Replication data for: Diffusion and State Power. A Reactive Model of Regime Change.

Building on the seminal contribution of Brinks and Coppedge (2006), this article investigates the role of diffusion in explaining regime change during the Third Wave of democratization. While both neighbor emulation and global trends toward more or less democracy are important predictors of regime change, their impact is shown to be at most marginal for the evolution of regional and global powers. Besides being conditioned by the characteristics of the receiving country, diffusion is shown to accelerate after moments of major geopolitical realignment. Based on these insights, the article proposes and tests a reactive model of change that focuses on regime permeability. Based on a rich set of controls and robustness checks, we demonstrate that a country’s propensity to emulate its neighbors or global regime trends will be inversely proportional to its wealth and size. This empirical finding partially confirms the leverage/linkage theory developed by Way and Levitsky (2006). However, as linkage and leverage tend to move in opposite directions in relation to a country’s size and wealth, our results predict that leverage will trump linkage.

本文立足于布林克斯（Brinks）与科普奇（Coppedge）2006年的奠基性研究成果，探讨了政治扩散（diffusion）在解释民主化第三波（Third Wave of democratization）期间政权更迭的作用机制。尽管邻国效仿与全球民主程度升降的整体趋势均为政权更迭的重要预测变量，但二者对区域与全球大国的政权演化至多仅具备边际性影响。政治扩散不仅受接收国自身特征的制约，还会在经历重大地缘政治调整的时期后加速显现。基于上述研究发现，本文提出并检验了一个聚焦于政权渗透性（regime permeability）的响应型政权变迁模型。通过设置丰富的控制变量并开展多组稳健性检验，本文证实：一国效仿邻国或全球政权趋势的倾向，与其财富水平和国家规模呈负相关关系。这一实证发现部分验证了韦（Way）与莱维茨基（Levitsky）2006年提出的杠杆/关联理论（leverage/linkage theory）。然而，由于关联效应与杠杆效应会随国家规模和财富水平呈现反向变动，本文研究结果表明，杠杆效应将胜过关联效应。