Democratic regression in comparative perspective: scope, methods, and causes

Third, democratization spread during the third wave to many countries that seemed to lack the supposed enabling conditions for it, such as high levels of per capita income and education, a substantial middle class and private sector, a reasonably capable state, cultural identification with liberal democratic values thought to be rooted in the Western enlightenment traditions, and a prior history of democratic government. As it happened, while “modernization” and exposure to Western values facilitated democratic transition in southern Europe (and later Central and Eastern Europe), parts of Latin America, and Korea and Taiwan, the weakness of structural preconditions for democracy did not prevent the third wave from spreading to many poor and lower-middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But what the wave left behind in almost all of those countries was “illiberal democracy.” 5 This is an important and underappreciated aspect of third wave. In 1974, over three-quarters of the world’s democracies (with populations above one million) could be classified as “liberal democracies,” in that they had both high levels of clean and fair democratic electoral competition and good protection for civil liberties with a reasonably strong rule of law. (The specific indicator I use for “liberal democracy” is one of the two best scores, a 1 or a 2, on both of the Freedom House seven-point scales of political rights and civil liberties). 6 But as the third wave gained momentum, a much larger gap emerged between the number of electoral democracies and the subset of liberal democracies (see Figure 1 ). While the former increased dramatically and consistently from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, liberal democracy expanded much more slowly and unevenly. Hence, the proportion of democracies that are liberal went from 83% in 1974 to 74% a decade later. By 1988 that proportion had fallen to 64%, and then with the big bang of the communist collapse, it fell further, to 50% in 1991 and 40% in 1994. Gradually, some of these illiberal democracies became liberal and the ratio gradually improved to about 60% in 2006, when the democratic recession began. Since then, the increasingly prominent and now dominant trend has been – choose your preferred term – democratic backsliding, erosion, or regression. Moreover, as I will soon show, it has now accelerated into a growing pace of democratic failures, which have almost exclusively afflicted illiberal democracies.

Second (a point to which I will return later in this article), even a cursory acquaintance with regime dynamics in this period underscores the importance of international factors, including the global balance of power and the foreign policies of powerful states. The successful imposition of democracy by an external power is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and it is difficult to point to a single instance of it during the third wave. But, to quote Karl Marx, while domestic actors “make their own history, … they do not make it as they please.” Rather they are shaped and constrained, not only by the deep economic and social forces Marx wrote about, but also by the international context. Communist rule would likely have fallen in Central and Eastern Europe well before 1989 (or would never have been widely established) without the military and political dominance of the Soviet Union. Changes in American foreign policy – first with Jimmy Carter’s rhetorical emphasis and aid conditionality on human rights, then with the Reagan Administration’s crucially timed diplomatic interventions in the Philippines and South Korea – helped to tip the balance of power and expectations towards democratic actors in civil society and the political opposition. 4

First, it is important to appreciate that while political science may sometimes be successful in explaining the past, its record of predicting the future is chequered at best. No one in the mid-1970s or even the mid-1980s anticipated that by the mid-1990s a majority of the world’s states would be democratic – for the first time in the history of the world. Few people anticipated the imminence, scope, and speed of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or its stimulus to democratic change elsewhere in the world.

Of course, Huntington would prove to be so wrong that just seven years later he would write the seminal book documenting the democratic transformation of the world. By then the global democratic wave had spread to Asia: the Philippines in 1986, Korea in 1987, gradually, beginning in 1986, Taiwan, and quietly, in 1988 in Thailand. Soon thereafter political liberalization processes ensued in South Asia, first Pakistan, then Bangladesh and Nepal. There soon followed the “big bang” of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ushering in a rapid succession of democratic transitions and political openings in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet states, and sub-Saharan Africa.

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the most dramatic expansion of democracy in the history of the world. What Samuel P. Huntington would call the “third wave” of global democratization became the first wave to establish democracy as the predominent form of government in the world. 1 When the wave began in 1974, only about 30% of all the world’s states were democracies – and only 22% of all states were of reasonably high quality, or what can be termed “liberal democracies.” The numbers were even more meagre among countries with populations larger than one million – 24% democracies, 20% liberal democracies. This led Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously to write in 1975, “Liberal democracy … is where the world was, not where it is going.” 2 At that very moment, while Indira Gandhi was imposing emergency rule in India in a kind of executive coup against democracy, the new global wave of democracy was getting going in southern Europe with a military rebellion against the dictatorship and then an embattled transition to democracy in Portugal, a rapid transition to democracy in Greece, and a negotiated transition in Spain. By the late 1970s, the wave began spreading to Latin America’s military dictatorships. A crucial early turning point came in 1978, when the United States pressured the authoritarian strongman, Joaquin Balaguer, to accept electoral defeat and leave office, resulting in the first democratic electoral alternation in the history of the Dominican Republic. Soon thereafter, transitions from military to civilian democratic rule followed in Ecuador and Peru. Then in 1982, the Argentine military regime – weakened by human rights sanctions during the presidency of Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) – imploded, leading to a democratic transtion the following year. Yet still, as the democratic wave was gathering momentum in Latin America, Huntington speculated in 1984 that, given the global power of authoritarian regimes like the USSR, widespread poverty and violence, and inhospitable cultural tranditions in much of the world, “the limits of democratic development in the world may well have been reached.” 3

For the past nearly decade and a half, the world has been in the grip of a democratic recession. 7 Until recently, this has been a mild and even ambiguous phenomenon, so much so that distinguished scholars challenged the notion that it was happening at all. 8 The main indicators of the downturn were three.

First, democracy simply stopped expanding. In fact, 2006 was the high water mark for democracy in the world, with the percentage of democracies peaking that year at 57% among states over one million population (Figure 1), and 61% of all states. 9 Since then the proportion of democracies in the world has gradually declined, to 55% of all states and 48% of states above one million population. And the percentage of people living in democracies has declined from 55% to 47%. The year 2019 marked the first time since the end of the Cold War that the majority of states over one million population was not democratic, and also the first time that a majority of the world’s people did not live in a democracy.

Second, beginning in 2006, freedom started to recede in the world. The ratio of countries gaining in freedom to the number declining in freedom (according to Freedom House) fell to about parity in 2006, but has been only about 50%–70% every year since 10 – exactly reversing the pattern for the fifteen years (1991–2005) following the demise of the Soviet Union (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Ratio of gains to declines in freedom (1991–2019).

To be sure, the impact on aggregate freedom scores in the world has still been modest. Averaging all countries of the world, the Freedom House 100-point scale of political rights and civil liberties has declined from a score of 62.4 in 2006 to 58.7 in 2019 (or, by 5.9%). The decline in the global average score on the Economist magazine’s Democracy Index in this period has been even more modest (1.5%). But this masks some more striking trends on the Freedom House scale. The average freedom scores for Africa, the Middle East and Latin American declined substantially between 2006 and 2019. Every other region showed at least a modest downward trend, except for East and Southeast Asian countries (over one million population), where the dramatic gains in Burma and the modest gains in Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and East Timor slightly outweighed the deterioration in the Philippines, China, and (more modestly) South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia. Despite relatively high global correlations, four different scales of democracy – Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and V-Dem’s Liberal and Electoral Democracy indices – show sharply divergent trends for some regions (Table 1). The four scales agree that there has been a modest negative trend for the advanced Anglophone and West European democracies, a more substantial slide for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean above one million population, and erosion – but of widely varying extent – in Sub-Saharan Africa. But in sharp contrast to the other two scales, the V-Dem scales show substantial improvement in average scores for South Asia and the former Soviet Union during this period.

Democratic regression in comparative perspective: scope, methods, and causes All authors Larry Diamond https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2020.1807517

Table 1. Percent change in democracy scores, by region and democracy scale, 2006–2019. CSVDisplay Table

Third, the rate of democratic breakdown has been accelerating. If we divide the last 44 years of the third wave into four segments (“long decades”) of eleven years (1976–2019), we find that the rate of democratic breakdown went from 13.7% in the first long decade to just under 10.7% in each of the next two long decades, and then spiked up to 18.9% in the last eleven years. But this itself understates the intensity of the recent downturn. Figure 3 decomposes the third wave into nine five-year segments (1975–2019). The number of democratic breakdowns in the last five years (2015–2019) – 12 – (including by gradual and undeclared executive strangulation, for example, in the Philippines) was the highest of any five-year period since the start of the third wave, and the number of transitions to democracy – 7 – was the lowest. Hence the ratio of democratic transitions to breakdowns was by far the lowest of any five-year period in this nearly half century of political change. In fact, the ratio fell to below 1 (0.6) for the first time since the mid-1970s.

Figure 3. Ratio of democratic transitions to breakdowns (1976–2019) 5-year periods.

But numbers do not tell the whole story. Since the democratic recession began in 2006, democracy has been failing in a number of big and strategically significant states, such as Bangladesh, Thailand, Turkey, the Philippines, and for the first time in a member state of the EU – Hungary. 11 These instances followed the executive-led strangulation (in the early years of the new century) of an emerging democracy in Russia and of a longstanding but deeply troubled democracy in Venezuela. Other states, like Sri Lanka and Nepal, have moved back and forth or hovered on the precipice. And then are the states that remain democratic but have been deteriorating in quality, including the world’s four largest democracies – the United States, India, Indonesia, and Brazil – and the largest democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland. 12 In 2019, India suffered one of the steepest declines on the 100-point Freedom House scale (4 points). Since 2012, India has declined by 5 points, Indonesia by 7, Brazil by 6, Poland 9, and the U.S. 7 points.

To avoid selection bias, we can construct a simple rule to identify the countries with the most geopolitical weight: the 19 countries in the G20 (which also includes the EU), and any other countries that are among the 20 most populous countries in the world. This yields a set of 29 countries, which I have grouped in Table 2 into three categories, based on their standing in 2005 (the year before the onset of the global democratic recession): advanced industrial democracies, emerging market (and mainly illiberal) democracies, and autocracies. We can ask a simple question: Between 2005 and 2019, how many of these countries improved on the 100-point scale by at least three points (which Freedom House reports consider a substantively significant increase), and how many declined by at least that much. Among the nine advanced democracies (all of them liberal democracies), five declined by at least three points, and only one improved by at least that much (Japan, by eight points). The U.S. was the biggest decliner, at seven points; France, Germany and Italy all declined by three points. Among the ten emerging market democracies, eight declined by at least three points and none improved by at least that much. Thailand and Turkey suffered catastrophic implosions of freedom, and Mexico joined Bangladesh and the Philippines in registering double-digit declines. Among the ten large autocracies, six suffered declines of at least three points, and only one (Pakistan) gained by that margin. China, Russia, and Egypt all became dramatically more authoritarian, and Saudi Arabia declined five points even though it began near the bottom.

Table 2. Freedom House scores (0–100 scale) G-20 countries and other most populous countries. CSVDisplay Table

We can summarize the data from Table 2 in the following way: Of these 29 geopolitically weighty countries, 19 experienced substantive declines in freedom between 2005 and 2019, and only two improved. The picture does not get brighter if we widen the aperture to look at other regionally signficant countries. Most observers of Southeast Asia would add (to Indonesia and Thailand above) Malaysia and Singapore as the region’s other two most influential countries. Both began and ended this period around the mid-point of the 100-point scale, though in the case of Malaysia that involved a substantial drop in score (down to a low of 44 in 2016), and then, with the electoral earthquate in 2018, a sharp increase to 52. It remained there in 2019, though, it is now moving backwards. Sadly, Asia as a whole now appears to be on a general trajectory of democratic decline, with Burma and Thailand both stuck in military-dominated hybrid regimes, India witnessing an escalating assault on civil liberties and religious tolerance under Narendra Modi’s populist BJP government, 13 the media and opposition being hounded in the Philippines, and South Korea moving in an illiberal direction under a left-wing hegemonic ruling party. 14

In Africa, the next most populous countries after those mentioned above are Kenya and Tanzania, which both declined sharply from 66 to 48 and 58 to 40, respectively. Each reverted from promising levels of political pluralism back towards previous levels of repression and ruling party dominance. The most important former communist country in Europe, Poland, declined from 92 to 84; and the largest post-Soviet country after Russia, Ukraine, dropped from 72 in 2005 down to 55 in 2013 (the final dark days of rule by a pro-Russian autocrat) before bouncing back to a rough democracy (62) after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Finally, take the next largest Latin America country, Colombia, and a smaller regional pacesetter, Chile. Chile declined from 96 to 90 (largely due to a sharp drop in 2019). Colombia was the lone country among these second-tier regional influentials to substantially improve its freedom score (from 60 to 66).

It is only when we look country by country that the larger scope of the democratic recession becomes apparent. The overwhelming majority of the largest, most powerful and influential countries, globally and regionally, have been regressing politically during the last decade and a half. A number of advanced liberal democracies have become less liberal – most notably the most powerful liberal country, the United States. Numerous electoral democracies have slid the down path of creeping authoritarianism, with less protection of civil liberties, weaker accountability and rule of law, and/or more intense political polarization, undermining the functionality of democratic institutions and the normative commitments that sustain them. A growing number of electoral democracies have been breaking down, and so did one liberal and supposedly consolidated democracy, Hungary. Competitive authoritarian regimes, such as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Cambodia, have been squeezing out their competition, to the point now where the latter three are virtual one-party states. 15 And regimes that were already deeply authoritarian (such as Venezuela) have become much more so.

Another way to assess the scope of the democratic recession is to focus on the positive – democratic transitions. But in recent years, these have not come close to compensating for all the negative trends. Beyond the numerical downturn – that 2015–19 was the first five-year period since the start of the third wave to see many more democratic breakdowns (12) than democratic transitions (7) – has been the rise and fall (or at least stalling) of hopes for democratic transition in numerous countries. When the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition was defeated in Malaysia’s May 2018 parliamentary elections for the first time in the country’s history, hopes for a transition to democracy were euphoric, and not entirely unrealistic. 16 But political divisions and opportunism within the opposition coalition have stalled that transition and may now be unravelling it. 17 A similar fate fell upon Nigeria in 2015 when an incumbent president was defeated in an election for the first time in the country’s 55-year history. Many Nigerians felt democracy was dawning, but the victor – a former military dictator – was at best only marginally more democratic, and hardly committed to institutional transformation, beyond trying to reduce corruption. 18

Table 3 presents a list of 20 country cases where mass public protests or an “electoral earthquake” – an unexpected opposition defeat of an authoritarian incumbent at the polls – might have resulted in a transition to democracy. Some of these have so far produced political liberalization of authoritarian rule. Several are still ongoing, and in countries like Ethiopia and Sudan, and perhaps ultimately Malaysia or The Gambia, a transition to democracy could still transpire. But the striking thing about this list is that only two of the 20 cases have so far resulted in democratic transitions. The most common outcome has been the dashing – and not infrequently, the brutal crushing – of popular hopes and expectations for democratic change. Since my focus is on national-level political change, the list excludes the two mass movements for democratic reform in Hong Kong, the 2014 Umbrella movement and the 2019–20 protests against China’s imposition of a draconian national security law. Still, all of this is a very far cry from the 1980s and 90s, or even early 2000s, when similar instances of mass public protest, peaceful revolution, and electoral defeat of autocratic incumbents produced transitions to democracy in a large number of countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the postcommunist world.