Facing up to the Democratic Recession
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FACING UP TO THE
DEMOCRATIC RECESSION
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond is founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, se-
nior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute
for International Studies at Stanford University, and director of Stan-
ford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
The year 2014 marked the fortieth anniversary of Portugal's Revolu-
tion of the Carnations, which inaugurated what Samuel P. Huntington
dubbed the third wave of global democratization. Any assessment of
the state of global democracy today must begin by recognizing-even
marveling at-the durability of this historic transformation. When the
third wave began in 1974, only about 30 percent of the world's indepen-
dent states met the criteria of electoral democracy-a system in which
citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders
in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections.1 At that time, there were
only about 46 democracies in the world. Most of those were the liberal
democracies of the rich West, along with a number of small island states
that had been British colonies. Only a few other developing democracies
existed-principally, India, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezu-
ela, Israel, and Turkey.
In the subsequent three decades, democracy had a remarkable global
run, as the number of democracies essentially held steady or expanded
every year from 1975 until 2007. Nothing like this continous growth in
democracy had ever been seen before in the history of the world. While
a number of these new democracies were quite illiberal-in some
cases, so much so that Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way regard them as
competitive authoritarian regimes2-the positive three-decade trend
was paralleled by a similarly steady and significant expansion in levels
of freedom (political rights and civil liberties, as measured annually by
Freedom House). In 1974, the average level of freedom in the world
stood at 4.38 (on the two seven-point scales, where 1 is most free and
7 is most repressive). It then gradually improved during the 1970s and
Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number] January 2015
© 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jnlodmcy26&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Facing up to the Democratic Recession
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