The third wave and the democratic recession: Huntington’s thesis thirty-five years later

In the early hours of 25 April 1974, junior officers in Portugal overthrew the Estado Novo dictatorship in an almost bloodless coup, later known as the Carnation Revolution. Few people at the time saw it as the start of a global trend. Seventeen years later, Samuel P. Huntington’s The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) presented it as exactly that: the beginning of the third major wave of democratisation in modern history. The wave spread through Southern Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, and then to Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa after the Cold War ended.

Thirty-five years later, the leading debate in comparative politics is about the reverse: whether we are living through a “democratic recession” or even a “third wave of autocratisation”. This essay reviews Huntington’s argument and how it has been revised.

Huntington’s waves

Huntington defined a wave of democratisation as a group of transitions from non-democratic to democratic regimes within a specific period, significantly outnumbering transitions in the opposite direction. He identified three:

• The first, “long” wave (1828–1926), rooted in the American and French revolutions and the gradual extension of voting rights in the nineteenth century, followed by a first reverse wave (1922–42) with the rise of fascism and military regimes.
• The second, “short” wave (1943–62), driven by Allied victory and decolonisation, followed by a second reverse wave (1958–75) of military coups in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Indonesia’s move to Guided Democracy in 1959 belongs to this period.
• The third wave (from 1974), which by the early 1990s had brought democracy to around 30 countries.

Huntington explained the third wave through five main factors: the declining legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, especially when they failed to deliver growth or lost wars; economic growth that expanded the middle classes; changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, which moved it from defending authoritarian governments to opposing them; the policies of external actors, especially the European Community, the United States after the mid-1970s and the Soviet Union under Gorbachev; and snowballing or demonstration effects, as transitions in one country encouraged others nearby.

The optimism of the 1990s

The third wave coincided with the end of the Cold War, and the result was strong optimism. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis (1989/1992) argued that liberal democracy had no serious ideological competitor left. Democracy promotion became a central part of Western foreign policy. Much of the “transitology” literature assumed, sometimes without stating it, that countries leaving authoritarianism were on their way to democracy.

Thomas Carothers’ article “The End of the Transition Paradigm” (2002) challenged this assumption directly. He argued that many supposed transitional countries had settled into a “grey zone”. They held regular elections but were marked by weak participation, dominant parties and abuse of state resources. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s Competitive Authoritarianism (2010) gave this grey zone a theoretical basis: regimes in which elections are real and competitive, but the playing field is so tilted that incumbents rarely lose.

The democratic recession

From the mid-2000s, indicators began to decline. Larry Diamond (2015) described a “democratic recession”: more breakdowns, declining quality of democracy in many countries, and growing confidence among authoritarian powers. Nancy Bermeo’s article “On Democratic Backsliding” (2016) showed that the form of breakdown had changed. Classic coups and openly fraudulent elections declined. Executive aggrandisement, in which elected leaders gradually weaken checks and balances, and strategic manipulation of elections increased.

Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg (2019), using V-Dem data, argued that a “third wave of autocratisation” was under way. It is gradual, legal in form and affects established democracies, including large ones such as India, Brazil (until 2022), Turkey and Hungary, as well as newer democracies. They also noted that this wave is slower and smaller than earlier reverse waves, and that most countries remain more democratic than they were in 1974.

Problems with the wave metaphor

Students should treat the wave metaphor critically.

• Measurement matters. Different datasets (Polity, Freedom House, V-Dem, Boix–Miller–Rosato) code countries differently. Whether a “wave” exists depends partly on where the threshold for democracy is set.
• Waves suggest a common cause. Clustering in time might reflect shared international conditions, such as the end of the Cold War, rather than processes that spread from country to country.
• The concept of a wave can hide variation. Waldner and Lust (2018) argue that research on backsliding has borrowed too many concepts from older work on transitions and needs better theories of gradual change.

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia complicates every version of the story. The Philippines (1986), Thailand (1992), Indonesia (1998) and Timor-Leste (2002) democratised during the third wave. Thailand then experienced two military coups (2006, 2014) and Myanmar’s partial opening ended in the 2021 coup. Singapore and Vietnam combined strong growth with continued authoritarian rule, which challenges the link Huntington drew between economic development and democracy. The region is therefore a useful testing ground for any theory of global democratic trends.

Questions for seminar discussion

• Is the current period best described as a “reverse wave”, a “recession”, or simply variation around a much higher level of global democracy than in 1974?
• Which of Huntington’s five causes of democratisation have weakened since the 1990s, and which have reversed?
• How should Indonesia since 2014 be classified? Consider the debate between those who see “regression” and those who see stability within a hybrid system.

References and further reading

• Bermeo, N. (2016). On democratic backsliding. Journal of Democracy, 27(1), 5–19.
• Carothers, T. (2002). The end of the transition paradigm. Journal of Democracy, 13(1), 5–21.
• Diamond, L. (2015). Facing up to the democratic recession. Journal of Democracy, 26(1), 141–155.
• Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press.
• Huntington, S. P. (1991). The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press.
• Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge University Press.
• Lührmann, A., & Lindberg, S. I. (2019). A third wave of autocratization is here: What is new about it? Democratization, 26(7), 1095–1113.
• Waldner, D., & Lust, E. (2018). Unwelcome change: Coming to terms with democratic backsliding. Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 93–113.