Varieties of Democratic Diffusion: Colonial Networks

• “No man is an island; some countries are, but even so, no country can be regarded as completely self-determined and unaffected by the world beyond its borders” (Coppedge 2012, 301). This is a widely accepted proposition backed by many empirical studies. Yet stating that countries are in some way affected by external forces only hints at the innumerable possible pathways of influence, which have only begun to be explored. This paper builds on Brinks and Coppedge (2006), which reported that geographic neighbors tend to converge toward a shared level of democracy. Here we look at a completely distinct set of networks: that linking colonies and occupied states to their colonizers or occupiers. We find that convergence in levels of liberal democracy is also the dominant tendency in colonial networks when diffusion relationships are properly specified.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

ovr (ämneskategori)