Numerous studies have reported that countries tend to become more similar to their immediate geographic neighbors with respect to democracy. In this lecture, Michael Coppedge will confirm this finding with far more extensive Varieties of Democracy data and show that a similar process of mutual adjustment can be found within very different international networks: international alliances and geographically dispersed colonial empires, especially those that were founded early and lasted a century or more. The electoral democracy index from the Varieties of Democracy project, which is the dependent variable, includes historical democracy ratings for colonies, making it possible to test these relationships extensively for the first time. The causal mechanisms for the diffusion of democracy are notoriously vague, but the existence of diffusion within alliance and colonial networks helps narrow the possibilities. Where these relationships are significant, the net tendency is overwhelmingly convergence. Allies have tended to become more similar to one another in their levels of electoral democracy; colonies have tended to democratize more quickly than similar countries that were never colonies; and some colonizers have tended to democratize more slowly than similar countries that never had colonies. Coppedge will distinguish between effects that took place during colonial rule and later relations between former colonies and their colonizers.

Michael Coppedge is professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He is also one of the principal investigators of the Varieties of Democracy Project, which has produced new measures of hundreds of aspects of democracy and governance for nearly all countries since 1900. He is the author of "Democratization and Research Methods" (Cambridge University Press, 2012); "Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela" (Stanford University Press, 1994); and dozens of articles and chapters on democratization, research methods, and Latin American political parties and elections.