Reassessing External Influence on Democratization: A Cross-Regional Approach.

This study examines the international effects on the process of democratization and attempts to provide coherent and systematic accounts for why there are different external influences and how they have affected at different phases of democratization through a cross-regional comparison between East Asia and Central Europe. By focusing on process-oriented analysis and on interactions between external and internal factors, I argue that we should isolate international influences from common domestically dependent-level factors in national cases, in order to examine the exact effects of key explanatory factors. At the same time, the regional differences provide me enough variations to examine external effects with regional variables. I also challenge the mainstream “domestically biased” assumption that democratization is an exclusively domestic affair by arguing that external influences are a crucial part in democratic transition and consolidation especially through assessing regional and international impacts on regime change in the two regions. Furthermore, some scholars provide systemic and comprehensive approaches to explore the major mechanisms of the external impacts on regime change, but their generalizations are based on comparisons within only one geographic or cultural region. Thus, there are limits to the applicability and credibility of their general frameworks. Therefore, this study is a first effort to compare the international effects on democratization between the East (Confuciandom) and the West (Christendom). It attempts not only to refine current theoretical frameworks, but also to enhance the literature on democratization in breadth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]