Making Waves

'Making Waves is an ambitious, audacious, and well-crafted analysis of why the diffusion of political regime contention was much more rapid but had a lower success rate in Europe in 1848 and 1917–19 than in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s. The book combines historical knowledge and political science in fertile ways. Weyland makes important contributions to the literatures on diffusion, democratization, contentious politics, and cognitive heuristics.' Scott Mainwaring, University of Notre Dame
'Weyland develops a theory of political diffusion founded on the integration of cognitive micro foundations (inferential heuristics) with organizational macro factors, applying it to an analysis of three major eras of diffusion of struggles for democracy in Europe and Latin America. This is a highly ambitious and successful attempt that constitutes a fundamentally important contribution to political science because it demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive processes that are the exact opposite of the cognitive processes assumed by rational choice analysis, and it offers a systematic analysis of the mechanisms through which the organizational context modifies these cognitive processes and their effect on political behavior.' Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
'Why does democratization come in waves, and why do these waves succeed or fail? In a work of breathtaking sweep, Weyland draws from the written and oral testimonies of the principals across continents and centuries to show that when word of democratic uprisings spreads rapidly across national borders to inspire comparable actions, common people may tragically miscalculate, but when better-informed leaders of mass parties and organizations are able to channel popular impulses and direct events, they are more likely to prevail. This book will redefine how the field of comparative politics understands the process of democratization.' Frances Hagopian, Harvard University
'The idea that diffusion is an important causal process is intuitively obvious but strikingly under-theorized. Making Waves is a theoretically and empirically ambitious effort to meet this challenge. Empirically, it examines three historical waves of democratic opposition: Europe in 1848 and 1917–19 and South America in the 1970s and 1980s. Theoretically, it advances two approaches to explaining diffusion and the success or failure of democratic opposition movements. The book is an important contribution to the study of both diffusion and the major episodes of democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.' Ruth Collier, University of California, Berkeley