The Influence of International Factors in the Process of Democratization

Abstract

D emocracy has been one of the most studied themes in the field of comparative political science. This is owed not just to questions of value but also to countries' growing adherence over time to this type of regime. Studies in this area have sought to answer two main questions: what are the conditions under which democracy emerges and what are the conditions under which democracy survives. The debates have been permeated by different interpretations and currents, most of which use only domestic variables for their explanations. One of the main theories about the process of democratization attributes the emergence and consolidation of democratic regimes to the existence of favourable socioeconomic conditions (Lipset 1967). Modernization theory, whose precursor is the study by Lipset, takes the view that economic development brings about a gradual build-up of social changes that prepare society for democratization, so that it is more likely that democracies emerge in economically developed countries. However, empirical studies (Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Przeworski et al. 2003) have revealed that there is no relation between the level of economic development and the emergence of democracies. The emergence of democracy is a random event, deus ex machina, but, once established for reasons other than structural factors, it is more likely to survive in a developed country. Since the 1990s, we have witnessed the development of a literature that has questioned the consensus according to which democracy results only from domestic factors, without any influence from international forces. By analysing four recent empirical studies-Brinks and Coppedge (2006), "Diffusion Is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy"; Gleditsch and Ward (2006), "Diffusion and the International Context of