![]() ![]() Populists, who come to power via the ballot box, rather than dictators, who come to power via coups, are the main threat to democracy today ( Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018). Capturing the contemporary zeitgeist, Viktor Orbán, Hungary's current prime minister, whose political career began in 1989 as an opponent of dictatorship but who then morphed into an opponent of democracy, recently proclaimed ( Santora & Bienvenu 2018): “The era of liberal democracy is over.”Īlthough all previous democratic waves have been followed by undertows, democratic backsliding today is distinctive in at least one critical way: Contemporary democracies are more likely to decay gradually than to die quickly. Reflecting these trends, rather than celebrating the “end of history,” scholars and commentators today worry about democratic deconsolidation and autocratization ( Diamond et al. In the United States and Western Europe, places where democracy has long been taken for granted, significant democratic decay has occurred. In Asia, democratic backsliding has taken place in the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, and even India, the world's largest democracy. In Latin American and Eastern Europe, democracy is eroding and has even collapsed in some countries. Yet only a decade or so after democracy reached its high point, the euphoria and triumphalism have crumbled. ![]() ![]() Francis Fukuyama's (oft-misunderstood) concept of the “end of history,” when the world had reached “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”-captured the euphoric, even triumphalist zeitgeist of the era ( Fukuyama 1989, p. Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1990, democracy faced no ideological competitors for the first time since the modern struggle for democracy began in 1789 with the French Revolution. By the wave's high point around 2008, that relationship had flipped, and the number of democracies had reached an all-time high. Before it began, there were more than twice as many dictatorships as democracies in existence. Beginning in the 1970s, a “third wave” of democracy ( Huntington 1991) began sweeping the globe. ![]()
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