https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8587-8183
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Huntington famously distinguished between waves of democratization and de-democratization. Based on an alternative conceptualization of waves of regime change and novel data on episodes of democratization and autocratization, Lührmann and Lindberg identify three waves of autocratization where the most recent and ongoing began in 1994, affects a higher number of democracies, and unfolds relatively slowly and piecemeal. In this note, however, I argue that both their definition and their measurement of waves of democratization and autocratization are questionable. First, their operationalization of regime changes do not capture all degrees of change and it provides a skewed account since the criteria used to identify episodes of autocratization and democratization are not balanced. Second, their definition of waves of regime change deviates from the conventional understandings as it emphasizes relative trends in the number of upturns and downsturns rather than looking at the relative size or the relative number of autocratizations vis-à-vis democratizations. The last part of the article shows that an alternative, more intuitively appealing understanding and operationalization supports different conclusions regarding the periodization of waves.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anne Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg for sharing their data and for their readiness to answer my questions and commenting on a draft version. Moreover, I would like to thank the reviewers as well as Vanessa Boese, Suthan Krishnarajan, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Jørgen Møller for detailed comments on the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See, e.g. Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization.”
2 Huntington, The Third Wave.
3 See, e.g., Berg-Schlosser, “Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization,” 41–73; Diamond, “Is the Third Wave Over?” 20–37; Doorenspleet, “Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization”; Knutsen and Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy”; Kurzman, “Waves of Democratization”; Markoff, Waves of Democracy; Møller and Skaaning, Democracy and Democratization in Comparative Perspective.
4 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization.”
5 Kurzman (“Waves of Democratization,” 50) also identifies a third understanding, which considers the “linkages among a group of countries undergoing democratization” (see also Gunitsky, “Democratic Waves in Historical Perspective”). However, since this approach moves beyond descriptive purposes by emphasizing the importance of connections and resting on assumptions about diffusion or imposition effects, I disregard it here.
6 E.g. Cassani and Tomini, “Reversing Regimes and Concepts”; Autocratization in Post-Cold War Regimes; Cederman, Hug, and Krebs, “Democratization and Civil War”; Durán, “Dual Presidentialization and Autocratization”; Lührmann et al., “State of the World 2017”; Tan, “Regime Change and Conflict Recidivism within Rivalry.”
7 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization,” 1099.
8 Ibid., 1098.
9 Ibid., 1101.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 1111.
12 Huntington, The Third Wave, 15.
13 See, e.g. Knutsen et al., “Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset”; Knutsen and Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy”; Strand et al., Why Waves?; Teorell, Determinants of Democracy.
14 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization,” 1102.
15 Ibid., .
16 See Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg, “Regimes of the World (RoW).” It bears mentioning that also the ROW categorizations are based on somewhat arbitrary thresholds. More particularly, democracies are distinguished from autocracies by identifying polities scoring higher than .5 on the V-Dem electoral democracy index and at least 2 on two V-Dem indicators (using the _osp-version), i.e. multi-party elections and free and fair elections.
17 See Lindberg et al., Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization.
18 A new, symmetrical version of the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset is about to be released.
19 A similar point can be made about the size of changes, where some are relatively small (just fulfilling the threshold criteria), while others are big.
20 See, e.g. Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding”; Diamond, Ill Winds; Lührmann et al., “State of the World 2017”; Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome Change.”
21 Notice that, following L&L, all polities included in the V-Dem dataset are used in the analysis. Accordingly, some of the polities included are not independent countries but rather semi-sovereign units such as overseas colonies. This means that some of the revealed patterns are different those based on an analysis only based on independent countries, which is the approach most commonly applied when constructing such overviews. Only including independent countries would, for example, imply a higher average until the late 1960s a more pronounced upturns and downturns largely in line with Huntington’s periodization (see Knutsen and Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy”). There is not much evidence of a second reverse wave, however, if one takes into account that the number of independent countries has increased (see Doorenspleet, “Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization”; Møller and Skaaning, Democracy and Democratization in Comparative Perspective).
22 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization.”
23 Other studies have reached similar conclusions, see, e.g. Carothers and Young, “Democracy Is Not Dying”; Knutsen and Skaaning, “The Ups and Downs of Democracy”; Levitsky and Way, “The Myth of Democratic Recession”; Skaaning and Jiménez, “The Global State of Democracy”; Treisman, Is Democracy in Danger?.
24 Carothers, “Dictators in Trouble.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Svend-Erik Skaaning
Svend-Erik Skaaning is professor of political science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include the conceptualization, measurement, and explanations of democracy and other aspects of good governance. He has recently published three books on these issues: the single-authored Democracy (Aarhus University Press) and the co-authored Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis: Reassessing the Interwar Period (Oxford University Press) and Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change (Cambridge University Press).