The History of the Transformation from Authoritarian Societies to Pluralist Democracies

First version 28 October 2026, last changed 31 October 2026 · Andreas Stockter

A pluralist democracy is an order in which many groups, parties and opinions compete openly for power, in which the government can lose an election, and in which the losers accept the result because they can win next time. The political scientist Adam Przeworski put it in one sentence in 1991: “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”¹ Its counterpart is the authoritarian regime, a rule that does not submit to open competition: whoever governs cannot be voted out, and whoever objects risks office, freedom or life. For most of history that was the normal case. In 1971 the American political scientist Robert Dahl asked the question this text is about: given a regime in which the opponents of the government cannot openly and legally organise into political parties in order to oppose it in free and fair elections, what conditions favour or impede a transformation into a regime in which they can?²

Dahl broke the question down into two axes (Figure 1). One is public contestation: whether one may openly oppose the government. The other is participation: how many may vote and stand for office. A regime that has come far on both axes he called polyarchy, the rule of the many; he reserved the word democracy for the ideal that no large country fully reaches.² When a government tolerates an opposition he answered with a calculation: toleration becomes more likely the lower its costs to the government, and a competitive regime becomes more likely the more the costs of suppression exceed the costs of toleration. In the end there has to be mutual security for government and opposition.²

Like the other chronicles on this site, the text follows a chain: each era solves a bottleneck that the previous one left open, and creates the next one in doing so. Here the bottleneck has had the same shape since Athens. Those who hold power must be brought to share it and give it up, and those who lose an election must be brought to accept that. Each era found a different answer: the idea of consent, the written constitution, the vote for all, the protection of the constitution against its enemies, the negotiated pact, the incentive from outside. And each answer left a gap through which the next setback came. In 1991 the American political scientist Samuel Huntington described the course in waves: groups of transitions to democracy within a specified period of time that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction.³ Each wave was followed by a reverse wave, in which more democracies fell than arose.⁴

Contents: 1 The idea · 2 The first wave · 3 The reverse wave · 4 The second wave · 5 The third wave · 6 Round tables · 7 Grey zones · 8 Erosion and resistance · 9 Success and failure · Chain · Timeline · Further reading · Sources · Glossary

1. The Idea: Consent and Divided Power (to 1787)

The problem. Whoever lived in a kingdom, a principality or an empire was governed without being asked. Rule was justified by birth, conquest or divine mandate, and whoever challenged it challenged the order of the world. That rule should depend on the consent of the ruled, that it should have limits, and that it could be removed without destroying order were thoughts that had to be thought before anyone could try to establish them.

Athens. The first attempt was made by Athens. In 508/507 BC Cleisthenes reorganised the citizenry into ten tribes made up of 139 local communities, the demes, and a council to which each tribe sent fifty members.⁵ The citizens decided in their assembly themselves, and many offices were filled in large part by sortition, the drawing of lots, so that the same families did not always rule. But only free, adult, male citizens could take part: no women, no slaves, no resident foreigners, the metics. In the 4th century BC some 250,000 to 300,000 people lived in Attica, of whom around 30,000 could vote; the citizens probably made up no more than 30 per cent of the adults.⁶ Athens showed that a community can govern itself. It also showed that “the people” has a boundary, and the history of the following two and a half millennia is also the history of how that boundary was moved.

Magna Carta. The next step came not from the people but from the nobility. On 15 June 1215 King John of England sealed a charter at the meadow of Runnymede that became known as Magna Carta. Its clause 39 promised that no free man would be arrested, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, exiled or in any other way ruined “except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land”.⁷ Magna Carta was no profession of democracy; it protected a small upper class. But it placed the king under a law he could not change alone, and centuries later people appealed to it whom nobody had had in mind in 1215.

The Glorious Revolution. England decided the conflict between crown and parliament in 1688. William of Orange landed in Devon on 5 November, James II fled to France on 23 December, and on 13 February 1689 a Declaration of Right was read and accepted, which came into force as a statute in December.⁸ The Bill of Rights laid down that the election of members of parliament ought to be free, that the freedom of speech and debates in parliament ought not to be questioned in any court, and that parliaments ought to be held frequently.⁹ Only a few could vote as yet, but parliament was now a place where the power of the king was negotiated.

Locke. The justification was supplied by John Locke. His Two Treatises of Government appeared anonymously in December 1689, with the year 1690 on the title page.¹⁰ Men were by nature free, equal and independent, he wrote, and no one could be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent of the governed. If the legislature breaks the trust placed in it, the people retain the supreme power to remove or alter it; whoever destroys the property of the citizens or rules arbitrarily puts himself into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.¹¹ This right of resistance was the most dangerous idea of the book: it made rule revocable.

Montesquieu. How to limit power without abolishing it was described in 1748 by the French jurist Montesquieu in “The Spirit of the Laws”. It is an eternal experience that every man who has power is inclined to abuse it; so that power cannot be abused, power must check power. There is no liberty if the power of judging is not separated from the legislative and the executive, and all would be lost if the same man or the same body exercised all three.¹² The separation of powers, which he described using England as his example, became the blueprint of almost all later constitutions.

Rousseau. Another path led from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his “Social Contract” of 1762 only the general will, the will of the people as a whole, could make laws.¹³ The thought was radically democratic, but it had a dark side: if there is a right will of the people, then those who want something else are in error. The tension between the one people and the many interests has accompanied democracy to this day.

Read it yourself. Magna Carta can be read clause by clause with translation and commentary at the Magna Carta Project of the University of East Anglia; Locke’s Second Treatise is complete at Project Gutenberg, Montesquieu’s Book XI in the French Wikisource.^{7, 11, 12}

The bottleneck. By 1787 the ideas were ready: rule needs consent, it can be revoked, and it must be divided. Two things were open. Who belongs to the people whose consent counts? And how does one organise a large state in which interests diverge, without the majority oppressing the minority or one man seizing power?

2. The First Wave: Constitutions and the Vote (1776–1926)

The problem. An idea is not yet an order. Whoever wanted to base rule on consent needed a procedure in which consent can be given and withdrawn, a rule on who takes part, and institutions that prevent the winners from eliminating the losers. The 19th century tried this out in one country after another, slowly and with setbacks.

The Declaration. The start was made by thirteen British colonies in North America. Their Declaration of Independence of 1776 said that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.¹⁴ That was Locke in one sentence, and it became the founding document of a state.

The Constitution. From 25 May to 17 September 1787 the convention that wrote the Constitution of the United States sat in Philadelphia; it has been in force since 4 March 1789, and on 15 December 1791 the first ten amendments were added, the basic rights.¹⁵ The constitution divided power three ways, between Congress, president and courts, and once more between the federation and the states.

Madison. Why that should make a republic strong precisely by being large was explained by James Madison in the newspaper articles in which he argued for the constitution. A faction was a number of citizens, whether a majority or a minority, united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens; its causes were sown in the nature of man. One could not abolish it without abolishing liberty. One had to multiply it: extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests and make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.¹⁶ Number 51, printed on 6 February 1788, followed with the sentence that turned the separation of powers into a mechanism: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” If men were angels, no government would be necessary; since they are not, one must first enable the government to control the governed, and then oblige it to control itself.¹⁷ This order of mutual control is called checks and balances.

Pluralism. Madison’s thought is the core of what the 20th century would call pluralism: a free society consists of many groups with conflicting interests, and the common good is not fixed in advance but only emerges from their regulated dispute. The German political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, who had fled the National Socialists to the United States, formulated it after the war as a counter-model to Rousseau and to any dictatorship: the common good arises “a posteriori”, from the process. One may argue about almost everything; only about the rules of the argument must there be agreement.¹⁸

France. France took the other, shorter path. On 26 August 1789 the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: the principle of all sovereignty resides in the nation, the law is the expression of the general will, and a society in which rights are not guaranteed and powers not separated has no constitution.¹⁹ In 1792 about 3.36 million men aged 21 and over elected the National Convention;²⁰ the constitution of 1793 with universal male suffrage was approved by referendum and never applied.²¹ Instead the Convention made terror the order of the day in September 1793; by July 1794 there were 16,594 official death sentences.²² Dahl called the French path the third: all at once, without the time in which government and opposition learn to trust each other.²³

The first transfer. The test that no constitution can anticipate was passed by the United States in 1801. In the presidential election of 1800 Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent John Adams, one party lost to the other, and after a deadlock the House of Representatives decided on 17 February 1801 on the 36th ballot.²⁴ Adams handed over office. Jefferson said in his inaugural address: “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”²⁵ The peaceful transfer of power between opposing parties is to this day the touchstone that shows whether a democracy is more than a constitution on paper.

Associations. What carried the young republic besides its constitution was described by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who had travelled through the United States for nine months in 1831, in 1840 in the second volume of his book on democracy in America: “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations”, not only commercial companies but associations of every kind, to give entertainments, build churches, distribute books and found schools and hospitals. “In democratic countries”, he wrote, “the science of association is the mother of science.”²⁶

The vote grows. Who belonged to the people was renegotiated step by step in the 19th century. In England the number of voters grew with the reform of 1832 from about 400,000 to about 650,000.²⁷ In 1867 about one million of seven million adult men in England and Wales could vote, and the reform doubled that number;²⁸ after the reform of 1884, 5.7 million voters were registered across the United Kingdom, but still 40 per cent of men and all women were excluded.²⁹ Only in 1918 could all men aged 21 and over vote.³⁰ France introduced universal male suffrage on 5 March 1848,³¹ the Third Republic lasted from 1870 to 1940.³² In Germany the constitution of the Paulskirche of 28 March 1849 failed because the large states did not recognise it.³³ The Reichstag of the North German Confederation and, from 1871, of the Empire was then elected by universal, equal and secret suffrage for men aged 25 and over,³⁴ but the chancellor did not depend on its confidence: the first parliamentary government in German history took office on 3 October 1918, and the constitutional amendment that made the chancellor answerable to the Reichstag followed on 28 October.³⁵ Germany thus took Dahl’s second path: participation first, then contestation.²³ Universal suffrage remained a male suffrage almost everywhere into the 20th century.

The women. New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote; the act received royal assent on 19 September 1893, and the election was held in November. In Europe Finland was the first, in 1906.³⁶ In Germany the Council of People’s Deputies proclaimed women’s suffrage on 12 November 1918, and on 19 January 1919 women voted for the first time.³⁷ In the United States the 19th Amendment came into force in August 1920, in the United Kingdom women received the same vote as men in 1928,³⁸ in Switzerland the men agreed only in February 1971, and the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden had to be compelled by the Federal Supreme Court in 1990.³⁶

The wave. At the end of the First World War the monarchies of central Europe fell, and the Weimar National Assembly adopted a constitution on 31 July 1919 that was promulgated on 14 August.³⁹ Huntington counted some 29 democracies at the end of this first, long wave, which had begun in the 1820s with the widening of the suffrage in the United States (Figure 2).⁴

The explanations. Why some countries took this path and others did not later occupied research. In 1966 the sociologist Barrington Moore compared England, France, the United States, China, Japan and India, with side glances at Germany and Russia, and summed up his answer in a famous formula: no bourgeois, no democracy. What mattered was whether the landed aristocracy was weakened and whether a balance prevented the crown from becoming too strong or the nobility too independent.⁴⁰ In 1970 Dankwart Rustow objected to the search for preconditions. Democracy arises when a people whose unity is not in dispute fights a long, inconclusive struggle for power and its leaders at some point deliberately agree on rules that they at first merely accept and then grow used to over time.⁴¹

Read it yourself. The Federalist Papers are complete at Project Gutenberg; numbers 10 and 51 together take half an hour to read. The National Archives show the Declaration of Independence as a transcription and as an image of the original.^{16, 14}

The bottleneck. Around 1920 many countries of Europe and the Americas had parliaments, constitutions and a vote that included almost all men and in many countries the women too. What no constitution regulated: what happens when a majority wants to vote democracy itself away. The new democracies had rules for competition, but none for the case that a competitor wants to abolish competition.

3. The Reverse Wave: How Democracies Abolished Themselves (1922–1945)

The problem. After the war the new democracies came under a pressure none of them had foreseen: inflation, unemployment, disappointed nationalists, veterans in uniform, fear of revolution. The enemies of democracy did not have to storm the constitutions. They could use them.

Rome. Italy made the start. On 27 October 1922 Benito Mussolini had his Blackshirts march on Rome; King Victor Emmanuel III did not declare a state of siege but summoned Mussolini to Rome on the evening of 29 October and appointed him prime minister on 30 October.⁴² In July 1923 parliament approved the electoral law of the deputy Giacomo Acerbo: the list that received at least 25 per cent of the votes was to get two thirds of the seats.⁴³ In the election of 1924 the Fascists reached the two-thirds majority, and with the emergency laws of November 1926 all other parties were dissolved and a special tribunal set up; the press and associations had been under control since the end of 1925.^{42, 43} Huntington lets the first reverse wave begin with this march.⁴

The wave of coups. In May 1926 Józef Piłsudski marched on Warsaw with army units; after three days of street fighting with 379 dead, the president and government resigned.⁴⁴ Two weeks later, on 28 May, the military staged a coup in Portugal, and with the constitution of 1933 Salazar’s Estado Novo came into being.⁴⁵ In December 1926 a coup followed in Lithuania.⁴⁶ In Austria, on 4 March 1933, all three presidents of the National Council resigned in a procedural crisis; Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss called that a “self-elimination of parliament”, prevented it from reconvening on 15 March by police force and went on governing with an enabling law from the war.⁴⁷ After the February fighting of 1934 he banned the Social Democrats, and the constitution of 1 May 1934 declared Austria a “Christian, German federal state on a corporative basis”.⁴⁸ In Estonia and Latvia the heads of government themselves ended parliamentary democracy in March and May 1934,⁴⁹ in Greece Ioannis Metaxas suspended constitutional rights with the king’s consent on 4 August 1936,⁵⁰ in Spain the civil war began in July 1936, at whose end in April 1939 stood Franco’s dictatorship.⁵¹ By 1942, according to Huntington’s count, twelve democracies were left in the world.⁴

Weimar. The downfall was most thorough and had the greatest consequences in Germany, and it took place almost entirely along the path of the constitution. On 27 March 1930 the grand coalition under Hermann Müller broke apart.⁵² Three days later President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning chancellor of a presidential cabinet, a government that rested not on a majority in the Reichstag but on the president. It governed with the emergency decree under Article 48 of the constitution, which allowed the president to take measures without parliament when public security was endangered: more than 60 emergency decrees in less than two years, in the banking crisis of 1931 alone no fewer than 25, while the Reichstag met only rarely.⁵³ In the Reichstag election of September 1930 the NSDAP rose to 18.3 per cent,⁵² on 31 July 1932 it became the strongest party with 37.3 per cent; together with the KPD it held more than half the seats, a negative majority that could topple any government but form none.⁵⁴ After Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933.⁵²

Four weeks. What followed took less than two months. After the Reichstag fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933, likewise based on Article 48, suspended the basic rights “until further notice”: personal liberty, freedom of opinion, of the press, of assembly and of association, the secrecy of post and telecommunications and the protection of property.⁵⁵ On 23 March the Reichstag, meeting in the Kroll Opera House, passed the Enabling Act, which allowed the government to issue laws without parliament, by 444 votes against the 94 votes of the Social Democrats present; the KPD deputies and several from the SPD had been arrested or had fled. Otto Wels gave the reason for the SPD’s no: “You can take our freedom and our lives, but not our honour.”⁵⁶ Historians speak of a legal revolution: the National Socialists overturned the state while stressing a supposedly legal course that followed law and constitution.⁵⁷

Linz. How democracies break down in this way was examined by the Spanish sociologist Juan Linz in 1978 in a comparative work with Alfred Stepan. He distinguished loyal, semi-loyal and disloyal oppositions. A disloyal opposition questions the existence of the democratic order itself; more dangerous, though, is often the semi-loyal opposition, which affirms the rules as long as they serve it, excuses the violence of its allies and makes deals with the enemies of democracy when that promises an advantage.⁵⁸ In 2018 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt derived from this four warning signs by which one recognises an autocrat before he is in power: he rejects the democratic rules of the game, denies the legitimacy of his opponents, tolerates or encourages violence, and is ready to curtail the civil liberties of his opponents.⁵⁹

Loewenstein. Already during the reverse wave the jurist Karl Loewenstein, who had emigrated from Germany, drew the conclusion that the Federal Republic would later make a principle. In 1937 he wrote in the American Political Science Review that democracy must become militant: “Fire is fought with fire.” In substance: a democracy that leaves its enemies all freedoms, including the freedom to abolish it, delivers itself into their hands.⁶⁰ The concept of militant democracy goes back to this debate, even if Loewenstein was not its only author.⁶¹

Read it yourself. Otto Wels’s speech against the Enabling Act is available verbatim at German History in Documents and Images; the Bundestag’s text archive describes the session of 23 March 1933.⁵⁶

The bottleneck. By 1945 the lesson had been drawn: democracies die not only by tanks but by their own procedures, by emergency decree, election victory and majority vote. Whoever wanted to rebuild them had to protect them against their own tools. And he had to win over people who had supported or accepted a dictatorship.

4. The Second Wave: Basic Law, Decolonisation and Coups (1945–1974)

The problem. After the Second World War democracy came to the defeated countries with the victors, and to many colonies with independence. In both cases it was new, and in both cases it was open whether the population wanted it.

Occupation. The American military government regularly asked the Germans in its zone what they thought. In November 1945, 53 per cent considered National Socialism a good idea badly carried out, in July 1946 42 per cent, in August 1947 55 per cent.⁶² Denazification was to remove the compromised from office and influence: in the American zone adults had to fill in a questionnaire with 131 questions, by March 1946 almost 1.4 million forms had come back, and the Liberation Law of 5 March 1946 handed the procedure to German tribunals, which placed everyone in one of five groups, from major offenders to exonerated.⁶³

The Basic Law. From 1 September 1948 to 8 May 1949 the Parliamentary Council in Bonn, chaired by Konrad Adenauer, wrote the Basic Law; it was promulgated on 23 May 1949, and on 14 August 1949 the first Bundestag was elected.⁶⁴ The authors had Weimar before their eyes (Figure 3). The Weimar constitution had allowed the president to dissolve the Reichstag and had required that the chancellor and ministers enjoy the confidence of the Reichstag, so that a majority could topple them without agreeing on a new government.⁶⁵ The Basic Law gave the federal president no emergency decree power,⁶⁶ tied the dissolution of the Bundestag to narrow conditions⁶⁷ and allowed the chancellor to be removed only by the Bundestag electing a successor with the majority of its members, the constructive vote of no confidence.⁶⁸ The eternity clause in Article 79(3) forbids any amendment that affects the division into Länder or the principles of human dignity, democracy, the rule of law and the social state;⁶⁹ no majority can abolish it, not even a two-thirds majority. Parties that seek to abolish the free democratic basic order can be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court, the party ban under Article 21,⁷⁰ and whoever abuses basic rights to fight that order can forfeit them under Article 18, the forfeiture of basic rights.⁷¹ The court banned the Socialist Reich Party as a successor of the NSDAP in 1952⁷² and the KPD in 1956.⁷³

Japan and Italy. In Japan women voted for the first time on 10 April 1946, and 39 of them were elected to the lower house, a record that lasted until 2005.⁷⁴ The constitution, drafted under American occupation, came into force on 3 May 1947; in Article 9 the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.⁷⁵ In Italy, on 2 and 3 June 1946, 54.27 per cent voted for the republic and against the monarchy;⁷⁶ the new constitution came into force on 1 January 1948.⁷⁷

The new order. On 10 December 1948 the United Nations wrote into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government, expressed in periodic and genuine elections by universal and equal suffrage and secret vote.⁷⁸ Ten western European states founded the Council of Europe in London on 5 May 1949,⁷⁹ and on 4 November 1950 its members signed in Rome the European Convention on Human Rights, which came into force on 3 September 1953.⁸⁰

Political culture. Whether the Federal Republic was more than a constitution was examined by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in 1959 with surveys in five countries, among them 955 West Germans. They found a subject culture: the West Germans expected services from the state but kept their distance from the political system and wanted to take little part. Later studies saw the Federal Republic on a par with the old western democracies from the mid-1970s.⁸¹ Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti took the question further in Italy in 1993: of the regional governments the country had created in 1970, those worked better in whose regions there was a lively civic community, with associations and choral societies of the kind Tocqueville had described in America.⁸² Seymour Martin Lipset had already formulated in 1959 the modernisation thesis that was to explain the change: the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.⁸³ The West German economic miracle seemed to prove him right.

Decolonisation. In Asia and Africa the second wave came with the end of the empires, decolonisation. India’s Constituent Assembly adopted on 26 November 1949 the constitution whose drafting committee B. R. Ambedkar had chaired; it came into force on 26 January 1950.⁸⁴ The first election to the lower house lasted from 25 October 1951 to 21 February 1952, with 173,213,635 voters and 489 seats.⁸⁵ When Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1975, the experiment seemed to have failed; in 1977 she lifted it, lost the election and her own constituency, and for the first time a party other than Congress governed.⁸⁶ In 1960, the “Year of Africa”, 17 colonies became independent.⁸⁷ Many of the new states became a one-party state within a few years: Ghana by referendum in 1964,⁸⁸ Tanzania in 1965,⁸⁹ Kenya by constitutional amendment in 1982.⁹⁰

The coups. In Latin America and southern Europe the second wave ended with the military. On 31 March and 1 April 1964 Brazil’s generals overthrew President João Goulart,⁹¹ on 28 June 1966 the Argentine generals overthrew President Arturo Illia,⁹² on 21 April 1967 colonels staged a coup in Greece five weeks before an election from which Georgios Papandreou’s Centre Union would in all likelihood have emerged as the largest party; the right feared above all the left wing around his son Andreas.⁹³ In 1973 the Uruguayan president Juan María Bordaberry dissolved parliament with the military on 27 June,⁹⁴ and on 11 September the Chilean military overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende; Allende died in the presidential palace, and a junta under General Augusto Pinochet took over.⁹⁵ On 24 March 1976 a further coup followed in Argentina.⁹⁶ In the Cold War the United States, too, overthrew elected governments: in 1953 the CIA, with British involvement, organised the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, and in 1954 that of President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.^{97, 98} In Chile, according to the report of a Senate committee of 1975, the United States intervened covertly in a way that was “extensive and continuous” between 1963 and 1973 in order to block Allende’s election, and after his victory President Richard Nixon ordered on 15 September 1970 that his inauguration be prevented by a coup.⁹⁹ Guillermo O’Donnell, an Argentine political scientist, turned Lipset’s thesis on its head in 1973: in the countries of South America it was precisely catch-up modernisation that had led to a new form of dictatorship, bureaucratic authoritarianism, in which officers and technocrats ran the country like a business.¹⁰⁰ According to Huntington the second reverse wave pushed the number of democracies down from 36 in 1962 to 30.⁴

Read it yourself. The Basic Law is available in its current version at “Gesetze im Internet” of the Federal Ministry of Justice; Articles 18, 21, 67 and 79 together fill one page.⁶⁹

The bottleneck. Where democracy came with the victors, it held when prosperity, alliances and a constitution that had learned from its own history came together. Where it came with independence, it often fell within a few years. The hardest form of transition remained unsolved: how a dictatorship ends from within, without war, without occupation and without civil war, when the old rulers still hold the weapons.

5. The Third Wave: Negotiated Transitions (1974–1988)

The problem. A dictatorship that is not defeated from outside ends only when its own people give it up. But generals, police chiefs and party officials fear what comes after them: trials, expropriation, revenge. And their opponents fear that every concession is only a trap. The third wave was the time in which dictatorships learned to wind themselves up, and in which oppositions learned to pay a price for it.

Lisbon. Huntington begins his book on the third wave with a night in Lisbon.¹⁰¹ On 25 April 1974 young officers of the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the regime that Salazar had established in 1933; the signal at 00:20 was the song “Grândola, Vila Morena” on the radio.¹⁰² The restaurant worker Celeste Caeiro gave carnations to soldiers, who put them in the barrels of their rifles; the pictures went round the world and gave the upheaval its name, the Carnation Revolution.¹⁰³ Exactly one year later the Portuguese elected a constituent assembly, with a turnout of 91.7 per cent, the highest of Portuguese democracy;¹⁰⁴ the constitution came into force on 25 April 1976, and a revision in 1982 abolished the military’s Council of the Revolution.¹⁰⁵

Athens. Three months after Lisbon, the junta in Greece collapsed, having overreached itself with a coup on Cyprus; after the Turkish invasion of the island, the former prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis returned from exile and was sworn in on 24 July 1974.¹⁰⁶ On 8 December 1974, 69.18 per cent voted for the republic and against the return of the king.¹⁰⁷

Madrid. The model for all later transitions was Spain. Franco died on 20 November 1975, and his successor as head of state, King Juan Carlos, appointed Adolfo Suárez head of government in July 1976. Suárez put forward a law for political reform that opened the way to free elections and had it confirmed by referendum on 15 December 1976; about 94 per cent voted yes. On 9 April 1977 he legalised the Communist Party, and on 15 June 1977 Spain voted freely.¹⁰⁸ The amnesty law of 15 October 1977 freed the political prisoners and at the same time secured impunity for the perpetrators of Francoism, which still holds today;¹⁰⁹ the historian Paloma Aguilar has described the tacit consensus of the elites to let the past rest as a pact of forgetting.¹¹⁰ On 25 October 1977 the government and parties signed the Moncloa Pacts against inflation and unemployment,¹¹¹ and on 6 December 1978 the Spanish approved the new constitution with 91.81 per cent of the yes and no votes, on a turnout of 67 per cent.¹¹² The Transición still had its test ahead of it. On 23 February 1981 Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero burst into parliament with more than 250 Civil Guards and held the deputies for more than 17 hours; during the night the king, in uniform, came out against the putschists on television. Tejero, who was released from prison in 1996, died on 25 February 2026.¹¹³ In October 1982 the Socialists under Felipe González won an absolute majority, and the party of the transition collapsed: the first change of government had succeeded.¹¹⁴

The theory of the pact. What had happened in Spain was generalised in 1986 by Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter in their concluding volume of a large comparative project. Every transition begins with a split within the regime itself: between hardliners, who consider the continuation of the dictatorship possible and desirable, and softliners, who want to legitimise the regime through elections. On the other side stand moderates, who negotiate, and radicals, who want a rupture. The transition can succeed if the reformers in the regime and the moderates in the opposition agree on a pact, an agreement that guarantees both sides their vital interests: free elections for the opposition, security for the old rulers (Figure 4).¹¹⁵ Huntington distinguished three forms of transition: transformation, which the regime itself steers; replacement, in which it collapses and the opposition takes over; and transplacement, a middle way that government and opposition negotiate together.¹¹⁶

Buenos Aires. In Argentina the junta broke on a lost war. From 2 April to 14 June 1982 it fought Britain over the Falkland Islands, 649 Argentines died, and after the surrender General Galtieri resigned.¹¹⁷ On 30 October 1983 the Argentines elected Raúl Alfonsín president with 51.75 per cent.¹¹⁸ He set up a truth commission under the writer Ernesto Sábato, which handed over its report “Nunca más” on 20 September 1984: 8,961 disappeared, expressly as a provisional figure; human rights groups estimate around 30,000.¹¹⁹ In the trial of the juntas a court sentenced the former rulers Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera to life imprisonment on 9 December 1985.¹²⁰ For the reckoning with dictatorships through trials, commissions, reparations and purges, the jurist Ruti Teitel coined the term transitional justice in 1991, justice in times of political change.¹²¹

Brasília, Montevideo, Santiago. In Brazil the military opened the country step by step. A constitutional amendment for the direct election of the president failed on 25 April 1984 with 298 yes votes against the required 320; on 15 January 1985 an electoral college chose Tancredo Neves, and because he fell ill on the eve of his inauguration, his vice-president José Sarney was sworn in on 15 March 1985 as the first civilian president since 1964. The new constitution came into force on 5 October 1988.^{122, 123} In Uruguay the military and parties negotiated in the Club Naval pact of 3 August 1984 the election of 25 November, in which two leading opposition figures were not allowed to stand.¹²⁴ In Chile Pinochet put a further term to the vote on 5 October 1988, in a plebiscite, a popular vote on a person or a question of principle. 55.99 per cent voted no.¹²⁵ On 11 March 1990 he handed the presidential sash to the elected Patricio Aylwin,¹²⁶ whose truth commission in February 1991 named 2,279 dead, 2,025 of them killed by agents of the state, among them 957 disappeared.¹²⁷

Manila, Seoul, Taipei. In Asia the wave came with crowds in the streets. After the presidential election of 7 February 1986, overshadowed by allegations of fraud against Ferdinand Marcos, Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos from the top of the regime went over to the opposition, Cardinal Jaime Sin called on the population to support them, and from 22 to 25 February crowds filled the ring road EDSA in Manila. On 25 February Corazon Aquino was sworn in, and in the evening the Americans flew Marcos out to Hawaii.¹²⁸ The word for this path, People Power, went round the world. In South Korea the June movement of 1987 forced Roh Tae-woo, the designated successor of the military ruler Chun Doo-hwan, to promise the direct election of the president on 29 June; Roh won it in December with 36.64 per cent against the two opposition leaders Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, who together received over 55 per cent.¹²⁹ In Taiwan martial law ended on 15 July 1987 after 38 years, and in 1996 the president was elected directly for the first time.¹³⁰

Church and Helsinki. Among the causes of the wave Huntington found one that nobody had expected: a striking shift in the doctrine and activities of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council; he called the third wave “overwhelmingly a Catholic wave”, and later studies confirmed it.¹³¹ In the East a document worked that the Soviet Union itself had signed. In the Helsinki Final Act of 1 August 1975, 35 states, among them the Soviet Union and its allies, committed themselves to respect human rights; the act was not binding under international law, but it gave civil rights activists a text they could appeal to.¹³² On 1 January 1977 around 240 signatories of Charter 77 demanded exactly that of the Czechoslovak leadership; its spokesman Jan Patočka died in March after interrogations.¹³³

Washington. Huntington saw a further cause in the changed policies of outside powers, above all the European Community, the United States and the Soviet Union.⁴ Until the mid-1970s promoting democracy had not always been a priority of American foreign policy, and in the Cold War it had propped up anti-communist dictators. The political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick defended this in November 1979 in the essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards”: the policies of President Jimmy Carter, she argued, had undermined friendly authoritarian governments such as those of the Shah in Iran and of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, although authoritarian regimes could develop into democracies and totalitarian ones could not. In 1981 Ronald Reagan made her ambassador to the United Nations.¹³⁴ All the same, according to Huntington, the United States was a major promoter of democratisation in the 1970s and 1980s.⁴

Read it yourself. Huntington’s essay “Democracy’s Third Wave” from the Journal of Democracy of 1991 is freely available from the National Endowment for Democracy and, in just over twenty pages, the best introduction to the book.⁴

The bottleneck. Between 1974 and 1990, according to Huntington, at least 30 countries became democracies, roughly doubling their number.⁴ The pacts had a price: amnesties as in Spain and guarantees for the old rulers, who often sat in army and state for years afterwards. And one region of the world remained untouched. As long as a leadership sat in Moscow that held its allies with tanks if need be, nobody in Warsaw, Prague or East Berlin could conclude a pact.

6. Round Tables: Eastern Europe and South Africa (1989–1994)

The problem. In the Eastern bloc the party had everything: the state, the economy, the newspapers, the police, and behind everything stood the Soviet Union. There were no reformers in the regime one could talk to, and no opposition the regime wanted to talk to. When it became clear in 1989 that Moscow was not intervening, both sides had to learn in a few months what had taken years in Spain.

Warsaw. From 6 February to 5 April 1989, 29 representatives of the government, 26 of the opposition and three observers from the Church negotiated in Warsaw at the round table, at which nobody sat at the head and nobody at the foot.¹³⁵ The compromise was a semi-free election in which only part of the seats in the Sejm were freely contested, plus all seats in the Senate. On 4 and 18 June Solidarność won all 161 freely contested seats in the Sejm and 99 of 100 in the Senate.¹³⁶ In the night to 4 June, the day of the first round, the Chinese army entered Beijing and ended seven weeks of protests by the democracy movement. How many people died is unclear to this day: the government spoke of 200 civilians and several dozen police and soldiers, the estimates of the time ranged from several hundred to more than a thousand, and a British diplomatic telegram gave a minimum of 10,000 civilian dead.¹³⁷ On 24 August 1989 the Sejm elected Tadeusz Mazowiecki the first non-communist head of government in the Eastern bloc.¹³⁸

Budapest. In Hungary the government and opposition negotiated at the National Round Table from 13 June to 18 September 1989.¹³⁹ On 19 August more than 600 East Germans fled during the Pan-European Picnic on the border with Austria, in the night to 11 September Hungary opened the border, and on the first day more than 10,000 East Germans left.¹⁴⁰ On 23 October 1989, the anniversary of the uprising of 1956, the acting president proclaimed the Republic of Hungary.¹⁴¹

Leipzig and Berlin. On 9 October 1989 around 70,000 people marched through Leipzig with the cry “We are the people”, and the security forces standing by did not intervene.¹⁴² A month later, on the evening of 9 November, Günter Schabowski announced the new travel regulations to the press too early, and the Wall opened that same night.¹⁴³ The Central Round Table, at which old and new parties and groups sat, met from 7 December 1989 to 12 March 1990 and pushed through, among other things, the dissolution of the Stasi’s successor agency and free elections.¹⁴⁴ On 18 March 1990, 93.38 per cent of those entitled voted in the first free Volkskammer election,¹⁴⁵ and on 23 August the Volkskammer resolved by 294 of 363 votes to accede to the Federal Republic on 3 October.¹⁴⁶

Prague and Bucharest. In Prague the police beat down a student demonstration on 17 November 1989; eleven days later the Communist Party renounced its monopoly of power, and on 29 December Václav Havel, co-founder of Charter 77, became president. Because not a shot was fired, this upheaval is called the Velvet Revolution.¹⁴⁷ In Romania the dictatorship ended in violence: the uprising began in Timișoara on 16 December, on 22 December Nicolae Ceaușescu fled by helicopter, on 25 December he and his wife were shot after a summary trial; the number of dead is given as between 689 and 1,290, depending on the source.¹⁴⁸ On 26 December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist.¹⁴⁹ Within fifteen years the wave had travelled from Lisbon to Prague (Figure 5).

The end of history. Already in the summer of 1989 the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama had asked in an essay whether the world had reached the end of history: the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.¹⁵⁰ The question carried a question mark, but it was read as a claim.

Cape Town. On 2 February 1990 South Africa’s president Frederik Willem de Klerk opened parliament with a speech in which he lifted the ban on the ANC and other organisations, ended the state of emergency and announced the release of Nelson Mandela, who walked out of prison on 11 February.^{151, 152} The negotiations of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa began in December 1991 with 19 parties, broke down in May 1992; after the Boipatong massacre with 46 dead in June the ANC withdrew altogether, and only the Record of Understanding of 26 September 1992 got the negotiations going again.¹⁵³ Mandela and de Klerk received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime.¹⁵⁴ From 26 to 29 April 1994 all South Africans voted for the first time; the ANC won 62.65 per cent, and Mandela was sworn in on 10 May.¹⁵⁵ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Archbishop Desmond Tutu heard victims and perpetrators in public from April 1996. More than 21,000 victims gave statements, more than 7,000 people applied for amnesty; Tutu handed over the report on 29 October 1998.¹⁵⁶

The anchor. For the new democracies of eastern Europe the European Union became the strongest incentive. In June 1993 in Copenhagen the European Council laid down what a country needs for accession: stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities, plus a functioning market economy.¹⁵⁷ These Copenhagen criteria made democracy a condition, a procedure called conditionality. Ten states joined on 1 May 2004, Bulgaria and Romania in 2007.¹⁵⁸ On 10 May 1990 the Council of Europe founded the Venice Commission, which helped new democracies write their constitutions and electoral laws,¹⁵⁹ and the CSCE, later the OSCE, created in Warsaw an office for free elections that in 1992 became the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and has since assessed elections in its member states through election observation.¹⁶⁰

The handbook. How to overthrow a dictatorship without violence was written down in 1993 by the American political scientist Gene Sharp for Burmese exiles in Bangkok. “From Dictatorship to Democracy” was translated into more than 30 languages.¹⁶¹

Read it yourself. The documents of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Mandela’s speech on receiving the report are archived on polity.org.za; the Copenhagen conclusions are available verbatim at the Centre virtuel de la connaissance sur l’Europe.^{156, 157}

The bottleneck. In 1990 Huntington again counted about 45 per cent of the states with more than a million inhabitants as democracies, as many as in 1922 at the peak of the first wave.¹⁶² There were now elections almost everywhere. But an election is not yet a democracy, and many rulers soon learned that one can hold elections without risking power.

7. Grey Zones: Elections Without Democracy (1993–2013)

The problem. In the 1990s transition seemed a one-way street: a country opens up, votes, writes a constitution and step by step becomes a consolidated democracy. It soon turned out that many countries stopped halfway. They had parties, parliaments and elections, but the government never lost them.

Moscow. Russia set the pattern. On 21 September 1993 President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet without a clear basis in the constitution, and on 4 October he had the parliament building shelled by tanks; officially 187 people died. On 12 December voters approved a constitution with a strong president.¹⁶³ His successor Vladimir Putin had a constitutional amendment approved in 2020, in a vote in which observers suspected manipulation, with officially 77.92 per cent; it allows him two more terms until 2036.¹⁶⁴

The concepts. Research needed new words. In 1997 Fareed Zakaria described illiberal democracy, elected governments that disregard the limits of their constitution and deprive citizens of basic rights: democracy is flourishing, constitutional liberalism is not.¹⁶⁵ In 2002 Thomas Carothers called for abandoning the transition paradigm, the assumption that every country moving away from dictatorship is on the way to democracy; most were stuck in a broad grey zone in between.¹⁶⁶ Larry Diamond called such orders hybrid regimes.¹⁶⁷ In the same year Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way described competitive authoritarianism: regimes that are authoritarian at the core but in which elections remain a real path to power, because the opposition can stand and sometimes win.¹⁶⁸ In 2006 Andreas Schedler called electoral authoritarianism the most common regime type of the developing world.¹⁶⁹

Consolidation. How one recognises that a democracy will no longer fall back had been described by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan in 1996. Consolidation is reached when democracy is “the only game in town”: behaviourally, because no significant group tries to overthrow it; attitudinally, because a large majority considers it the best order; and constitutionally, because all conflicts are resolved by its rules.¹⁷⁰ Huntington proposed a simpler test, the two-turnover test: a democracy counts as consolidated when the party that won the first free election loses a later one and hands over power, and when the winners of that later election in turn do the same.¹⁷¹

The colour revolutions. Where elections were rigged, they became the occasion to overthrow the regime. In Serbia, after the election of 24 September 2000, the government declared the opposition candidate Vojislav Koštunica the winner only of a first round, although an independent count saw him at around 56 per cent; on 5 October demonstrators stormed parliament in Belgrade, carried among others by the non-violent youth movement Otpor, and Slobodan Milošević gave up.¹⁷² In Georgia opposition supporters entered parliament on 22 November 2003, and President Eduard Shevardnadze resigned the next day.¹⁷³ In Ukraine, after weeks of protests, the Supreme Court declared the run-off invalid on 3 December 2004 because of systematic and massive violations, and in the repeat on 26 December Viktor Yushchenko won with 51.99 per cent.¹⁷⁴ In Kyrgyzstan demonstrators stormed the government buildings in March 2005.¹⁷⁵ After the colours and flowers of their supporters these upheavals are called colour revolutions. In Indonesia Suharto had already resigned on 21 May 1998 after 32 years; in 1999, 48 parties contested the first free election since 1955, and in 2004 the president was elected directly for the first time.¹⁷⁶

The power of non-violence. Why non-violent movements succeeded so often was examined by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. They compared 323 campaigns between 1900 and 2006 and found that major non-violent campaigns achieved their aim in 53 per cent of cases, violent ones in only 26 per cent.¹⁷⁷ Civil resistance, as they explained it, wins more participants, and it splits the pillars of the regime: soldiers are reluctant to shoot at their neighbours. From their data comes the 3.5 per cent rule: no campaign in which at least 3.5 per cent of the population took an active part at its peak has failed. In 2020 Chenoweth herself qualified this: the rule is an observation, not a law, and there are exceptions;¹⁷⁸ in the same year she found that civil resistance in the 2010s was more widespread than ever but succeeded less often, because regimes had learned to deal with it.¹⁷⁹

The Arab Spring. On 17 December 2010, in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, the vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire; he died on 4 January 2011. Ten days later President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. On 25 January the protests on Cairo’s Tahrir Square began, on 11 February Hosni Mubarak resigned, and on 15 March the demonstrations began in Syria that spread from Daraa across the country and from which the civil war grew.¹⁸⁰ Shortly after midnight on 28 January the network firm Renesys watched the Egyptian providers go offline one after another, and according to most reports about 93 per cent of Egyptian networks could then no longer be reached; everything pointed to a shutdown ordered by the government.¹⁸¹ The Arab Spring brought democracy to only one country. In Egypt Mohamed Morsi won the first free presidential election in 2012; on 3 July 2013 the army chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi deposed him and had himself elected in 2014 with 96.9 per cent.¹⁸² In Syria the United Nations confirmed 191,369 dead by April 2014.¹⁸³ In Tunisia the constituent assembly adopted a democratic constitution on 26 January 2014 by 200 votes to 12,¹⁸⁴ and in 2015 the National Dialogue Quartet of trade unions, employers, human rights league and bar association received the Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution to building a pluralistic democracy.¹⁸⁵ On 25 July 2021 President Kais Saied dismissed the head of government and suspended parliament; his constitution was approved in 2022 with a turnout of 30.5 per cent.¹⁸⁶

Read it yourself. The essays by Carothers, Levitsky and Way, and Diamond from the Journal of Democracy of 2002 are short and clear; Carothers’s “The End of the Transition Paradigm” is freely available on the journal’s site.¹⁶⁶

The bottleneck. By around 2013 the autocrats had learned to hold elections without losing them, and non-violent movements met regimes that expected them. And a new danger appeared that hardly anyone had reckoned with: that elected governments in democracies would learn the same methods.

8. Erosion and Resistance (since 2010)

The problem. For a long time democracies often ended with a coup: tanks outside parliament, a broadcaster occupied, a date on which everyone knew it was over. The danger of the 21st century came from within and by legal means, as in Weimar, but more slowly: governments that won an election and then rebuilt the institutions that could have voted them out or held them back.

The diagnosis. In 2015 Larry Diamond spoke of a mild but protracted democratic recession since about 2006; in the same issue Levitsky and Way objected that there was none.^{187, 188} In 2016 Nancy Bermeo described how the forms had shifted: open coups, executive coups and blatant fraud on election day were becoming rarer, while more frequent were coups with the promise of early elections, executive aggrandizement, the gradual self-empowerment of elected governments, and strategic electoral manipulation, which begins long before election day. These forms were legitimated precisely by the institutions that democracy promoters considered most important.¹⁸⁹ In 2019 Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg declared that a third wave of autocratisation had begun; it mainly affected democracies, gradually and under a legal façade, and in 33 of 47 episodes since 1994 elected politicians had been the driving force.¹⁹⁰

The rules behind the rules. In 2018 Levitsky and Ziblatt noted that democracies live less by written rules than by two unwritten ones: mutual toleration, by which rivals accept each other as legitimate opponents, and institutional forbearance, by which they do not use rights that formally belong to them to the hilt. Whoever wants to hollow out a democracy proceeds in three steps: capture the referees, sideline the other side’s key players, and rewrite the rules of the game (Figure 6).¹⁹¹

Hungary. The textbook example was provided by Hungary. In April 2010 Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and its partner won a two-thirds majority, and on 18 April 2011 parliament adopted a new Fundamental Law by 262 votes to 44.¹⁹² On 26 July 2014 in Băile Tușnad in Romania Orbán announced an “illiberal state” and named Singapore, China, India, Turkey and Russia as models.¹⁹³ On 12 September 2018 the European Parliament opened the Article 7 procedure against Hungary by 448 votes to 197, the procedure of the European treaties against a member state that endangers the common values.¹⁹⁴ Then Hungary showed what distinguishes a hollowed-out democracy from a dictatorship. In the parliamentary election of 12 April 2026, with a turnout of 78.99 per cent, the Tisza party under Péter Magyar won 141 of the 199 seats, a two-thirds majority, and Fidesz fell to 52; Orbán called the defeat painful but clear.¹⁹⁵ On 9 May parliament elected Magyar prime minister.¹⁹⁵ On 29 May he agreed with the European Commission to release frozen funds of 16.4 billion euros in return for reforms.¹⁹⁶ On 15 June parliament limited the prime minister’s tenure to eight years,¹⁹⁷ and on 13 July it passed a further constitutional amendment that reinstated a retirement age of 70 for constitutional judges and allowed the court to elect its own president and to review tax laws.¹⁹⁸ On 13 October 2026 the Council of the EU lifted the measures it had adopted against Hungary in 2022 under the conditionality mechanism, the procedure by which the EU can tie payments to respect for the rule of law; the Article 7 procedure is not thereby concluded.¹⁹⁹

Poland and Turkey. In Poland the PiS government restructured the judiciary from 2015; on 15 July 2021 the European Court of Justice declared the disciplinary regime for judges incompatible with EU law and in October imposed a penalty of one million euros a day.²⁰⁰ In the election of 15 October 2023, with a record turnout of 74.4 per cent, PiS lost its majority, and on 11 December the Sejm elected Donald Tusk prime minister.²⁰¹ The rebuilding is not finished: President Karol Nawrocki, elected in June 2025 with 50.89 per cent, vetoed the reform of the National Council of the Judiciary in February 2026.²⁰² In Turkey 51.4 per cent voted on 16 April 2017 for the move to a presidential system,²⁰³ and on 19 March 2025 Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the most promising challenger of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was detained; his trial with more than 400 defendants began in March 2026.²⁰⁴

Surveillance. Erosion had a tool that older dictatorships did not know. Spyware installs itself unnoticed on a computer or mobile phone and passes on messages, calls and location to whoever planted it. In July 2021 an international consortium of media reported that in Hungary the program Pegasus, made by the Israeli company NSO, had been used against at least ten lawyers, an opposition politician and several journalists critical of the government; in November Lajos Kósa, chairman of parliament’s defence and law enforcement committee and a vice-president of Fidesz, confirmed that the interior ministry had bought it.²⁰⁵ In Poland Prosecutor General Adam Bodnar told the Sejm in April 2024 of 578 people whom the authorities had surveilled with Pegasus between 2017 and 2022, under the PiS government.²⁰⁶ How states use face recognition, data analysis and predictive software against their own populations is told by the history of AI in security and defence.

The numbers. How democracy is faring in the world is measured by several institutes with different yardsticks. The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg places every country in one of four types:²⁰⁷ the closed autocracy without an election with a choice, the electoral autocracy with elections that are not free and fair, the electoral democracy with free and fair elections, and the liberal democracy, in which rule of law, checks on the government and civil liberties are secured as well. For 2025 it counted 92 autocracies and 87 democracies (Figure 7). 74 per cent of people lived in autocracies, the level of democracy enjoyed by the average world citizen was back at that of 1978, 44 countries were becoming more autocratic and only 18 more democratic. V-Dem downgraded the United States from a liberal to an electoral democracy for the first time in more than fifty years.²⁰⁸ Freedom House recorded for 2025 the twentieth consecutive year with more declines than improvements and for the United States, with 81 of 100 points, the lowest score in its history;²⁰⁹ the Economist Intelligence Unit, by contrast, saw democracy in the world stabilising after eight years of decline.²¹⁰ The yardsticks differ; the direction of the last twenty years does not.

Resistance. At the same time the years since 2022 showed that societies fight back. In Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the protests in July 2022,²¹¹ in Senegal, after a crisis over a postponed election, the opposition candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye won in the first round in March 2024.²¹² In Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina fled on 5 August 2024 after protests in which, according to the UN human rights office, up to 1,400 people were killed;²¹³ elections were held in February 2026.²¹⁴ In South Korea President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law on the evening of 3 December 2024; the deputies rushed to parliament, all 190 present voted to lift it, and after about six hours it was over. Parliament impeached Yoon, the constitutional court unanimously upheld the impeachment on 4 April 2025, and in the new election in June turnout, at 79.4 per cent, was the highest since 1997.²¹⁵ In Syria Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow on 8 December 2024, after some 50 years of his family’s rule.²¹⁶ In Nepal young people toppled the government in September 2025, and in March 2026 a new party won the first single-party majority since 1999.²¹⁷ In Brazil supporters of the defeated president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace on 8 January 2023;²¹⁸ in September 2025 the Supreme Court sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years and three months in prison for an attempted coup.²¹⁹ It does not end this way everywhere. In Georgia the constitutional court has been hearing since 21 October 2026 the ruling party’s application to ban five opposition parties.²²⁰ Serbia went the other way. There, students had protested for almost two years after the collapse of the station canopy in Novi Sad with 16 dead on 1 November 2024; in the parliamentary election of 25 October 2026, with the highest turnout since the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Student List won 52.65 per cent of the vote according to the preliminary figures of the electoral commission of 26 October, Aleksandar Vučić’s list 39.22 per cent, on a turnout of 68.8 per cent. After the votes from abroad had been counted, the Student List held 141 of the 250 seats on 28 October and Vučić’s list 103, with 126 needed for a majority. Apart from the two large lists, only lists of national minorities entered parliament. Less than two hours after the polls closed Vučić conceded defeat; the official final result is still pending.²²¹

The lot. Besides courts and elections, democracies tried out anew a device from Athens, the sortition of Section 1. In Ireland 99 randomly selected citizens, chosen to reflect the electorate by gender, age and region, deliberated from November 2016 to April 2017, chaired by the Supreme Court judge Mary Laffoy, on the constitution’s ban on abortion. Such a citizens’ assembly does not decide itself; it deliberates and makes recommendations. The Irish one recommended lifting the ban, and in the referendum of 25 May 2018, 66.4 per cent voted to do so.²²²

Read it yourself. The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report appears every March as a free PDF, with country curves on which one can follow the erosion of a country year by year; Freedom House publishes a report on every country.^{208, 209}

The bottleneck. The story ends open. The answers of earlier eras still work: courts that stop emergency decrees, parliaments that lift martial law in six hours, voters who vote out a two-thirds majority that rebuilt the country for sixteen years. But the bottleneck has shifted. How does one protect the referees of a democracy when they are attacked not by a general but by an elected majority that invokes the will of the people? The question that divided Rousseau and Madison is again the most important one.

9. What Decided Success and Failure

The question. The eight sections tell of dozens of attempts to turn an authoritarian order into a democracy or to preserve a democracy. Some succeeded, some failed, many are open. Is there a pattern, a game plan, a playbook? In 1970 Dankwart Rustow warned against searching for fixed preconditions; democracy, he argued, emerges from a power struggle whose leaders at some point agree on rules.⁴¹ Research since then has nevertheless found conditions that shift the odds considerably. This section sets the cases of the text side by side and sorts them by these conditions. It is an evaluation, not a formula: for every factor there are counter-examples.

The cases. The table summarises the transfers and trials of power that appear in sections 3 to 8, with what, according to the text, tipped the balance. The sources are given there.

1. The split at the top. Almost every successful transition began with a crack in the regime. O’Donnell and Schmitter turned this into a rule: without reformers in the regime who conclude a pact with moderate opponents, there is no peaceful transition.¹¹⁵ Spain, Poland, Hungary and South Africa followed this pattern. Where no pact was found, the dictatorship ended in violence, as in Romania, or not at all.

2. Those who bear arms. In many cases what army and police did was decisive. In Lisbon officers themselves toppled the dictatorship, in Manila Enrile and Ramos defected, in Leipzig the security forces did not intervene, in Madrid in 1981 the king stood against the putschists.^{128, 142, 113} Where the army took power itself, the change failed: in Chile in 1973 and in Egypt in 2013, and in Moscow in 1993 the president had parliament shelled.^{182, 163} Chenoweth and Stephan see here the reason why non-violent movements win more often: they split the regime’s pillars of support, including the security forces.¹⁷⁷

3. Many and non-violent. Between 1900 and 2006 large non-violent campaigns achieved their aim in 53 per cent of cases, violent ones in 26 per cent.¹⁷⁷ The 3.5 per cent rule describes how large a movement must grow, with the exceptions Chenoweth herself names.¹⁷⁸ Egypt in 2011 shows the limit: a peaceful mass movement can topple a ruler and still lose democracy if the army decides afterwards.

4. One opposition, one candidate. Against an incumbent who controls the media and the state, a fragmented opposition had little chance. In Serbia in 2000 the quarrelling opposition agreed, in the alliance Democratic Opposition of Serbia, on Vojislav Koštunica as joint candidate.²²³ In Hungary in 2026 and in Serbia in 2026 a single new force each time gathered the votes against the government.^{195, 221} Unity alone is not enough, however, where the competition is already unfair. In 2022 six opposition parties in Hungary ran together with one candidate for prime minister, Péter Márki-Zay, and lost; Fidesz kept its two-thirds majority with 135 of 199 seats.²²⁴

5. Referees who hold. Where courts and counts remained independent, fraud could be proven and power limited: the opposition’s own count in Serbia in 2000, Ukraine’s Supreme Court in 2004, South Korea’s constitutional court in 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2025, the European Court of Justice against Poland’s overhaul of the judiciary.^{172, 174, 215, 219, 200} That is precisely why erosion starts here. Its first step, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt, is to capture the referees.¹⁹¹

6. Rules and gatekeepers. Weimar fell through its own constitution; the Basic Law closed the gaps: no emergency decree power for the president, constructive vote of no confidence, eternity clause, party ban.^{66, 68, 69, 70} Just as important, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt, are the parties. They are democracy’s gatekeepers, who should recognise extremists early and keep them away from power, instead of thinking them controllable and making a pact with them, as the German conservatives did in 1933.²²⁵

7. The anchor from outside. For eastern Europe the prospect of joining the European Union was the strongest incentive from outside; the Copenhagen criteria made democracy and the rule of law a condition.¹⁵⁷ In 2005 Levitsky and Way distinguished two ways in which the West has an effect. Leverage is their term for a government’s vulnerability to outside pressure, linkage for the density of a country’s ties to the United States, the EU and Western institutions. Pressure and conditions alone, they found, rarely democratised autocracies; linkage worked more consistently.²²⁶ In their book of 2010 they followed 35 regimes that were competitive authoritarian in the early 1990s for almost two decades: 15 became democracies, 19 remained competitive authoritarian, Russia fell back into full autocracy.²²⁷ Where linkage was high, as in most countries of Central Europe and the Americas, not a single autocratic government or chosen successor survived through 2005; among the countries that became democracies they count Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, Mexico and Peru. Where linkage was low, the strength of the ruling party and the state apparatus decided. Strong regimes such as those in Russia and Malaysia remained stable and authoritarian; weak ones often fell without democracy following, as in Georgia and Zambia.²²⁸ Leverage is weakened by countervailing powers that stand by a regime economically, militarily or diplomatically and so soften American or European pressure; Levitsky and Way, using a term of Hufbauer and colleagues, call them black knights. After the Cold War Russia, China, Japan, France and South Africa played this role at times, for instance Russia for the governments of Armenia, Belarus and Ukraine and France for autocrats in former colonies such as Cameroon, Gabon and Ivory Coast.²²⁸ Why and how Russia supports authoritarian incumbents in post-Soviet states at elections was examined by Jakob Tolstrup in 2015.²²⁹ After accession the anchor loses force: against Hungary and Poland there remained the Article 7 procedure and judgments of the European Court of Justice.^{194, 200}

8. Prosperity. Lipset’s modernisation thesis said that prosperous countries were more likely to preserve democracy.⁸³ In 1997 Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi tested this on 135 countries from 1950 to 1990. In no country richer than Argentina in 1975, at 6,055 dollars per head in 1985 purchasing power, did a democracy ever fall; 32 democracies spent a combined 736 years above this threshold and none collapsed, while 39 of 69 poorer ones fell. Prosperity, they concluded, does not make democracies, but it keeps them alive.²³⁰ This count does not capture erosion; it only asks whether a democracy fell. For the first part of this conclusion China is the great example. Since the reforms of 1978 its economy grew, according to the World Bank, by more than nine per cent a year on average, almost 800 million people escaped extreme poverty, and in 2010 it overtook Japan as the world’s second-largest economy;²³¹ it did not become a democracy. As early as the late 1980s the leadership put forward a theory of “new authoritarianism”, according to which a country at China’s stage of development needed authoritarian rule, and in 1991 Huntington wrote that in China economics had reinforced culture in holding back democracy.⁴ Another line of research asks how prosperity is distributed. Carles Boix in 2003 and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in 2006 explain transitions from the conflict over redistribution: the more unequal a country, the more a democracy would equalise wealth, and the more stubbornly a rich elite resists it; according to Acemoglu and Robinson the elite concedes the vote when the majority can effectively challenge the existing order and the franchise is the more credible promise to share the pie in future.²³² For the erosion of the present it is disputed whether economic losers or a cultural backlash bring authoritarian populists their voters. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart saw in 2019 above all a backlash against the change in values; Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig found for 15 countries of Western Europe from 1988 to 2007 more votes for nationalist and radical-right parties where competition from Chinese imports was strongest.²³³

9. What happens after victory. An overthrow is not yet a democracy. Linz and Stepan called a democracy consolidated when it is the only game in town; Huntington required two peaceful turnovers of power.^{170, 171} In Russia, Tunisia and Egypt the transition failed not because of the old regime but because of what came after: a president who had parliament dissolved, one who suspended it, an army that removed the elected president.^{163, 186, 182} How to deal with the perpetrators each country decided differently, with amnesty in Spain, trials in Argentina and a truth commission in South Africa; what the successful cases had in common was that yesterday’s losers found a place in the new order.^{109, 120, 156}

The playbook. Figure 8 assigns the factors to the phases Rustow distinguished: the long, inconclusive power struggle, the decision in which the leaders agree on rules, and habituation, in which everyone learns to keep to the rules.⁴¹ Added to these is a fourth phase, endurance against erosion, which the text describes in section 8.

The list. In brief, with one example from the text in which the factor helped and one in which it was missing or failed:

No formula. No factor worked alone, and none guaranteed anything. Tunisia had mass protest, dialogue, a constitution and a Nobel Peace Prize and still lost its democracy.^{185, 186} Argentina fell in 1976 with the highest income of all democracies that perished in this count.²³⁰ Hungary’s opposition was united in 2022 and lost; four years later a new party won. What links the cases is the question from the beginning of this text: whether the powerful can be brought to give up power, and the losers to accept it. Each of the nine factors is an answer to one of the two halves.

The chain in brief

1. Athens, Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, Locke and Montesquieu (to 1787) supply the ideas: rule needs consent, can be revoked and must be divided; open remains who belongs to the people and how a large state with many interests works.
2. The American constitution, Madison’s pluralism, the first peaceful transfer of power and the widening of the vote up to the women (1776–1926) bring the first wave with some 29 democracies; no constitution regulates what happens when a majority wants to vote democracy away.
3. Mussolini, the coups of the interwar years and Weimar with emergency decree, Reichstag Fire Decree and Enabling Act (1922–1945) show that democracies die by their own procedures; in 1942 twelve are left, and Loewenstein calls for militant democracy.
4. The Basic Law, Japan, Italy, the Convention on Human Rights and decolonisation (1945–1974) build democracies that protect themselves against their enemies, and in India the largest in the world; in Africa one-party states arise, in Latin America and Greece the military stages coups.
5. Lisbon, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Manila and Seoul (1974–1988) learn the negotiated transition: reformers and moderates conclude pacts, truth commissions replace revenge, the number of democracies doubles; the Eastern bloc stays closed.
6. The round tables of Warsaw, Budapest and Berlin, the Velvet Revolution and South Africa (1989–1994) carry the wave to eastern Europe and Africa, and the EU makes democracy a condition of accession; there are now elections almost everywhere.
7. Russia, the grey zone, the colour revolutions and the Arab Spring (1993–2013) show that elections without the rule of law are no democracy; autocrats learn to hold elections without losing them.
8. Hungary, Poland, Turkey and V-Dem’s numbers (since 2010) show the erosion by elected governments; South Korea, Bangladesh, Hungary in 2026 and Brazil show the resistance. Open remains how to protect the referees from a majority that invokes the people.
9. Comparing the cases (1922–2026) shows what decided success and failure: a split at the top and a pact, armed forces that do not shoot, non-violent crowds, a united opposition, independent referees, a constitution that defends itself with parties as gatekeepers, the anchor from outside, prosperity and what happens after victory; none of these factors worked alone, and for each there are counter-examples.

Timeline

Further reading

For those who want to go deeper, here is a selection, ordered by the sections it deepens.

• Paul Nolte: Was ist Demokratie? Geschichte und Gegenwart. C. H. Beck, Munich 2012. The history of democracy from Athens to the present, concise and clear (in German); background to sections 1 and 2.
• Hedwig Richter: Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre. Vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. C. H. Beck, Munich 2020. German democratic history as a history from above and below (in German); sections 2 to 4.
• Robert A. Dahl: Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, New Haven 1971. The book from which the two axes of Figure 1 come.
• Heinrich August Winkler: Weimar 1918–1933. Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie. C. H. Beck, Munich 1993, new edition 2018. The downfall of section 3 in full detail (in German).
• Mark Mazower: Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century. 1998 (German: Der dunkle Kontinent, Alexander Fest, Berlin 2000). Democracy, fascism and communism as competing orders of Europe; sections 3 and 4.
• Samuel P. Huntington: The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1991. The book that gave the waves their name; sections 5 and 6.
• Wolfgang Merkel: Systemtransformation. Eine Einführung in die Theorie und Empirie der Transformationsforschung. 2nd edition, VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010. The standard German-language work on the transitions of sections 5 to 7.
• Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: Endspiel. Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR. C. H. Beck, Munich 2009. The autumn of 1989 from section 6 (in German).
• Juan J. Linz, Alfred Stepan: Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1996. Southern Europe, South America and eastern Europe compared; sections 5 to 7.
• Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die. Crown, New York 2018 (German: Wie Demokratien sterben, DVA, Munich 2018). The warning signs and the unwritten rules of sections 3 and 8.
• Anne Applebaum: Autocracy, Inc. 2024 (German: Die Achse der Autokraten. Korruption, Kontrolle, Propaganda, Siedler, Munich 2024). How the autocracies of the present work together; section 8.

Sources

The text draws on the original documents, essays, reports and accounts cited in the footnotes. Unless noted otherwise, they are freely available online. Some details of older history rely on Wikipedia; they are marked as such.