The Power of Ideas: A Political Social-Psychological Theory of Democracy, Political Development and Political Communication

In this dissertation, I propose a new social psychological theoretical framework to describe, analyze and explicate under what conditions and through what processes successful democratic stabilization can occur in the developing world. This theoretical framework attempts to add new intellectual knowledge to the academic study of democracy beyond the intellectual and practical limitations of research and policies built upon mainstream structural-functional and institutionally-focused theories of democracy, namely the procedural-minimalist approach. The intellectual focus of this study is to determine what impact, if any, the Internet has on countering the negative cultural effects of repressive authoritarian rule and improving the likelihood of successful democratic stabilization in the developing world. I comparatively examine three cases in Latin America -Argentina, Brazil and Chile- who all liberalized their information and telecommunication infrastructure (with particular attention paid to the Internet) and share a common brutal history of bureaucratic-authoritarianism (to varying degrees). I hope to accomplish four primary goals: 1. to finally advance a solid research project that positively links the Internet and democracy; 2. to explicate my social psychological theory of democracy; 3. to demonstrate the usefulness of social constructivist ideology within political science research; and 4. to reintroduce the discipline of political science to sociology and demonstrate the importance and need for more interdisciplinary and holistically-focused research projects in comparative politics and international relations that are not analytically and conceptually limited to units of analysis that lend themselves to quantification.