How Does an Ideology Spread? Archival Evidence from an Extreme Case

This paper is interested in the spread of an autocratic ideology and the emergence of a societal belief. It is often assumed that the greater the capacities of an autocratic regime to inculcate an ideological belief into the minds and hearts of subordinate citizens, the more an autocratic ideology is shared in a given society. The extent of an ideological belief is explained by a direct and immediate function of its indoctrination capacities. The paper does not question this top–down, macro–micro approach, but argues that the spread of an ideology also depends on stabilizing micro–micro interactions and micro–macro linkages. In this light, the paper makes use of James Coleman’s famous explanatory model and theorizes the different partial mechanisms. It pays particular emphasis on the micro–macro mechanism. Borrowing insights from epidemiology, it argues that three classes of parameters should be taken into closer consideration: timing, contact structure, and the contagiousness of an ideology. In empirical terms, the paper illustrates its theoretical reasoning with the dissemination of the North Korean Juche ideology from the 1950s to the early 1970s, which represents an extreme case of a rapidly ideologizing autocracy. The paper relies on secondary sources as well as archival material retrieved from the former embassy of the German Democratic Republic in Pyongyang.