During the last two decades, the social sciences have seen a dramatic increase in the study of diffusion processes; a growing number of scholars have investigated how and why economic, social, and political innovations spread across nations, or across states inside federal countries, such as the United States and Brazil.
The first phase of research has examined the extent to which external influences impact domestic decision making: Do demonstration and contagion effects make a significant difference, and what is their effect, by contrast to the standard domestic determinants of decision making? After many scholars applying ever more sophisticated statistical techniques documented the importance of diffusion processes in a number of areas of society, politics, and policy, a second stage of research in the last few years began to disentangle the exact nature of external influences and the causal mechanisms through which they operate. Do decision makers learn from the success of front-runners and assess the benefits and costs of their reforms in systematic, thorough, and rational ways? Or do innovative experiences serve as models that exert strong normative appeal and raise the standards of appropriate behavior, pushing latecomers toward imitation? Alternatively, are innovations actively promoted by their initiators or by international organizations or great powers, which promote their spread with more or less forceful pressure? These questions, which mark the current research frontier, speak to major theoretical debates over rationality versus sociological motivations and over sovereignty and hierarchy in the contemporary global system.
Consequently, the study of diffusion phenomena constitutes one of the most vibrant and exciting research areas in the social sciences. One added attraction arises from the fact that diffusion research productively trespasses outdated dividing lines between the subfields of comparative politics and international relations; between “American” politics and the remainder of political science; and, above all, among sociology, political science, and other disciplines.
Barbara Wejnert’s wide-ranging and ambitious book embodies this interdisciplinary approach. As a political sociologist, she conducts a comprehensive analysis of the Diffusion of Democracy at the global level over the course of the last two centuries. While her predominant approach is the statistical investigation of a worldwide data set, the study also draws on the author’s intensive interview research with democratic activists in Eastern Europe, which focuses on the fall of communism and the subsequent transition to democracy.
Chapter 1 sets up the analysis by explaining the measurement of democracy, which relies largely on Polity IV and Freedom House, and by depicting the growth of democracy in the world since 1800. Chapter 2 first offers an ample overview of the theoretical literature, which Wejnert divides into diffusion approaches and development approaches. She discusses a great variety of external influences, which can arise from the spatial proximity of democratic countries, from the density of democracy in a region of the globe, from networks of communication channels, and from the media, for instance. Internal factors, by contrast, include a country’s socioeconomic development level, its value system, and political conditions, especially prior experience with democracy.
To capture the interplay of diffusion and development, Wejnert then designs a threshold model of democratic transition. Accordingly, particularly strong external influences can lift a country toward democracy at low development levels, while a high development level can produce this outcome despite limited diffusion effects; intermediate combinations of the two types of factors tend to have the same result. In the second half of Chapter 2, she illustrates the threshold model through an application to the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe and then provides thorough evidence of diffusion networks by reporting many interesting findings and quotes from her interviews with East European activists, with a special focus on her native Poland.
Chapter 3 contains the analytical core of the book, namely, statistical analyses that assess the relative impact of development versus diffusion factors. To do justice to the complexity of external influences, which can operate at the country and regional level, Wejnert applies hierarchical modeling and complements her investigation of the global growth of democracy with studies of all the major regions of the world. Strikingly, she finds that development factors, which many scholars have emphasized as decisive determinants of political regime change, fade in importance if diffusion factors are considered as well; overall, these external influences appear as far more powerful.
Chapter 4 then uses the statistical findings to predict the future of global democracy and to derive policy recommendations on how to promote its spread. The investigation of the outcomes of democratization in Chapter 5 offers another counterintuitive result by showing that political transitions lower several facets of social progress, such as health indicators and women’s empowerment, at least in the short and medium run. It is interesting that this disappointing finding applies not only to Eastern Europe, where democratization coincided with a fundamental transformation of the socioeconomic system, but also to other types of less developed countries. Unfortunately, not “all good things go together”!
With its ambitious scope and provocative findings, Diffusion of Democracy raises a number of interesting questions. The book’s bold message that diffusion has a much stronger impact on democratization than development rests on a clear distinction between internal and external determinants of political regime change. It is not easy, however, to draw such a sharp divide. For instance, are the media really a diffusion factor, as Wejnert claims in large parts of the book (pp. 46–49, 177–78, 196–97, 220–21)? After all, modernization theory regarded the media as a crucial facet of domestic development. Indeed, a large part of media content in most countries probably has a domestic origin. Therefore, if one had to choose, there could be more justification to place the media on the development side of Wejnert’s divide. In fact, the author herself, toward the end of the volume (pp. 253–54), subsumes media access under development factors.
Moreover, this binary distinction seems to subsume all external influences under “diffusion.” This classification may inadvertently downplay the role of sheer coercion; for instance, the Soviet Union’s imposition and forceful maintenance of “socialism” in Eastern Bloc countries, which Wejnert mentions in the latter half of Chapter 2, was very different from the learning processes usually associated with diffusion. While in principle one can define “diffusion” very broadly, it may be more instructive and useful to distinguish different types of foreign influences, especially by separating pure external imposition from decisions that involve some domestic autonomy and internal initiative. The recent conceptual discussion over diffusion, which has debated the type and degree of “coercion” that is productively included in this category, could shed light on this issue.
The focus on development versus diffusion factors also leaves out some other important variables that are commonly seen as relevant for the fate of democracy, such as ethnic heterogeneity, religious divisions, or natural resource endowments. Many scholars have seen certain patterns of ethnic and religious fragmentation as obstacles to the institution of liberal safeguards and electoral competition. Similarly, a recent outpouring of writings has highlighted the difficulties that mineral wealth, especially massive revenues from oil exports, can create for efforts to shake off authoritarian rule. While debate continues to rage over the severity of this “resource curse,” it would be important for a comprehensive analysis of democracy’s fate in the world to consider this factor, as well as countries’ ethnic and religious composition, at least for the stretches of time for which reliable and valid data are available.
Another aspect of the statistical analysis that was not fully clear concerns the inclusion of time, specifically the variable of calendar year and year squared (pp. 186–89). Given that the predominant linear trends of most development and diffusion factors is substantively meaningful and most likely have causal effects on Wejnert’s main dependent variable, the global growth of democracy, the reason for the inclusion of time, which as such is not a causal factor, could have been clarified.
The statistical investigation also controls for a number of “historical events,” but the book devotes little space (pp. 17–19, 55–57, 178–79) to explaining this variable, which covers a disparate set of occurrences, ranging from “the end and aftermath of World War I” to “the United Nations decolonization act” and “the effects of the worldwide oil crisis.” It would have been good to provide a systematic, thorough explanation and justification of why those events were selected and not others, and how these events were delimited in time: Why, for instance, is “the Great Depression” coded as 1933–39 when “Black Friday” occurred in 1929? Why is “the UN decolonization act” coded as 1955–60, and “the effects of the worldwide oil crisis” as 1975–1985? Even more basically, why do these events include not only causal factors (wars, economic crises), but also outcomes such as “the collapse of fragile democracies in many African post-colonies” (p. 178)?
Given the impressively long time frame of the analysis, which for Europe starts in 1800 and for the world as a whole in 1860, one also wonders whether a fundamental assumption implicit in Wejnert’s statistical models is valid, namely, that causal factors operated and interacted in the same way over these 150 to 200 years. For instance, the media may have acquired increasing importance during the last two centuries, and they may have given growing coverage to international events. By conducting separate analyses for the major regions of the world—a particularly interesting section of the volume (pp. 200–224)—Wejnert considers the possibility of causal heterogeneity across country groupings; it would be good systematically to consider the possibility of causal heterogeneity across time as well. The “historical events” variable looks somewhat ad hoc for this purpose, especially for the analysis of specific regions.
A related point about the role of historical time: Wejnert’s analysis focuses on the worldwide advance of democracy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While in her long-term perspective, this forward movement indeed stands out, it was unfortunately not steady and linear, as the useful global and regional graphs included in the book show (pp. 13, 16, 149–50, 164–65). Instead, during certain time periods, democracy suffered significant setbacks. What explains these reverse waves? While in some instances, such as the proliferation of authoritarianism and fascism during the interwar years, unfavorable economic conjunctures (the Great Depression) mattered greatly, it would be interesting to investigate the extent to which diffusion processes, as well as development factors, played a role. Scholarship on diffusion mostly examines the spread of advanced, modern, “positive” innovations; it tends to assume, for instance, that democracy exerts contagion effects, but not authoritarian rule. For the interwar years, however, this premise is problematic: In the eyes of many observers, including prominent intellectuals, artists, and philosophers, fascism with its dynamic vigor held great appeal, whereas liberal democracy looked decadent, exhausted, and fated to decay. What explains this dramatic shift in the Zeitgeist, and to what extent did it affect political regime change? Thus, why does history sometimes change direction?
In conclusion, Diffusion of Democracy raises a number of interesting and important questions about the advance of democracy in the world and the best ways of analyzing this complex process. Scholarly studies make significant contributions not only with their own findings but also by pointing to productive paths for further research.
