Understanding Democratic Transition Using Self-Organizing Maps: A Special Focus on Arab Spring Countries

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to determine democratic transition success predictors. We adopted the self-organizing map (SOM) as an alternative approach, mapping thus 121 countries on the bases of 33 indicators of various nature over 4 years (1984, 1991, 2002 and 2013). We have included economic, social, demographic and political, as well as institutional variables. Population age structure, globalization, health indicators, education and women participation in the society were found to have the most important clustering potentials, whereas according to a subsequent SVM procedure unemployment, corruption, democratic accountability, and law and order were found to be particularly strong democratic transition success predictors.