Replication Data for: Why Democracy Protests Do Not Diffuse

One of the primary international factors proposed to explain the geographic and temporal clustering of democracy is the diffusion of democracy protests. Democracy protests are thought to diffuse across countries primarily through a demonstration effect, whereby protests in one country cause protests in another based on the positive information that they convey about the likelihood of successful protests elsewhere, and secondarily, through the actions of transnational activists.In contrast to this view, we argue, that, in general, democracy protests are not likely to diffuse across countries because the motivation for and the outcome of democracy protests results from domestic processes that are unaffected or undermined by the occurrence of democracy protests in other countries. Our statistical analysis supports this argument. Using daily data on the onset of democracy protests around the world between 1989 and 2011, we found that in this period, democracy protests were not significantly more likely to occur in countries when democracy protests occurred in neighboring countries either in general or in ways consistent with the expectations of diffusion arguments.