The International Diffusion of Democracy

Abstract

The idea that democracy is contagious, that democracy diffuses across the world map, is now well established among policy makers and political scientists alike. The few theoretical explanations of this phenomenon focus exclusively on political elites. This article presents a theoretical model and accompanying computer simulation that explains the diffusion of democracy based on the dynamics of public opinion and mass revolutions. On the basis of the literature on preference falsification, cascading revolutions, and the social judgment theory, an agent-based simulation is developed and analyzed. The results demonstrate that the diffusion of attitudes, in combination with a cascading model of revolutions, is indeed a possible theoretical explanation of the spatial clustering of democracy.