Abstract
Recently the role of ideology and hegemony has received increased attention to explain varying dynamics of diffusion and autocratic cooperation. As a result, patterns of interaction in clusters from regions without hegemony or ideology have been overlooked because their autocracy-toautocracy transitions are no threat to the global status of democracy, even when active regime promotion is very common. This article will apply insights from economic cluster theory to political regimes and introduce a typology to differentiate among clusters. Regime Cluster Theory is the first framework that presents three ideal-types of ideological, hegemonic and biotopical regime clusters. With a new concept of ‘biotopical clusters’ the paper explains the dynamics of clusters in often omitted regions, like in Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America during the Cold War, or Central Asia during the 1990s. RCT offers a dynamic approach to recognize and assess patterns of forcible regime promotion per cluster as well as distinguish between their different diffusion patterns (coercive, voluntary, bounded learning, contagion) in four arenas: institutions, ideas, policy and administrative practices. RCT advances the comparative study of regime promotion and diffusion in various regions of the world and hopes to shed new light on related theories of alliance formation, regional institutionalization, and (conflict) spill-over effects.
Highlights
This is illustrated by the work of Franziska Deutsch & Christian Welzel (2016), who assess the diffusion of emancipatory values – the psychological bedrock of a pro-democratic mass culture – and find even these universal democratic values spread at different speeds and intensities in free and unfree climates, with variations according to regime type
Without a regional hegemon to restrain these regimes, foreign-sponsored rebel groups have been a key element in the list of civil wars, and the resulting conflict traps have often led to more personalist regimes coming to power, entrenching and repeating these vicious circles
This article is the first attempt to transplant economic cluster frameworks to political regimes, even if many scholars intuitively have been referring to such autocratic groupings as clusters
Summary
After the Color Revolutions and Arab Spring, with an assertive Russia looming over Europe’s democratic cluster in the last years, the study of autocratic cooperation has received new impetus. Despite their heterogeneity in actors, methods and aims, the Color Revolutions and the ‘Arab’ Spring uprisings were considered to bring change, if not democracy to key autocratic clusters in Eurasia and MENA. This article will introduce a new framework: Regime Cluster Theory (RCT) and present three ideal types and criteria to identify clusters. RCT aims to predict in what arenas of state interactions, which modes of diffusion can be expected based on the cluster type of the region.
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