The Influence of International Factors in the Process of Democratization

Abstract

D emocracy has been one of the most studied themes in the field of comparative political science. This is owed not just to questions of value but also to countries' growing adherence over time to this type of regime. Studies in this area have sought to answer two main questions: what are the conditions under which democracy emerges and what are the conditions under which democracy survives. The debates have been permeated by different interpretations and currents, most of which use only domestic variables for their explanations.One of the main theories about the process of democratization attributes the emergence and consolidation of democratic regimes to the existence of favourable socioeconomic conditions (Lipset 1967). Modernization theory, whose precursor is the study by Lipset, takes the view that economic development brings about a gradual build-up of social changes that prepare society for democratization, so that it is more likely that democracies emerge in economically developed countries. However, empirical studies (Przeworski and Limongi 1997;Przeworski et al. 2003) have revealed that there is no relation between the level of economic development and the emergence of democracies. The emergence of democracy is a random event, deus ex machina, but, once established for reasons other than structural factors, it is more likely to survive in a developed country. Since the 1990s, we have witnessed the development of a literature that has questioned the consensus according to which democracy results only from domestic factors, without any influence from international forces. By analysing four recent empirical studies -Brinks and Coppedge (2006), "Diffusion Is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy"; Gleditsch and Ward (2006), "Diffusion and the International Context of bpsr (2009) 3 (1) 173 172 -179 bpsr 173 Democratization"; Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñan (2009), "International Factors and Regime Change in Latin America , 1945, " and Wejner (2005, "Diffusion, Development, and Democracy, 1800-1999" -I intend to discuss how this literature has contributed to the insertion of international factors into the theoretical debate on democratization. All of these authors espouse the idea that there exist mechanisms of diffusion or contagion through which the democratic regime gets propagated, for democracies' grouping in time and space suggests the occurrence of diffusion or of cross-border dependencies that influence the development and persistence of political institutions. In a book on the state of the art in democratization theory, Munck (2007) states that this field of analysis has provided considerable evidence of the influence of international factors on processes of democratic transition and consolidation.The empirical analyses of diffusion literature are conducted by means of models that take into account not just diffusion variables, such as the proportion of democratic countries in the region and the occurrence of transitions in neighbouring countries, but also control variables represe...