Activists Against Autocrats: TSMO Networks and Democratic Diffusion

Jonathan Pinckney,John Joseph Chin

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.705223

Abstract

Do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) promote the international diffusion of democracy? If so, how? Scholars of democratization have studied a plethora of international factors in the spread of democracy, including geographic or regional proximity, colonial history, trade and alliance networks, and joint inter-governmental organization (IGO) memberships. Few have studied the role of TSMO networks in democratic diffusion. We theorize that TSMOs empower and connect civil societies and thus promote democracy from the “bottom up.” Leveraging a new TSMO Dataset and data on the dimensions of democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project over the 1953–2013 period, we find that TSMOs promote democratic diffusion. TSMOs are strongest at diffusing participatory democracy. TSMOs also contribute to the diffusion of electoral democracy but do so by promoting the diffusion of freedom of association and freedom of expression rather than elections.

Highlights

What role do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs)—international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) dedicated to promoting social or political change—play in democratic diffusion?1 In this article, we leverage a new Transnational Social Movement Organizations Dataset from 1953–2013 and data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project to address these questions
We argue that activists who are embedded in democratic TSMO networks promote democratic civil societies, diffuse participatory democratic norms, and are more effective in mobilizing against autocrats
Are the Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) and International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) examples anomalies or generalizable? Through a series of spatial regression models in a global sample of countries from 1953 to 2013, we show that TSMOs do promote cross-national democratic diffusion, as constructivists have long argued,2 even when controlling for alternative diffusion networks and other major confounders

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Peasant activists joined mass protests with other social organizations that reversed the attempted self-coup by President Serrano Elias in May 1993 and helped install Ramiro de León Carpio, the human rights OMBUDSMAN, as president This example highlights how TSMOs may promote democracy indirectly over many years of activism at the local level long before ever explicitly mobilizing for electoral democracy. Most prior studies of democratic diffusion have relied on Polity IV or other binary measures (Cheibub et al, 2010; Boix, Miller, and Rosato 2012) Relying on such minimalist measures would prevent us from testing whether TSMOs are better are promoting non-electoral elements of democracy. We include country fixed effects in all models to control for unobservable timeinvariant differences across countries (such as colonial history, conditions at independence, etc.), our estimates pertain to “within” country variation over time

FINDINGS

CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT