What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? Research has focused on socioeconomic and institutional factors, yet the assumption that political liberalization has to precede democratization has not been systematically examined. We explore the impacts of granting civil rights...

This article uses Polity IV data to probe system dynamics for studies of the global diffusion of democracy from 1800 to 2000. By analogy with the Bass model of diffusion of innovations, as translated into system dynamics by Sterman, the dynamic explanation proposed focuses on transitions to...