Over the last year, I've been working towards some exciting new projects using measures of cultural distance. So, I was interested to read this new article by Thanos Kyritsis (University of Auckland), Luke Matthews (RAND Corporation), David Welch and Quentin Atkinson (both University of Auckland), published in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences (open access, with a non-technical summary available on The Conversation). In the article, Kyritsis et al. look at how differences in democracy between countries are related to the cultural and geographical distance between them, and whether changes in democracy over time in one country are related to the level of democracy in other countries that are culturally close and geographically close to the first country.
Kyritsis et al. develop measures of cultural distance based on linguistic distance and religious distance, and use three different measures of democracy: Polity 5 (covering 1800-2018), Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy (covering 1810-2012), and the Freedom in the World index (covering 1972-2020). Overall, their dataset covers 220 years, with 221 modern and historical nations, and 41,638 observations in total. They also distinguish between different waves of democracy:
...an initial ‘slow’ wave beginning in the US and culminating in the emergence of several European democracies at the end of the First World War (1828–1926); a second wave linked to the process of decolonisation following the end of the Second World War (1945–1962); and a third wave comprising a succession of transitions in Western Europe, Latin America, the Pacific, Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, and sub-Saharan Africa (1974 to present)...
In the first part of their analysis, Kyritsis et al. regress the difference in democracy between two countries on the distances between them (linguistic, religious, and geographical). They run this analysis cross-sectionally for each year in their dataset, and find that there were:
...independent effects of all three predictors on each democracy indicator over the time period covered by our data... While the effects of linguistic and religious ancestry were slightly attenuated in this combined model, when present, they remained generally better predictors of all three democracy indicators than geography. Over the last 50 years, linguistic and religious ancestry accounts for up to 12.3% and 17.4% of variance in pairwise differences in democracy, respectively, compared with 1.2% for geographical proximity...
Looking at how the cross-sectional relationships have changed over time, they find that:
...across all three democracy indicators, linguistic ancestry is an increasingly important predictor beginning mid-way through the second wave (circa 1955) and plateauing (or, in the case of Polity 5, declining somewhat) in the third wave from about 1990 to the present. Likewise, religious ancestry becomes an increasingly important predictor of similarity in all three democracy measures from approximately the beginning of the third wave, circa 1975, plateauing and then declining somewhat from circa 2000 to the present...
The relationships between geographical distance and differences in democracy were not as large as for the two measures of cultural distance, and the relationship was inconsistent over time. Overall, this suggests a stronger effect of cultural distance on democracy than the effect of geographical distance.
Turning to their second analysis, of changes in democracy over time, Kyritsis et al. find that:
The democratic status of nations’ linguistic relatives is the only effect to show a consistently positive trend across all three democratic outcome measures for the duration of the time series. The language ancestry effect is strongest, and statistically significant for most of the third wave of democratisation across all outcome measures. Unsurprisingly, since democratic status tends to persist, most of the variation in nations’ democracy indicators at T2 is explained by their democracy at T1, but linguistic ancestry accounts for a non-trivial component of the remaining variation, explaining up to 17.4% of variation across outcome measures in the third wave. The democratic status of nations’ religious relatives shows no consistent effect until the third wave, when we see a sustained positive trend across all outcome measures, consistent with our cross-sectional analyses, with religious ancestry explaining up to 11.1% of the variation in democratic outcomes during this period. Also in accordance with our cross-sectional analyses, the effects of a nation’s geographical neighbours on its democratic outcomes tend to be positive, although these geographical effects show more variation through time and across outcome measures.
Essentially, the longitudinal analysis results confirm what they found in the cross-sectional analysis over time. Democracy appears to diffuse more readily between cultural 'neighbours' than between geographical neighbours. My future research will build on similar themes, where cultural distance appears to matter more than geographical distance. I look forward to sharing some of that in a future post.
[HT: The Conversation]
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