After the collapse of a superpower: A quantitative analysis of the effect of Western influence on democratization in post-communist countries

This paper contributes to existing theories on democratization by examining the effect of Western influence on democratization in post-communist countries from 1991 until 2019. This is executed as a quantitative test of Levitsky and Way’s (2010) qualitative framework of Western influence in post-Soviet countries, post-Yugoslavia countries, and a group of remaining post-communist countries such as Albania and Bulgaria. Western influence is divided into two dimensions: leverage as governments’ vulnerability to external pressure and linkage as the density of ties to the West. It is expected that leverage alone does not enhance democratization, but linkage does and that a combination of high linkage and leverage has the strongest effect on democratization. Surprisingly, a factor analyses of the dimensions of linkage and leverage reveal that leverage is not a coherent concept as was expected beforehand. Moreover, after performing multiple OLS regressions, it is concluded that linkage has a strong effect on democratization, but that leverage alone also positively affects democratization, contrary to expectations. Finally, it cannot be concluded that an interaction effect exists whereby linkage enhances the effect of leverage on democratization. This is due to the lack of coherence between the leverage dimensions and conflicting test results.