“…In contrary to wider efforts to promote democracy, including diplomatic pressure, aid conditionality or economic sanctions, democracy assistance highlights the role of partners in recipient countries in the development cooperation to establish democracy. ing countries since they learned from their own transition experiences and were the recipients of democracy assistance themselves not that long ago (Beichelt, Hahn-Fuhr, Schimmelfenning, Worschech, 2014;Chimiak, 2016;Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka, 2013;Horký-Hlucháň, Lightfoot, 2015;Jonavicius, 2008;Kucharczyk, Lovitt, 2007;Petrova, 2014a;Pospieszna, 2014Pospieszna, , 2016aPospieszna, , 2016bSzent-Iványi, 2014;Szent-Iványi, Lightfoot, 2015). The process of spreading ideas, institutions, policies and models across neighbouring countries through different channels is known in the literature as democracy diffusion (Brinks, Coppedge, 2006;Bunce, Wolchik, 2006).…”