Tunisia, Egypt, and now Yemen. Is democracy contagious?
Victoria Clark examines “Why Yemen won’t fall” in an opinion-piece of the New York Times.
It is very interesting to see how what happens in neighbor countries can change the perception of what becomes possible for the people. Even more with the spread of information today, one country can change “the rules of the game” for a whole region. In Yemen the president ended up making political concessions that he would never have made without the events in Egypt and Tunisia.
However, it would be interesting to see in the long term what those different “revolutions” become. Depending on how the negotiations are made between the different groups, and what will be the role of the military, the spectrum of possibilities for political regimes will be very broad. Therefore I would say that revolution might be contagious but we cannot say yet if democracy will be too.