Abstract

Protecting and expanding democracy around the globe is a perennial national security interest for the United States. A standard vehicle for democratization has been economic development. The two are linked in a scholarly tradition and conventional wisdom, the dominant strain of which has held that development leads to democracy. The demise of the Soviet antagonist and rise of nascent democratic institutions across Eurasia, however, have challenged fundamental assumptions relating economic development with democracy. A third factor which stimulates both democratization and economic growth, namely access to information, could be consistent with the historically strong statistical correlation between democracy and development and might also help explain some of the recent unprecedented political changes. Politicians and pundits have postulated this relationship, yet to date, the evidence has been solely anecdotal. This study addresses the relationship between democracy and the new communication media by applying theory and data analysis to the task.

The circumstances surrounding the demise of totalitarian social control in the former Soviet Union are examined through a new theoretical framework. These historic events elucidate a conflicting set of options confronting autocratic governments: economic development or authoritarian order. Because new communication technologies enable modes of communication that were never before feasible, it may now be virtually impossible for any country to maintain an open economy for expansion while remaining closed to democratic ideas. Comparative analyses distinguish communications media along several key dimensions to illuminate the relative effects of technological advancements in promoting democracy. The recent innovations in new communication media markedly stand out from previous technologies in fundamental ways that tend to bias political outcomes in favor of greater societal openness and freedoms.

Quantitative analyses empirically probe the hypothesized relationship between democracy and electronic communication networks from several statistical perspectives. The conclusion from these tests, repeated without exception throughout the analyses, is that one cannot reject a hypothesis that democracy and networked communication are positively correlated. Likewise, if leading democracies such as the United States seek to influence democratic development effectively and efficiently, they cannot disregard a critical role for the new communications technologies.