01138pab a2200133 454500008004000000100002100040245004600061260000900107300001700116362000800133520081500141650001400956773003400970180718b2011   xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d  aElkink, Johan A.  aThe international diffusion of democracy.  c2011  ap.1651-1674.  aDec  aThe idea that democracy is contagious, that democracy diffuses across the world map, is now well established among policy makers and political scientists alike. the few theoretical explanations of this phenomenon focus exclusively on political elites. This article presents a theoretical model and accompanying computer simulation that explains the diffusion of democracy based on the dynamics of public opinion and mass revolutions. On the basis of the literature on preference falsification, cascading revolutions, and the social judgment theory, an agent-based simulation is developed and analyzed. The result demonstrate that the diffusion of attitudes, in combination with a cascading model of revolutions, is indeed a possible theoretical explanation of the spatial clustering of democracy. - Reproduced.  aDemocracy  aComparative Political Studies