Culture, technologies and democracy: A cross-national analysis of political development

•The path from culture to technologies and to political development is tested.•Cultures have a role in shaping the structure of horizontal networks.•The structures of networks are related to institutional democracy of nations.

Communication technologies have been hailed as having a potential to promote democracy and freedom, and this paper aims to examine these claims in a comparative, international context. Our analysis focuses on the mediating role of horizontal communication networks (i.e., telephone, mobile telephone and the Internet) in the relationship between culture and political development. Using cultural value indicators of the World Values Survey and the measures of communication technology development, this study tests the mediating path from culture to communication technologies and to political development. The results suggest that cultural values have a role in shaping the structural characteristics of horizontal networks such as accessibility and decentralization, and that these features of horizontal networks are positively related to institutional and effective democracy as well as to economic competitiveness of nations.