Global Trends, State-Specific Factors and Regime Transitions, 1825-1993

If democratic states are significantly less conflict prone in their relationships with each other than are pairs of states involving at least one autocratic regime, then global trends in regime transitions have important implications for international politics. Analysts of international politics, then, might fruitfully pay increased attention to such global trends. Predominant approaches to regime transitions emphasize differences between regime changes, and the impact of internal factors specific to the states in which they take place. An alternative approach focuses on similarities in transitions, connections between them, and their possibly common origins in the global environment. The relative strengths of state-specific factors and systemic environmental forces can be inferred from a comprehensive empirical analysis of regime transitions at the global level. Such an analysis of the average level of democracy in all the states in the international system over the last 170 years suggests that the balance of system level forces has had an important impact on global trends in regime transitions. However, a partitioning of variance in data on regime transitions in each of the states of the international system from 1825 to 1993 also reveals that simultaneous similar changes in the levels of democracy have been much less common than dissimilar changes toward or away from democracy.