Despite of the fact that the “change” can be regarded as the zeitgeist of our times, in the continuum between change and continuity Arab countries have always been positioned on the latter, making of their capability to resist any democratic wave or influence the “exception” to the general democratizing trends. The recent events of the Arab Spring, toppling three well-established authoritarian regimes and fostering the general eruption of protest movements across the Arab world, challenged the traditional notion of “Arab exceptionalism”, making Arab countries no longer immune to the concepts of “democratic change”, “waves”, “contagion”, “diffusion”. In the wake of the events and with the awareness that political transitions are not an automatic process whose results can be never given for granted, several questions emerge. Which are the theoretical implications of the Arab Spring? Can it be regarded as the beginning of a fourth wave of democratization or just as a mere one-off event? Is it possible to introduce a notion of “democratic incubation” that has eventually allowed Arab countries to yield to the “democratic contagion”? With these research questions in mind and on the idea that the Arab Spring and its democratic turmoil do require to review the existent literature in this field, the aim of this paper is to investigate the appropriateness of concepts such as “waves”, “contagion”, “diffusion” and “demonstration effects” and to test them against the reality of the Arab Spring. To this purpose, the first part of the paper outlines the conceptual framework and the main theoretical concepts while the second one is concerned with testing their theoretical validity in the case of the Arab Spring, making use of qualitative data and quantitative data-set. The last part summarizes key findings and implications.
