A Note on Borders, Dyads and the Distribution of Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa

In this note we use dyadic data to address the issue of the spread of political regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 to 2014. Dyadic data are binary relationship between countries and provide a data-rich environment for the study of international relations. We address the issue of correlation between these dyadic observations, which generates a cluster of dependent observations associated with that country. We find that borders matter, since often the effect of home- and foreign-grown variables have differentiated effects on democracy in one country.