Simulating the Evolution of Global Democracy Levels

Abstract

This paper presents a multivariate multinomial logit model of changes to countries' level of democracy ('Markov regression'), taking into account the stability of different institutional setups, average income, diffusion through neighborhoods, and the instability of new and inconsistent institutions. To allow interpreting the aggregate effect of these factors, the paper develops a simulation model where the political systems of a set of simulated countries evolve in accordance with the results of the multinomial logit model. The results show a strong tendency for political systems to move toward either full democracy or full autocracy, but ?find the diffusion effect to be relatively less strong. The simulations tend to produce less dramatic changes in the global average democracy score than what was actually observed in the real world during the past 50 years, indicating that the diffusion of democracy also goes through other channels than the ones modeled here.