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Findings in Search of a Controversy and in Need of More Data

Based on their quantitative survey of democracy protests from 1989 to 2011, Dawn Brancati and Adrian Lucardi conclude that diffusion of such protests is the exception, not the rule; that domestic factors rather than international diffusion are key in determining if diffusion occurs and that their findings call into serious question the received wisdom about democratic diffusion. We have several problems with their analysis. First, no serious scholar of diffusion has claimed that the diffusion of subversive innovations supporting democracy is common or frequent, given the difficulties involved. Their conclusion that such diffusion is not common thus echoes, rather than challenges those of many scholars of diffusion. Second, their conclusion that domestic factors are primary in rejecting or sometimes supporting democratic change is also unsurprising. Virtually every empirical account and every theory of cross-national diffusion identify variation in domestic receptivity to change as a key element in determining if diffusion occurs, and its limits. Finally, we question the authors’ decision to limit their analysis of diffusion to protests. Innovative challenges to authoritarian rule have taken many additional forms, including roundtables and legal challenges, as well as voter registration and get out the vote drives, agreements among opposition parties, work by civil society organizations, and participation in transnational networks of democracy activists, in addition to protests. Democracy protests are in fact a small and perhaps unrepresentative part of challenges to authoritarian rule; they are likely the result of a series of innovative actions that are hard to quantify and hard to trace, and for this reason are missing from Brancatii and Lucardi’s analysis. Their analysis, therefore, does not challenge the accepted wisdom on diffusion, but, in fact, lends partial support to its conclusions, support that is limited by the kinds of data collected and the authors’ understanding of both innovation and diffusion.