soci-ety and Democracy in Africa. Boulder, CO: LynneRienner.

Moore, B. Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship andDemocracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of theModern World. Boston: Beacon Press.

Morrill, R.; Gaile, G. L.; and Thrall, G. I. 1988. SpatialDiffusion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Most, B. M., and Starr, H. 1980. Diffusion, Reinforce-ment, Geopolitics and the Spread of War. Ameri-can Political Science Review 74: 932–46.

Mouffe, C., ed. 1992 Dimensions of Radical Democracy:Pluralism, Citizenship and Community. London:Verso.

Nyerere, J. 1994. Interview. Africa Report 39:70.O’Donnell, G. 1973. Modernization and Bureaucratic-

Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Poli-tics. Berkeley, CA: Institute of InternationalStudies, University of California.

———; Schmitter, P. C.; and Whitehead, L., eds.1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospectsfor Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.

O’Loughlin, J. 1986. Spatial Models of InternationalConflict: Extending Theories of War Behavior.Annals of the Association of American Geographers76:63–80.

———. 1989. World-Power Competition and LocalConflicts in the Third World. In A World in Crisis?Geographical Perspectives, ed. R. J. Johnston and P.J. Taylor, pp. 289–332. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

——— and Anselin, L. 1991. Bringing GeographyBack to the Study of International Relations:Spatial Dependence and Regional Contexts in

Africa, 1966–1978. International Interactions17:29–61.

——— and van der Wusten, H. 1993. The PoliticalGeography of War and Peace. In The PoliticalGeography of the Twentieth-Century: A GlobalAnalysis, ed. P. J. Taylor, pp. 63–114. London: Bel-haven Press.

Ord, J. K., and Getis, A. 1995. Local Spatial Autocor-relation Statistics: Distributional Issues and anApplication. Geographical Analysis 27:286–306.

Painter, J., and Philo, C. 1995. Spaces of Citizenship:An Introduction. Political Geography 14: 107–20.

Poe, S. C., and Tate, C. N. 1994. Repression of HumanRights to Personal Integrity in the 1980s: A GlobalAnalysis. American Political Science Review88:853–72.

Pollins, B. M. 1989. Conflict, Cooperation, and Com-merce: The Effect of International Political Inter-actions on Bilateral Trade Flows. American Journalof Political Science 33:737–61.

Przeworski, A. 1991. Democracy and the Market: Politi-cal and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe andLatin America. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Putnam, R. D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: CivicTraditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press.

Robinson, W. I. 1996. Promoting Polyarchy: Globaliza-tion, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Rogers, E. M. 1995. Diffusion of Innovations. 4th ed.New York: Free Press.

Rokkan, S. 1984. [1975]. Dimensions of State Forma-tion and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm forResearch on Variations within Europe. In TheFormation of National States in Western Europe, ed.C. Tilly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Rueschemeyer, D.; Stephens, E. H.; and Stephens, J. D.1992. Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press.

Scarritt, J. R., and Nkiwane, S. 1996. Friends, Neigh-bors, and Former Enemies: The Evolution of Zam-bia-Zimbabwe Relations in a Changing RegionalContext. Africa Today 43:7–32.

Schumpeter, J. A. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism and De-mocracy, 3rd ed. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Shin, D. C. 1994. On the Third Wave of Democratiza-tion: A Synthesis and Evaluation of Recent The-ory and Research. World Politics 47:135–70.

Siverson, R., and Starr, H. 1991. The Diffusion of War:A Study of Opportunity and Willingness. Ann Ar-bor: University of Michigan Press.

———. 1990. Opportunity, Willingness, and the Dif-fusion of War. American Political Science Review84:47–67.

Smith, W. C. 1989. Authoritarianism and the Crisis of theArgentine Political Economy. Stanford, CA: Stan-ford University Press.


Staeheli, L., and Cope, M. 1994. Empowering Women’sCitizenship. Political Geography 13:443–60.

Starr, H. 1991. Democratic Dominoes: Diffusion Ap-proaches to the Spread of Democracy. Journal ofConflict Revolution 35:6–31.

——— and Most, B. M. 1976. The Substance andStudy of Borders in International Relations Re-search. International Studies Quarterly 20:81–620.

Stedman, S. J. 1993. Botswana: The Political Economy ofDemocratic Development. Boulder, CO: LynneRienner.

Stepan, A. 1971. The Military in Politics: ChangingPatterns in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press.

———. 1973. The New Professionalism of InternalWarfare and Military Role Expansion. In Authori-tarian Brazil: Origins, Policies and Future, ed. A.Stepan, pp. 47–68. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-sity Press.

Stokke, O. S. 1995. Aid and Political Conditionality.London: Frank Cass.

Talbott, S. 1996. Democracy and the National Interest.Foreign Affairs 75:47–63.

Taylor, P. J. 1996. The Way the Modern World Works:World Hegemony to World Impasse. Chichester:John Wiley and Sons.

Tilly, C. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading,MA: Addison-Wesley.

———. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, HugeComparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Vanhanen, T. 1984. The Emergence of Democracy: AComparative Study of 119 States, 1859–1979. Hel-sinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.

———. 1990. The Process of Democratization: A Com-parative Study of 147 States, 1980–1988, NewYork: Crane Russak.

———, ed. 1992. Strategies of Democratization. NewYork: Crane Russak.

———. 1997. Prospects of Democracy: A Study of 172Countries. New York: Routledge.

Whitehead, L. 1996. International Aspects of Democ-ratization. In Transitions to Democracy, vol. 3, ed.G. O’Donnell, P. Schmitter, and L. Whitehead, pp.3–46. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress.

Correspondence: Institute of Behavioral Science, Campus Box 487, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0487;email [email protected] (O’Loughlin); Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle, WA98195-3530; email [email protected] (Ward).


the diffusion of democracy, 1946–1994

Documents