The Diffusion of Revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America

Abstract

What accounts for the spread of political protest and contention across countries? Analyzing the wildfire of attempted revolutions in 1848, the present article assesses four causal mechanisms for explaining diffusion, namely external pressure from a great power (such as revolutionary France after 1789); the promotion of new norms and values—such as liberalism and democracy—by more advanced countries; rational learning from successful contention in other nations; or boundedly rational, potentially distorted inferences from select foreign experiences. The patterns in which revolutionary contention spread and eyewitness reports from all sides of the ensuing conflicts suggest that bounded rationality played a crucial role: cognitive heuristics that deviate from fully rational procedures drew attention to some experiences but not others and induced both challengers and defenders of the established order to draw rash conclusions from these experiences, particularly the French monarchy's fall in February 1848. My study also shows, however, that other factors made important contributions, for instance by preparing the ground for the wave of regime contention.

The Diffusion of Nonviolent Campaigns

“…17 Campaigns that are eventually repressed or ultimately unsuccessful such as the Egyptian revolution can have an important effect on actors in other countries if they seemed promising at the outset. Some stress the ''irrationality'' of campaigns promoted by diffusion as these uprisings rarely manage to unseat governments (e.g., Weyland 2009). However, this is a narrow conceptualization of success, which disregards how governments often offer various concessions and reforms to try to fend off dissent and the long-term aim of dissidents.…”

“…Tarrow (1994) suggested the term ''modular'' protest to highlight possible demonstration effects in the spread of dissent (see also Koopmans 1993). Some literature on revolutions has stressed waves of uprisings and their common origins-whether ideological or similar structural conditions-with the 1848 revolutions or the Arab Spring as prominent recent examples (see Weyland 2009Weyland , 2012. However, there have been few systematic comparative studies of nonviolent contentious politics that explicitly consider diffusion and transnational linkages.…”

Are Coups Really Contagious? An Extreme Bounds Analysis of Political Diffusion

“…Because emulation, learning, and focal points are more critical channels for mass action, we expect these events to be more likely to diffuse. Indeed, compared to coups, there is a much more extensive and rigorous literature supporting the spread of these events, especially for democratization, protests, and civil war (e.g., Starr 1991;Gleditsch and Ward 2006;Weyland 2009;Hale 2013). Miller et al 23 We conduct separate EBA runs for each type of event and five metrics: region, contiguity, inverse distance, trade, and trade community.…”

On Recent Comparative Historical Studies

“…Building on earlier 4 See Rueschemeyer (2010) and two other papers in the same newsletter of the American Political Science Association's Section on Comparative Democratization. and current work by such authors as Thomas Ertman (1998), Daniel Ziblatt (2006, and Kurt Weyland (2007), Capoccia and Ziblatt propose that the emergence of democracy in Europe was not a single unitary process but rather a set of specific institutional developments that responded to different critical constellations. Much can be learned by detailed reexaminations-for instance about the role of political parties-that will be of value in studying different aspects and outcomes of democratization in contemporary non-European countries.…”