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.