Levitsky, Steven and Lucan Way. "The Myth of Democratic Recession". Journal of Democracy, Vol.26, No.1 (2015): 45-58.

Levitsky, Steven and Lucan Way. "The Myth of Democratic Recession". Journal of Democracy, Vol.26, No.1 (2015): 45-58.

• In the past decade, there has emerged a scholarly consensus that democracy is in recession to authoritarian forces (45). The authors assert that this perception is based in a misunderstanding of the state of global democracy relative to other periods, arguing that democracy is only in decline compared to the unrealistic euphoria of the early 1990s, while real rates of democracy are stable and above the 1990s level (45-47).
• Rates of global democracy have been declining in recent years, but most of these declines have occurred in countries which were already authoritarian with low levels of political and civil liberties (47).
• The authors argue that what is surprising from their examination of available data on democracy is that such a small number of democracies actually collapsed in the decade from 2003 to 2013. From the 1990s, Freedom House has only recorded 4 countries relapsing from democracy to autocracy: Mali, Honduras, Thailand, and Venezuela. Of these states, Mali and Honduras have made major progress in rebuilding their democracies (47).
• There are larger numbers of 'borderline cases', in which states that were not true democracies experienced democratic collapse, but the authors argues that these larger numbers are natural and offset by equal numbers of improvements in partial democracies and transitions to democratic rule overall (48).
• The unrealistic expectations for democratic transitions in a massive 'third wave' of democratization were based on the extraordinarily successful democratic transitions of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Latin America. The success of these nations in establish parliamentary government after decades of military rule was a rarity and under specific circumstances conducive to development of a democracy -- namely the mass politics inculcated by the previous fascist governments (48). The fallacious belief that other democratic transition would follow this pattern is the reason that divergence from this unrealistic bar is considered a pattern of authoritarian success, rather than standard failure to democratize (49).
• Unlike the transitions which led to the downfall of military governments in Latin America and Southern Europe, the trigger for regime collapse in the early 1990s was the sudden withdrawal of Cold War support for both Soviet and Western allies. These states lacked the mass politics and strong civil society of early third wave democracies, leading them to develop much more authoritarian regimes unlike to continue with democratic reforms (50).
• The fundamental differences in transition between the earlier and later regime transitions of the third wave of democratization was between external and internal factors in regime collapse. Whereas the state in Latin America and Southern Europe was seized by reformers dedicated to democratization, democratization only occurred in the former Soviet Union because states lacked the organization to resist opposition (50-51).
• Now that most post-Soviet states have recovered economically or developed alternative sources of financing the regimes there feel more comfortable engaging in repression. The state building activities promoted by the West have also opened the way to more effective oppression using newer and less intrusive mechanisms for political repression (51-52).
• The optimism of the early 1990s was always misplaced because it misdiagnosed the newfound plurality of that time period as the beginning of democracy. In fact, the transition was between a weak authoritarian state -- which lacked the capacity to effectively repress dissent -- and a strong authoritarian state, which does (52-53).
• The pessimism of the contemporary literature on democratization is also excessively geared towards an expectation of democratic progress. The current publications of democratization assume that the expansion of democracy is natural, meaning that years without expansion are deemed failures. If we assume that maintenance of democracy is the norm instead, then trends are more favorable towards democracy (54).
• The authors claim that most states with favorable conditions for the growth of democracy have already democratized, meaning that expectations for more and more states to advance along the path of democratization are unrealistic. Most current authoritarian regimes are stable and unlikely to undergo democratization in the near future (54-55).
• Drs. Levitsky and Way argue that if anything, democracy has been surprisingly resilient in the face of severe economic and geopolitical challenges in the decades following the end of the Cold War (57).