Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization

Abstract

Since the publication of Samuel Huntington's 1991 study of democratization, scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy has come in waves. Although Huntington's work has clearly proved to be an influential study, this article suggests that his analysis is far from compelling. There are two problems embodied in the work. The first is largely conceptual. Huntington's analysis fails to provide a clear and meaningful distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes because it focuses primarily on what Dahl had defined in 1971 as the dimension of competition and pays insufficient attention to the equally important dimension of inclusion. The second problem is more empirical. Huntington has estimated the incidence of transitions to democracy in terms of the percentages of world states involved. Since the denominator in this equation, that is, the number of states in the world, is far from constant, this measure can be misleading. This article proposes solutions to both of these problems, and this new approach leads to conclusions that are quite different from Huntington's.The new findings are important not only because they suggest a somewhat altered sequencing and a more accurate count of democratization waves but also because they cast real doubt on the appropriateness of the wave metaphor. As the reverse waves are not really apparent from these data, these results therefore also indicate that future studies should be cautious in comparing, explaining, and forecasting different “waves” of democratization.

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

“…There were 40 autocratization episodes starting 17 Albania, Romania, Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands and Norway. 18 Some scholars (see Doorenspleet 2000) posit that the three -wave metaphor is an artefact of newly independent countries appearing in the sample. In the V-Dem data colonies are include as separate observations, thus such concerns apply to a lesser extent than for other datasets.…”

Elections and Political Regimes

“…2 All figures and tables in the article are constructed using regime data from Boix et al (2013) and election data from Przeworski (2013). 3 Doorenspleet (2000) shows that misclassifying 'interrupted regimes' -periods when countries are occupied by foreign powers or have experienced the collapse of central authority -as authoritarian results in misleading views of aggregate patterns in ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL REGIMES 465 regimes and regime transitions. Consequently, the periods covering the First and Second World Wars are not included.…”

Vote Buying is a Good Sign: Alternate Tactics of Fraud in Africa 1986-2012

“…However, elections are only one element of democracy, and other "partial regimes" such as civil liberties, rule of law and institutions of horizontal accountability are important features of democratic regimes as well (Schmitter and Karl 1991, Karl 1995, 2000, Diamond 1999. Following Schmitter (1992:427) we consider elections as "partial regimes" that form one component of "a composite of partial regimes" that together form a political regime.…”

“…In the wake of the third and fourth waves of democratization, elections spread around the world (Huntington 1991, Doorenspleet 2000. For all but a handful of countries, holding elections seems to have become a global norm: over 90 percent of the world's states now select their national leaders through multi-party elections (Global Commission 2012, Hyde 2011.…”