In his article The Weight of Geopolitics, Robert Kagan seeks to answer the question of why democracy is in retreat worldwide.[1] The main claim he makes to answer this question is that political ideas within nations follow the relative success of countries holding those ideas within the geopolitical sphere.[2] In his telling, this is both because of hard power considerations, like the U.S. imposing democracy on Japan in the aftermath of World War II, and soft power aspects, like the idea that the success or failure of other democratic regimes in geopolitics impacts people’s perceptions of democracy as “people tend to follow winners.”[3] However, it is important to note Kagan never uses the specific phraseology of soft and hard power. The methodology used is that of small-n analysis. Kagan analyzes a number of case studies various periods in history that democracy either advanced or retreated worldwide and their connection to shifting geopolitics.[4] The data he uses in analyzing these case studies is sourced from a number of historical works and scholarly articles on waves of democratization and periods of democratic retreat throughout history. The conclusion he reaches at the end of his analysis is that if the United States or other liberal democracies don’t reassert themselves on the world stage, both in promoting democracy and in making democracy appealing through their example, past waves of democracy will be reversed. [5]
[1] Robert Kagan, “The Weight of Geopolitics,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 1 (January 7, 2015): 21–31.
[2] Ibid. 21.
[3] Ibid. 23.
[4] Ibid. 22-26.
[5] Ibid. 29.
A good job overall, Noah. This article is clearly relevant to your research and you’ve done a good job in identifying important methodological elements of the article. It would be good to more explicitly state the key IVs (and or the bodies of theory that inform those IVs) so that you can also think about using those in your own research project, but a fine job here overall.