Is Democracy Infectious?

Peter Leeson, guest-blogging at Freakonomics, summarizes some of his research:

Does democracy really spread between countries? If so, how much? We find that democratic dominoes do in fact exist, but they fall significantly “lighter” than foreign policy applications of this principle pretend.

Countries only “catch” about 11 percent of their geographic neighbors’ average changes in democracy...

As JB, my friend and favourite drug dealer, points out, this is not a refutation of the hypothesis that spreading democracy works; it is only a question of how much. He writes,

The authors contradict themselves, which shows their logic is faulty and not to be trusted. "Our results show that democracy does in fact spread, as the democratic domino theory contends" [Leeson T, Dean A. The democratic domino theory: an empirical investigation, page 6, accessed through hyperlink http://www.peterleeson.com/Democratic_Domino_Theory.pdf 2008Sep7]. 

The preceding quote is buried in the introduction, page 6. This seems very black and white and is the end of the story, right? Apparently not....

Bottom line:  We do not like the Bush Doctrine and even though our own results indirectly support it, if we apply a fudge factor we can capsize the whole hypothesis.

Leeson adds in his post,

If U.S. interventions fail to enhance democracy in the countries where they take place, pro-democracy spillovers obviously cannot spread throughout the greater regions these countries are part of. If the evidence from past attempts is any indicator, the prospect of using falling dominoes to democratize the globe looks pretty dim.

Again, JB points out that if interventions work (as they generally have), then there will be some democratic spillover into neighbouring areas. Furthermore, there will be some additional potential spillover outside the region. And, at least as important, the interventions have at times stopped the spillover of non-democratic 'isms within a region.

Comments

[Tom Hanna]

Suppose there is only an 11% spread of democracy. We know there's also some spread of totalitarianism. Assume it's also in the 11% range. If one country is changed from totalitarianism to democracy, that's a 100% shift for one country and a 22% shift for all its neighbors. To take the obvious case, Iraq, there's also the added benefit of having a toehold for more active work to oppose totalitarianism - covert action in Iran, for example. Minimizing the potential for democracy's (and more importantly, liberty's) domino effect misses more than half the benefit of the Bush doctrine.