Steven Levitsky (bio) and Lucan A. Way (bio) (muse.jhu.edu)
Against widespread perceptions, the authors argue that democracy has proven remarkably resilient in the twenty-first century. Fears of a “reverse wave” or a global “authoritarian resurgence” have yet to be borne out. The vast majority of “third wave” democracies—those that adopted democratic institutions between 1975 and 2000—have long outlived the favorable global conditions that enabled their creation. The authors attribute the resilience of third-wave democracies after the demise of the liberal West’s post–Cold War hegemony to economic development and urbanization, and also to the difficulty of consolidating and sustaining an emergent authoritarian regime under competitive political conditions.
Democracy has proven surprisingly resilient in the twenty-first century. The extraordinary global democratic expansion of the late twentieth century has ended, and several prominent democracies, including those in Hungary, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela, have experienced backsliding or breakdown. But the vast majority of “third wave” democracies—regimes that became democracies between 1975 and 2000—endure.1 Despite an increasingly unfavorable international environment, fears of a “reverse wave” or a global “authoritarian resurgence” have yet to be borne out. And the last quarter-century remains by far the most democratic in history.
Democracy has survived the demise of the global conditions that helped to propel the third wave. Starting in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s, sweeping across South America in the 1980s, and peaking in the decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the wave nearly tripled the number of democracies in the world (from 36 in 1975 to 95 in 2005, according to the Varieties of Democracy project). This unprecedented democratic expansion was rooted in an unusually favorable international environment.2 The post–Cold War era, roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (2003), was more supportive of democracy than any other period in history. The Soviet collapse discredited single-party rule as a regime model and eliminated the principal source of external support for single-party dictatorships. It also destroyed the raison d’être of anticommunist dictatorships.
The fall of communism led to a brief but consequential period of Western liberal hegemony, during which the United States and the European Union were the world’s dominant military, economic, and ideological powers. The West’s virtual monopoly as a provider of economic [End Page 5] assistance created strong incentives for peripheral states to adopt Western-style institutions, particularly multiparty elections. At the same time, the United States and other Western powers promoted democracy as never before. The end of the Cold War removed a major competing foreign-policy priority, which paved the way for more consistent and muscular democracy promotion. Thus, the EU used strict membership conditionality to encourage democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, while Washington applied economic, diplomatic, and occasionally military pressure to discourage coups and encourage autocrats to leave power or hold competitive elections.
The consequences of these geopolitical changes were far-reaching. Stripped of outside support and facing grave economic problems, both Soviet-backed and anticommunist dictatorships plunged into crisis in the early 1990s. Across Africa, the former Soviet Union, and parts of Asia and the Americas, isolated and bankrupt autocrats either held competitive elections or fell from power in the 1990s, giving rise to dozens of new multiparty regimes. The number of de jure single-party regimes in Africa fell from 29 in 1989 to zero in 1994.3 Not all these new multiparty regimes were fully democratic, but many of them were quite competitive. By the mid-1990s, then, democracy was “the only game in town” in many parts of the world.
The third wave’s extraordinary reach points to an underappreciated fact: Democracies overperformed in the post–Cold War era.4 Decades of social-science research have identified a range of structural conditions that make both democratization and democratic survival more likely, including capitalist development, large middle and working classes, a strong civil society, low social inequality, effective state institutions, and economic growth. During the 1990s, democracy emerged in countries—such as Albania, Benin, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ghana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, and Nicaragua—with few or none of these conditions. These surprising democratizations were often seen as challenging or even disconfirming established structuralist theories, but a more plausible explanation is that international conditions were so uniquely favorable to democracy that they tempered the effects of structural factors.
The End of Western Liberal Hegemony
The favorable conditions of the 1990s would not endure.5 The rise of China and the resurgence of Russia as an aggressive illiberal power reshaped the global landscape, ending Western liberal hegemony. As the balance of power shifted, the influence of Western liberal democracies waned. Increasingly, autocrats could turn to Beijing, Moscow, or emerging regional powers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia for military and economic support. At the same time, historic spikes in the prices of [End Page 6] oil, gas, and other mineral exports allowed many autocratic regimes to establish (Ecuador, Venezuela), consolidate (Azerbaijan, Russia), or reconsolidate (Algeria, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Gabon) their rule. The combination of external support and abundant resources expanded autocrats’ room to maneuver, reducing their dependence on the liberal West. By the 2010s, democracy was no longer the only game in town.
Simultaneously, the 2008 global financial crisis, U.S. failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rise of illiberal forces within established democracies eroded the prestige and self-confidence of Western powers, with their will and capacity to promote democracy abroad falling accordingly. The EU, which had been so influential in Southern Europe in the 1970s and Central Europe in the 1990s, did little to combat emerging authoritarianism in Hungary, Serbia, and elsewhere in the 2010s.6 Likewise, whereas U.S. administrations had intervened successfully to block authoritarian power grabs in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, and elsewhere in the late twentieth century, Washington failed to do so in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in the new century.
By the 2010s, then, the external costs of authoritarianism had declined markedly. Even governments in peripheral states with close ties to the West, such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Nicaragua, found that they could assault democratic institutions and get away with it.
Equally challenging to many third-wave democracies were the difficulties inherent to governing in “hard places.”7 New democracies are generally more vulnerable to breakdown, but they are especially crisisprone in countries with weak states, volatile economies, entrenched inequality, and widespread poverty and criminal violence. In the early twenty-first century, many new democracies confronted all or nearly all these conditions. Not surprisingly, elected governments in these democracies governed badly. Poor economic performance, corruption, rising crime rates, and insufficient and ineffective social policies generated broad public discontent. In a fledgling democracy without strong institutions or a history of democratic rule, such discontent can prove fatal.
There were good reasons, then, to expect many third-wave democracies to fail in the early twenty-first century. Democracy had emerged in many hard places, and the uniquely favorable international conditions that had once facilitated democratization in those places no longer existed.
Indeed, many of the democracies that had been born under especially unfavorable conditions experienced backsliding (Benin, Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras) or breakdown (Mali, Nicaragua). And numerous middle-income countries troubled by acute economic instability, inequality, corruption, or criminal violence experienced mounting public discontent and the election of populist or authoritarian figures who threatened democratic institutions. Several of these democracies (Ecuador, [End Page 7] the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Turkey) suffered backsliding, and a few (Thailand, Venezuela) broke down.
These emerging crises produced a dramatic mood swing among observers of democracy. Scholars wrote of an emerging “democratic recession,” a global “authoritarian resurgence,”8 and even a “third wave of autocratization.”9 Freedom House’s 2022 annual report pointed to a “global expansion of authoritarian rule.” The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project’s 2023 report claimed that global levels of democracy had declined to 1986 levels and, thus, that the global democratic advances of the last thirty-five years had been “wiped out.”10
The data do not support such claims. In its report covering the year 2013, Freedom House listed ninety countries as Free. A decade later, that number was 84. According to V-Dem, the number of liberal and electoral democracies in the world declined from 96 in 2016 to 90 in 2022. Both indices report that there are about as many democracies today as there were at the turn of the twenty-first century—and many more democracies than there were in 1995, at the height of the third wave. This modest democratic decline contrasts sharply with the period between the two world wars, when the number of democracies fell by more than a third from 27 to 17.11 Other indices, such as the Polity database and the Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy, find little or no evidence of a democratic recession. Most prominently, Andrew Little and Anne Meng, who developed a democracy index based on objective measures including incumbent turnover, incumbents’ vote and seat shares in elections, and data on repression of journalists compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists, find “little evidence of backsliding.”12 Little and Meng’s measures are blunt and fail to capture many forms of authoritarian abuse, but their analysis highlights an important fact: The rate of incumbent turnover “has remained fairly constant since the late 1990s.”13
Thus, even if Freedom House and V-Dem are correct in identifying an increase in incumbent abuse over the last decade or so, the consequences of that abuse appear to be modest, for many autocratic-leaning incumbents are failing to entrench themselves in power. Regimes in Albania, Benin, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Malawi, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Panama, Peru, Romania, Ukraine, and Zambia have each experienced between three and six electoral turnovers since 1990. Some of these regimes are not fully democratic, but the competitiveness of elections and regularity of turnover suggest that they are also not “autocratizing.”
Perception versus Reality
If leading indices suggest only a modest erosion of global democracy, what explains the widespread perception of steep decline? We see several reasons. First, the election of illiberal or authoritarian leaders is often [End Page 8] conflated with democratic backsliding. Electing a president or prime minister with autocratic tendencies certainly heightens the risk of backsliding, but it should not be taken as evidence of backsliding. Elected leaders with dubious democratic credentials may govern democratically. Examples include Panama’s Ernesto Pérez Balladares, who was elected with Manuel Noriega’s Revolutionary Democratic Party just five years after Noriega’s overthrow; Peru’s Ollanta Humala, a failed coup leader who launched his political career as a radical populist in the mold of Hugo Chávez; billionaire populist Andrej Babiš, who served as premier of the Czech Republic from 2017 to 2021, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (whose Brothers of Italy party has roots in Italian fascism) since 2022. In other cases, leaders attempt to weaken or subvert democratic institutions but are thwarted and thus leave office with democracy intact. Examples include Álvaro Uribe in Colombia, Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and, in all likelihood, Andres Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.
A second reason why perceptions of global democratic decline do not match reality is that instances of democratic backsliding are frequently short-lived. Many of the elected autocrats who subverted democratic institutions in the twenty-first century lost power within a decade, very often resulting in a “slide back” to democracy. For example, Moldova’s democracy backslid after the Communist Party came to power in the 2000s, but recovered when the Communists lost at the polls in 2009. In Ukraine, backsliding under Viktor Yanukovych was reversed after his fall in the 2014 EuroMaidan uprising. In Sri Lanka, the slide into autocracy was checked by President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s electoral defeat in 2015—and again after the Rajapaksa family was toppled by civil unrest in 2022. In North Macedonia, backsliding under Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski was halted after public protests forced Gruevski to resign. In Ecuador, backsliding under President Rafael Correa was reversed after he left office in 2017. Likewise, backsliding was reversed in Zambia after President Edgar Lungu was defeated in the 2021 elections and in Honduras after President Juan Orlando Hernández left power in 2022.
A third reason why the overall level of “autocratization” is more modest than it appears is that cases of democratic backsliding have been offset by democratic advances in other countries. Armenia, Colombia, the Gambia, Liberia, Malaysia, Moldova, Nepal, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka have all made democratic advances over the last fifteen years, but these cases received less attention—from both media and scholars—than such well-known backsliders as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela. The same is true of many unsung successes, or democracies that have survived in “hard places,” such as Romania, Ghana, and Mongolia. Even though democratic resilience in Romania—a poor country under Stalinist rule just a few decades ago—is as surprising as backsliding in neighboring Hungary, the latter case has received far greater attention. [End Page 9]
In sum, democratic erosion in this century has been modest. There is little evidence of a reverse wave comparable to those which followed the first and second waves. Given that so many third-wave transitions occurred in countries with unfavorable domestic conditions; that the international environment has grown less supportive; and that economic volatility, state weakness, corruption, and criminal violence have eroded public trust in elected governments across the world, the survival of so many new democracies reveals striking resilience.
The surprising persistence of democratic and near-democratic regimes is rooted in two distinct structural factors: whereas in some countries it is based in societal strength, which is largely a product of socioeconomic development, in other countries it is based—more precariously—in authoritarian weakness, which is largely a product of state incapacity.
Modernization and Democratic Resilience
One reason many third-wave democracies survive is modernization. Decades of research have demonstrated a robust correlation between economic development and stable democracy.14 Excluding major oil producers, 51 of the world’s 53 high-income countries are democracies (Hungary and Singapore are the only exceptions).
How, precisely, does economic development promote democracy? One school of thought, exemplified by Seymour Martin Lipset and, more recently, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, highlights the role of education in generating democratic values of tolerance and selfexpression.15 Other scholars argue that by reducing social inequality, development either dampens radicalism and polarization (Lipset again) or lowers the cost of democracy for wealthy elites by easing pressure for redistribution and increasing capital mobility.16 Still others contend that industrialization weakens antidemocratic landowning classes and strengthens social classes, such as the bourgeoisie and the working class, whose interests are best advanced under liberal democracy.17
Our approach, which draws on the work of Robert A. Dahl, centers on the distribution of power and resources in society.18 For Dahl, democracy is most likely to emerge and survive in a “pluralistic social order,” where wealth, income, skills, status, and other critical resources are dispersed across society.
Resource concentration is a recipe for autocracy. Where the state monopolizes the main sources of wealth and income, citizens depend on the government for resources—jobs, income, housing, loans, contracts—that are essential to their livelihoods. Governments can exploit this dependence by denying rivals and critics access to much-needed resources (while offering favorable access to loyalists). Democracy requires opposition, and sustainable opposition requires organization. [End Page 10] Autonomous organizations must have independent access to resources. Citizens who fear losing their jobs, income, or housing are less likely to join civic or opposition organizations, and businesses whose survival depends on state subsidies, credit, contracts, or licenses are less likely to finance such groups. In such a context, it is nearly impossible for opposition groups to mobilize large numbers of people or build durable organizations. Eventually, many of them are co-opted by the government, confined to the political margins, or starved out of existence.
Where resources are concentrated in the state, then, opposition groups are almost invariably weak, disorganized, and vulnerable to cooptation or collapse. Authoritarian resource concentration can take several forms. One is economic statism. Where the state controls the means of production and the main sources of employment and income, private sectors are small and dependent, leaving oppositions without financial bases, and critics may be easily deprived of the means for their livelihood.19 Thus, in countries such as China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and postcommunist Belarus and Russia, state control of the economy generates extreme power asymmetries that undercut the viability of opposition. Indeed, of the world’s twenty-five most economically statist countries (according to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom), only two—Suriname and Timor-Leste—were fully democratic in 2023.20
Another form of extreme resource concentration is the petrostate. In oil-based rentier economies such as those of Saudi Arabia and neighboring monarchies, the state owns most of the wealth, creating a situation similar to a command economy: Government control over resource distribution dramatically raises the cost—for citizens, businesses, and civil society—of speaking out or protesting against those in power. Thus, the structural bases of opposition—and consequently, of democracy—are weak. Indeed, 20 of the 21 states in which oil rents constituted (according to the World Bank) at least a tenth of GDP in 2021 are autocracies. Guyana is the sole exception.
Historically, the most common source of authoritarian resource concentration has been underdevelopment. Poor agrarian societies, in which property and wealth are concentrated in the state and a landowning elite while an overwhelming majority of citizens are rural dwellers living at subsistence levels, are a poor foundation for democracy. Before the Industrial Revolution, such conditions gave rise to absolute monarchies [End Page 11] or (if landed elites were able to check royal power) constitutional oligarchies. Spread out across the countryside and lacking resources and organization, poor rural majorities generally lacked the mobilizational muscle to achieve or sustain democracy.
Capitalist Development and Democratic Muscle
That muscle emerges with economic development, especially capitalist development. For one, economic development generates higher individual incomes. Higher incomes, particularly if privately generated, empower citizens by enhancing their autonomy. More affluent citizens are less reliant on the state or patron-client networks, less likely to sell their votes, and thus better positioned to actively oppose the government. They possess the time, skills, and resources to join independent organizations and seek out and obtain information from private media. Wealthier citizens also help to finance civic and opposition organizations, which can be critical to their survival. Thus, societal wealth dramatically increases both the demand for and the supply of independent media, civic associations, and opposition groups.
Capitalist development also gives rise to a more robust private sector—one that is less vulnerable to cooptation or socioeconomic sanctions. Not only do emerging capitalist classes often seek to strengthen institutional constraints on state power, but crucially, they possess the resources to sustain democratic-reform movements.21 Private business is often an important source of financing for political parties, independent media, civil society associations, and democracy movements. As Lisa Mueller has shown, a major impetus behind rising political protest in twenty-first century Africa has been the growth of middle classes capable of financing them.22 Capitalists do not always support democracy. Indeed, in some contexts (for example, much of East Asia and Latin America during the Cold War), they have backed right-wing dictatorships. Nonetheless, a healthy, autonomous private sector is a necessary condition for durable democracy.
Economic development also strengthens previously disenfranchised classes, particularly working classes. Industrial workers, like capitalists, are not invariably prodemocratic.23 But the growth of industrial working classes enhances the collective mobilizational capacity of the urban poor, which frequently shifts the distribution of power in society away from oligarchic or authoritarian-regime elites. Indeed, working-class expansion dramatically strengthened democracy movements early in the twentieth century in Europe, and late twentieth century Brazil, Poland, Spain, South Africa, and South Korea.24
Urbanization similarly enhances societies’ capacity for organization and collective mobilization.25 Urban residents can share information quickly and build networks that become bases for organized political [End Page 12] action.26 Cities also bring opposition protest closer to the “nerve centers of government,” which increases their likelihood of success.27 Nonviolent collective mobilizations—what Mark Beissinger calls “urban revolutions”—heighten the cost of repression and can overwhelm a state’s repressive capacity. Urban revolutions are not always democratizing, but as Beissinger shows, they have had a net positive impact on both electoral democracy and civil liberties in recent decades.28
Finally, increased education and literacy facilitate political mobilization by increasing citizens’ self-efficacy, knowledge about politics, and exposure to new ideas and practices. Indeed, recent research shows a clear relationship between the expansion of education and long-run political participation.29
In sum, capitalist development generates independent sources of economic and social power, dispersing resources away from the state and making it harder for leaders to monopolize political control. Higher incomes, wealthier private sectors, larger middle and working classes, and bigger cities generate what might be called countervailing societal power, which is critical to both achieving and sustaining democracy. By enhancing citizens’ capacity to organize independently of the state, economic development creates the structural bases for viable opposition.
The emergence of countervailing societal power does not, of course, guarantee democratization, especially in the short run. Economic performance, leadership successions, wars, and other contingencies shape the likelihood of democratic transitions.30 Over time, however, the existence of a pluralistic social order and countervailing societal power makes authoritarianism harder to sustain. Well-funded oppositions with large support bases are costlier to repress, harder to coopt, and more formidable at the polls. Societal wealth and dispersed resources make it more likely that the breakdown of authoritarian rule will result in democratization, and they make it more likely that new democracies will survive. Seizing and consolidating autocratic power is far more difficult when resources are dispersed across society rather than concentrated in the state.
Favorable Domestic Conditions Spread
Modernization helps us to understand contemporary democratic resilience because the world is considerably more developed today than it was when the third wave began in the 1970s. Half a century ago, few countries outside Western Europe and North America were characterized by levels of capitalist development, urbanization, and education that would lead us to expect stable democracy. Even now-industrialized countries such as Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan were still mostly rural in the early 1970s. Across Asia, Latin America, and communist Central and Eastern Europe, private sectors, independent [End Page 13] labor movements, and civil societies were weak or nonexistent, which limited countervailing societal power. The stable democracies that had emerged in those regions (Costa Rica, India, Venezuela) were outliers.
By the early twenty-first century, however, domestic conditions in much of the world had grown more favorable to democracy. The world had become wealthier. The number of countries classified as “high income” by the World Bank more than doubled, from 25 to 53 (excluding oil-based states), between 1987 and 2022. Urbanization increased markedly. Whereas only about a third of the world’s people lived in cities in 1974, today more than half (56 percent) live in cities. Global literacy has also risen considerably, and the proliferation of communications technology has dramatically expanded access to information and enhanced the potential for collective mobilization.
The political consequences of these changes have been profound. Take South Korea. When General Park Chung Hee’s military coup ended a brief democratic experiment there in 1961, the country was poor and overwhelmingly rural, with small middle and working classes incapable of sustaining a robust civil society. Rapid industrialization changed all that, however. When students mobilized against dictatorship in 1987, their backers included powerful trade unions and a large, prosperous, and increasingly well-organized urban middle class, whose “necktie troops” helped to make prodemocracy demonstrations succeed.31 Democratic governments then drew on middle-class support to push the military out of politics in the early 1990s. The new regime easily weathered the 1997 Asian financial crisis and today, South Korea has the world’s twelfth-largest economy and sustains a robust democracy.
Likewise, South Africa’s first significant democracy movement, led by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1950s, was crushed after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. At the time, South Africa was a largely rural society with tiny black middle and working classes, which enabled apartheid to endure for nearly a generation without serious challenge. Rapid industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, however, gave rise to a powerful labor movement and a robust urban civil society, which undergirded the mass protests that made democratization possible.32 Now nearly 70 percent urban and more than four times wealthier (per capita) than it was in the 1970s, South Africa has been a stable democracy for three decades. Similar processes of industrialization generated favorable structural conditions for democracy in Greece, Spain, Taiwan, and, to a lesser extent, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
Other third-wave cases developed rapidly in the aftermath of democratization, buttressed, in large part, by extensive ties to the West. Examples include Portugal, Chile, Mexico, Panama, the Baltic states, and most of Central Europe. Some of these countries, including the Dominican Republic and Romania, were initially quite poor and lacked effective states and robust civil societies; indeed, their transitions were [End Page 14] driven by intense external pressure. Over time, however, strong ties to the West likely generated both rapid economic development and the emergence of stronger states and civil societies.33 Thus, although these regimes began the third wave with unfavorable domestic conditions, the international environment contributed to the emergence of more solid democratic foundations.
Wealthy democracies are not immune to backsliding, as recent developments in Hungary, Israel, Turkey, and even the United States make clear. But rich democracies are markedly more robust than poorer ones. Indeed, the world’s richest democracies have a perfect survival rate since World War II. Wealthy third-wave democracies have also proven remarkably stable. As of 2022, twenty third-wave democratizers fell into or very near the high-income group. Including Bulgaria (which falls just short the World Bank threshold), they are Chile, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and Uruguay. Of these, nineteen are stable democracies. The only exception is Hungary.
Modernization, then, is an important source of global democratic resilience. Democracy rarely breaks down in wealthy societies, and the number of wealthy societies had increased dramatically by the early twenty-first century.
Authoritarian Weakness and Competitive Politics
Economic development cannot explain the resilience of all third-wave democracies, however. Even in countries with less favorable structural conditions, many democratic or near-democratic regimes—regimes with highly competitive elections and regular turnover, but which do not meet all the criteria for liberal democracy, such as Albania, Benin, Georgia, Indonesia, Malawi, Moldova, Senegal, Ukraine, and Zambia—persist in the early twenty-first century. This persistence is largely rooted in authoritarian weakness.
Just like new democracies, most new autocracies are fragile. It is relatively easy for an authoritarian-leaning politician to win power in a democracy (Bolsonaro in Brazil or Trump in the United States, for example), but consolidating an authoritarian regime is much harder. The task is easiest in rentier states (Angola, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Republic of Congo), states where the government controls much of the economy (Belarus, Burma, Turkmenistan), or in very poor countries (Burundi, Chad, South Sudan). It is also more likely in cases of violent social revolution (Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Rwanda, Vietnam), which often eviscerate preexisting civil societies and generate unusually strong ruling-party and state institutions.34
Frequently, however, emerging autocracies lack any of these conditions. [End Page 15] Indeed, most would-be autocrats inherit feeble states plagued by corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and fiscal scarcity. State weakness undermines authoritarian rule by limiting governments’ capacity to monitor and control dissent, coopt or repress independent media, punish economic elites who finance opposition, and repress protest. In extreme cases, midlevel or local bureaucrats may fail to follow the center’s orders to commit election fraud, while poorly paid and equipped security forces might refuse to crack down on protests and could even join them. Such state incapacity brought down embryonic autocracies in Georgia, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, and Madagascar in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Many new autocrats also lack strong ruling parties. These are often crucial to durable authoritarianism. They organize and coordinate elites, doling out the spoils of power to keep them happy and in the regime’s camp.35 Most post–Cold War autocracies hold regular multiparty elections, making parties vital as well for mobilizing, buying, or stealing votes. Lacking strong parties, many autocrats today are vulnerable to elite defections and electoral defeat. Ruling-party weakness has undermined emerging authoritarianism or contributed to the fall of autocraticleaning presidents in Benin, Ecuador, Malawi, Moldova, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Zambia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
These are cases of “pluralism by default,” in which incumbents lack the resources and coercive capacity to consolidate authoritarian rule.36 In such cases, pluralism and competitive politics persist not because democratic institutions or civil society are strong, but because governments lack the basic organizational or administrative tools to steal elections, shut down independent media, repress opposition groups, or crack down on protest.
One example is Ukraine. Elected autocrat Viktor Yanukovych had to flee the presidency and the country amid the 2014 EuroMaidan protests in part because the security forces splintered and abandoned him. Later that year, Petro Poroshenko won the presidential election without an established party. When he tried to declare martial law in 2018 in an apparent effort to delay the upcoming election, he met intense opposition from even his own allies. The election went forward, and Volodymyr Zelensky soundly defeated Poroshenko. Authoritarian weakness has been an important source of Ukrainian democracy.
Benin is an even more striking example of pluralism by default. One of the world’s least developed countries, Benin remained democratic for nearly three decades between 1991 and 2018. The persistence of pluralism, competitive elections, and incumbent turnover cannot be explained by the strength of opposition, which was fragmented and weak, or prodemocratic leaders. Rather, presidents Nicéphore Soglo, Mathieu Kérékou, and Thomas Boni Yayi lacked ruling parties or effective control over the coercive apparatus, which left them unable to tilt the electoral playing field (Soglo), extend their stay in office (Kérékou), [End Page 16] or impose their chosen successor (Yayi). The result was four instances of opposition victory and incumbent turnover between 1991 and 2016.
The Difficulties of Authoritarian Consolidation
Beyond these extreme cases of pluralism by default, contemporary efforts to consolidate authoritarianism are often undermined by the myriad challenges of governing in middle-income countries with weak states. Across Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia, weak state institutions result in moderate to high levels of corruption, poor and uneven delivery of public services, chronic fiscal shortfalls, insufficient social spending, and in many cases, pervasive criminal violence. Such problems pose a threat to new democracies, but they also vex emerging autocracies. In recent years, autocratic or autocratic-leaning presidents in Albania, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, Macedonia, Malawi, Moldova, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Ukraine, Zambia, and elsewhere have, in the face of eroding public support, either lost elections or been forced to cede power to successors who governed more democratically. In other words, the failure of backsliding governments eventually led to a “slide back” in a more democratic direction.
Turnover in weak authoritarian regimes should not be conflated with democracy. In fact, it rarely gives rise to stable democracy and is more often associated with unstable, crisis-prone regimes (Albania, Ecuador, Malawi, Ukraine, Zambia). But the persistence of pluralism, competitive elections, and turnover is no small thing. At the very least, it inhibits authoritarian consolidation. Because autocratic-leaning governments are unable to build durable patronage networks or establish firm control over institutions such as the judiciary, the military, and the electoral authorities, democratic forces are better positioned to resist efforts to impose full autocracy.
Notwithstanding the demise of the liberal West’s post–Cold War hegemony, we continue to live in the most democratic period in history. In much of the world, pluralism persists and even thrives where a half-century ago it did not exist. Such resilience is rooted in longterm structural changes. Although the international environment has become less friendly to democracy, domestic conditions for democracy have improved substantially in recent decades. The world has become wealthier, more urban, better educated, and interconnected. Across Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and much of Africa, economic development has dispersed political and economic resources away from states and toward previously excluded groups, strengthening opposition movements and civil society and thus raising the cost of abuse. Many autocrats, moreover, lack the resources and organizational and coercive capacity to monopolize political control. Weak states and endemic social problems challenge new autocracies just as they challenge [End Page 17] new democracies, preventing numbers of would-be strongmen from consolidating their rule.
To be clear, none of this means that all is well. Democracies across the world face serious challenges. Chinese power and Russian aggression pose real threats, as do rising illiberalism and polarization within many Western democracies. And for reasons we are just beginning to understand, public discontent with, and distrust of, political elites and institutions has risen dramatically in democracies all over the world.37 In this difficult environment, some prominent established democracies, from Hungary and Poland to Brazil, India, Israel, Mexico, and the United States, have come under strain. These developments are deeply concerning. And they could get worse, especially if the democratic crisis in the United States persists or deepens.
To protect democracy, however, we must have a clear understanding of both its vulnerabilities and its strengths. Far-reaching social, economic, and technological changes pose challenges to twenty-first–century democracies, but these changes also empower prodemocratic forces across the world. And although authoritarian forces remain strong in many places, it has become harder, in most of those places, to consolidate autocracy. If wealth and cities continue to expand, these authoritarian vulnerabilities may well deepen. None of this guarantees democratic survival. But it has given democratic forces in an unprecedented number of countries a fighting chance. [End Page 18]
Steven Levitsky is professor of government at Harvard University
Lucan A. Way is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. They are co-chairs of the Journal of Democracy Editorial Board.
NOTES
1. According to V-Dem, of the countries that became democratic for at least five years at some point between 1975 and 2000, about three quarters were democratic in 2022.
2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Seva Gunitsky, Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
3. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8.
4. Daniel Treisman, “How Great Is the Current Danger to Democracy? Assessing the Risk with Historical Data,” Comparative Political Studies (forthcoming).
5. Larry Diamond, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (New York: Penguin, 2019).
6. See R. Daniel Keleman “The European Union’s Authoritarian Equilibrium,” Journal of European Public Policy 27, issue 3 (2020): 481–91.
7. Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud, eds., Democracy in Hard Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
8. Larry Diamond, “The Democratic Rollback: The Resurgence of the Predatory State,” Foreign Affairs 87 (March–April 2009): 36–48; Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26 (January 2015): 144, 151.
9. Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New About It?” Democratization 26 (October 2019): 1095–113.
10. “Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization,” V-Dem Institute, www.v-dem.net/documents/29/V-dem_democracyreport2023_lowres.pdf, 9, 6.
11. Gunitsky, Aftershocks, 103.
12. Andrew T. Little and Anne Meng, “Measuring Democratic Backsliding,” PS: Political Science and Politics (forthcoming), 3.
13. Little and Meng, “Measuring Democratic Backsliding,” 3.
14. For a recent review of the statistical evidence, see Daniel Treisman, “Economic Development and Democracy: Predispositions and Triggers,” Annual Review of Political Science 23 (May 2020): 241–57.
15. Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959): 69–105; Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel. Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
16. See Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
17. Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
18. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 76–80.
19. William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1982); M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
20. See www.heritage.org/index. Two countries, Bolivia and Zambia, may be considered near-democracies.
21. Ansell and Samuels, Inequality and Democratization.
22. Lisa Mueller, Political Protest in Contemporary Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
23. Steven Levitsky and Scott Mainwaring, “Organized Labor and Democracy in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 39 (October 2006): 21–42.
24. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Gay Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
25. Mark R. Beissinger, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
26. Paul Staniland, “Cities on Fire: Social Mobilization, State Policy, and Urban Insurgency,” Comparative Political Studies 43 (December 2010): 1628.
27. Beissinger, Revolutionary City, 4, 15.
28. Beissinger, Revolutionary City, 14, 406–11.
29. Horacio Larreguy and John Marshall, “The Effect of Education on Civic and Political Engagement in Nonconsolidated Democracies: Evidence from Nigeria,” Review of Economics and Statistics 99 (July 2017): 387–401.
30. Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Treisman, “Economic Development and Democracy.”
31. Jang-Jip Choi, Democracy After Democratization: The Korean Experience (Stanford: Walter Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2012), 91.
32. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance.
33. See Ryszard Rapacki and Mariusz Prochniak, “EU Membership and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence for the CEE Countries,” European Journal of Comparative Economics 16 (Summer 2019): 3–40. For an alternative view, see Thomas Barnebeck Andersen, Mikkel Barslund, and Pieter Vanhuysse, “Join to Prosper? An Empirical Analysis of EU Membership and Economic Growth,” Kyklos 72 (May 2019): 211–38.
34. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).
35. Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
36. See Lucan A. Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
37. See Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Rachel Navarre, and Stephen Utych, The Age of Discontent: Populism, Extremism, and Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
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