(Contains some work in progress, baroquely complex graphs to illustrate the obvious, rank speculation, and half-baked argument. It also continues this series on the quantitative history of political regimes ).Now, before you accuse me of being willfully obtuse, I am aware of the obvious explanation: modern societies, the story goes, required a new “basis for legitimacy” after the breakdown of traditional forms of legitimacy. Norms of popular sovereignty and individual rights come to replace earlier “legitimizing” norms; and so all regimes now “legitimize” their power by appealing to these norms. But I'm not sure that this doesn't simply restate the problem. Why these particular norms and not others? And why would appeal to “fictional” norms - norms that are known not to have any substance on the ground, so to speak - legitimize anything (in the sense of increasing the baseline level of support for a structure of domination)? It's not that there are no answers to these questions; it's just that the appeal to legitimacy is question-begging if what we are trying to explain is how the norms became dominant in the first place, even when they have minimal impact on what happens in day to day life.There are more and less “optimistic” stories one could tell about this process. An “optimistic” story could say that there was a sense in which the norms of liberal democracy and its associated freedoms became increasingly appealing to people throughout the world over the last two centuries, while alternative norms became less so. (One might here appeal to increasing literacy, capitalist development, the breakdown of local solidarities, etc. to explain the formation of modern subjectivities; whole libraries have been written on these topics). Normative change outstripped social change; and every political regime now feels compelled to pay at least lip service to these “new” norms, if only because not mentioning them exerts some negative pressure on their survival prospects, perhaps by making those subject to it needlessly dissatisfied. By the same token, this story might continue, the mere existence of the norm puts pressure on governments to live up to their highest commitments, and enables dissatisfied people to coordinate their claims; thus Chinese activists, for example, have (on and off) appealed to the party to enforce China's own constitutional norms guaranteeing basic freedoms of speech, association, etc., and perhaps eventually they will get somewhere. Accordingly, even if normative change feels insignificant at first, it can be utterly momentous in the long run - like a force that exerts only a slight pressure, but does so continuously over the very long run and so ends up accelerating a great mass to huge velocities.While this story is probably not entirely incorrect, it seems to me that the problem here is that for a norm to have any kind of ability to raise the baseline level of support for a political structure, it needs to be not only widely recognized as a normative standard, but credibly asserted by those in power; and many of these norms are not. (It seems absurd to me to think that the mere assertion of freedom of speech in the North Korean constitution can possibly fool anyone who doesn't already want to be fooled for other reasons, to take only an obvious example). Moreover, it seems clear that many of these norms are liable to lose their force as they become globally dominant simply as a result of adaptation on the part of groups adversely affected by them. There was a time, for example, when it was a matter of live controversy who should be admitted to the franchise , whereas nowadays most adults everywhere are enfranchised, even if their votes are utterly meaningless, since powerful groups have adapted to the mere existence of elections (if not necessarily to the possibility of actually fair elections). Similarly, it may be that as legal freedom of speech becomes increasingly unlikely to genuinely threaten powerful interests, the more easily it comes to be accepted as a global norm. Successful adaptation by groups that are disadvantaged under particular norms reduces their propensity to produce conflict; and the global dominance of a norm can thus mean either that it is ripe for struggles to give it substance (let's turn the fake democracy into a real democracy) or that it has been hollowed out, and live conflicts have relocated to other normative arenas (the right to healthcare, or to a standard of living, or to bear arms, or to enforce one's religion on others, etc., rather than suffrage, etc.).There are also other complications. Suppose that particular norms become entangled with markers of status; to be a “proper” country, with a “proper” constitution involves asserting some of the norms that powerful countries profess to affirm. As long as the norm is merely one of the marks of status tied to a specific collective identity, it can be asserted by most people in an entirely fictive way. The norm then appears as a sort of ornament, one aspect of a collective identity expressing “far” values , while being ignored or rationalized away in concrete situations. (The modern USA is “the land of the free” to most of its citizens irrespective of particular facts about freedom in the USA; and the idea that Venezuelans have “the best constitution in the world” is entirely unaffected, for most Venezuelans, by the fact that it is routinely ignored ). On this view, it is precisely higher-status countries that have the most freedom to mention or not to mention particular norms, which is more or less in accord with some of the data above, though I have not checked properly; and “new” norms should come from relatively peripheral countries with leaders intent on raising their status (e.g., Venezuela, whose constitution is chock-full of rights and institutional innovations, however unenforced). (Incidentally, we know that in fact many “democratic innovations” first emerged and were developed in peripheral countries , not major powers). The power of the norm comes here less from the content of the norm - as in the optimistic story - than from its association with other markers of status. I suspect similar things happened in the more distant past; as James C. Scott notes in The Art of Not Being Governed , the symbols of absolute monarchy were often adopted by peoples who had hardly “states” at all: every two-bit chieftain claimed to be a universal emperor.The global dominance of “democratic” norms in this "fictional" sense complicates our efforts to make sense of events like the Arab revolutions. Were these revolts “for” democracy? People sometimes argue that the revolts were not “for” democracy insofar as many protesters didn't make “democracy” their principal demand; instead, people wanted jobs, respect, dignity, and many other things. But we need to take into account the fact that the Arab republics explicitly endorsed democracy - the Qaddafi constitution made a huge deal of its participatory democratic character, for example - yet the norm was without substance. The revolts have sometimes attempted to give substance to the norm, but sometimes they have chosen different, more contested normative terrains - over the role of religion in public life, for example - where a norm is not yet universally accepted. This does not mean that “democracy” was not valued; it may mean merely that it was not always understood as something that required normative defence, or as a terrain where fighting over meaning was likely to lead to any interesting places, since everyone already agreed on democracy as the standard, though they disagreed in how exactly to give substance to it. Anyway, more of this would become clearer if we had a better sense of how it came about that these “liberal” rights became so dominant as normative fictions - when and where they first became publicly affirmed throughout the world. But I've run out of steam, and this post is already long enough. More later on the more vexed question of “culture” and democracy, perhaps…Code for replicating the graphs in this post (plus some additional stuff) is available in this Gist (five files, including one with auxiliary functions and some geocoded country codes). You will also need access to the public CCP data.