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Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Renske Doorenspleet
Renske Doorenspleet
Affiliation:
Leiden University, The Netherlands
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Since the publication of Samuel Huntington's 1991 study of democratization, scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy has come in waves. Although Huntington's work has clearly proved to be an influential study, this article suggests that his analysis is far from compelling. There are two problems embodied in the work. The first is largely conceptual. Huntington's analysis fails to provide a clear and meaningful distinction between democratic and authoritarian regimes because it focuses primarily on what Dahl had defined in 1971 as the dimension of competition and pays insufficient attention to the equally important dimension of inclusion. The second problem is more empirical. Huntington has estimated the incidence of transitions to democracy in terms of the percentages of world states involved. Since the denominator in this equation, that is, the number of states in the world, is far from constant, this measure can be misleading. This article proposes solutions to both of these problems, and this new approach leads to conclusions that are quite different from Huntington's.

The new findings are important not only because they suggest a somewhat altered sequencing and a more accurate count of democratization waves but also because they cast real doubt on the appropriateness of the wave metaphor. As the reverse waves are not really apparent from these data, these results therefore also indicate that future studies should be cautious in comparing, explaining, and forecasting different “waves” of democratization.

Type
Research Note
Information
World Politics , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , April 2000 , pp. 384 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2000

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References

1 Huntington, Samuel P., The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 15.

3 By Schmitter's reckoning, there have been four, more compact waves. In addition to Huntington's second and third waves, he thinks there had occurred two other earlier waves; one spectacular but ephemeral wave began in 1848 and reverted in 1852, and the other major outbreak of democracy corresponded to World War I and its aftermath. See Schmitter, Philippe C., “Waves of Democratization,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin et al., eds., Encyclopedia of Democracy, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1995), 346–50Google Scholar.

4 Huntington (fn. 1), 25–26.

5 Ibid., 14–15.

6 Dahl, Robert A., Polyarchy, Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Huntington (fn. 1), 7.

7 Huntington is not alone in this. Many other quantitative researchers focus almost exclusively on the degree of competition and make little or no reference to the extent to which the regimes in question are also inclusive. See, e.g., Bollen, Kenneth A., “Issues in the Comparative Measurement of Political Democracy,” American Sociological Review 45 (June 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Liberal Democracy: Validity and Method Factors in Cross-National Measures,” American Journal of 'Political Science 37 (October 1993)Google Scholar; Gastil, Raymond D., “The Comparative Survey of Freedom: Experiences and Suggestions,” in Inkeles, Alex, ed., On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991)Google Scholar; Jaggers, Keith and Gurr, Ted Robert, “Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data,” Journal of Peace Research 32 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alvarez, M. et al., “Classifying Political Regimes,” Studies in International Comparative Development 31 (Summer 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Huntington (fn. 1) 7, 14–17.

9 Ibid., 16.

10 Dahl (fn. 6) emphasizes that there is no country in which these conditions are perfectly met; therefore he prefers the term “polyarchies” for political systems in which the conditions are sufficiently met and uses the term “democracy” for the ideal type. In this research the term “liberal democracy” will be used for Dahl's polyarchies, because the term “democracy” is more common in daily language.

11 Huntington (fn. 1), 7.

12 Cf. Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan, and Lipset, Seymour Martin, Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences wtth Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995)Google Scholar; Diamond, Larry, “Is the Third Wave Over?” Journal of Democracy 7 (July 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gasiorowski, Mark J., “An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset,” Comparative Political Studies 29 (August 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schedler, Andreas, “What Is Democratic Consolidation?” Journal of Democracy 9 (April 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmitter (fn. 3); Sorensen, George, Democracy and Democratization (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Zakaria, Fareed, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November-December 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Multiple labels are applied to indicate the same concept; this type of regime has been variously described. It is called “formal” or “electoral democracy” in Axel Hadenius, “The Duration of Democracy: Institutional versus Socio-Economic Factors,” in Beetham, David, ed., Defining and Measuring Democracy (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 69Google Scholar; and in Diamond (fn. 12). It is called “democradura” in O'Donnell and Schmitter, “Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies,” in O'Donnell, and Schmitter, , eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 9Google Scholar. And it is called “illiberal democracy” in Zakaria (fn. 12).

14 Rustow, Dankwart A., “The Surging Tide of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 3 (January 1992), 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 E..g., Bollen (fn. 7,1980 and 1993), Gastl (fn. 7); Jaggets and Gutr (fiv. 7); Alvatrc et al, (fn. 7).

16 Bollen (fn. 7, 1980), 373.

17 Likewise, in Gurr's Polity III data set the South African Apartheid regime gets a score of 5. This score is quite high on the scale from -10 to +10, especially if one bears in mind that the Fifth Republic of France gets a score of 6. The inclusiveness dimension is clearly ignored in Gurr's measurement.

18 It should also be pointed out that voter turnout is not an adequate indicator of inclusiveness, reflecting instead factors that have little to do with measuring the right to participate in national elections (inclusiveness). Rather, structural indicators such as the institutional guarantees to participate in elections are required to calculate this second requirement of democracy. This also means that the many rich data sets on voter turnout cannot be used in this research. These include, for example, Arthur S. Banks, Cross-Polity Time-Series Data, assembled by Arthur S. Banks and the staff of the Center for Comparative Political Research, State University of New York at Binghamton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971); Vanhanen, Tatu, The Emergence of Democracy: A Comparative Study of 119 States, 1850—1979 (Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 1984)Google Scholar; idem, Prospects of Democracy: A Study of 172 Countries (London: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar; IDEA, Voter Turnout from 1945 to 1997: A Global Report (Stockholm: IDEA, 1997)Google Scholar.

19 There are other quite equivalent and interesting classifications of democracy, but these are not useful for the present research. See Mitchell Coppedge and Wolfgang H. Reinecke, “Measuring Polyarchy,” in Inkeles (fn. 7); Alvarez et al. (fn. 7); Gasiorowski (fn. 12). These classifications are available only for one specific year (e.g., Coppedge and Reinecke), or for a limited period since 1950 (Alvarez et al. [fn. 7]), or they are limited to developing countries (Gasiorowski [fn. 12]). What are needed in the context of this study are measures of democracy that cover both a long period of time and all independent countries.

20 Gastil's data on civil liberties are available only for the period since 1973, and hence transitions toward liberal democracies can be determined and investigated only since then.

21 Gurr, Ted Robert, “Persistence and Change in Political Systems,” American Political Science Review 74 (December 1974)Google Scholar; Gurr, Ted Robert, Jaggers, Keith, and Moore, Will H., “Polity II Codebook” (Manuscript, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1989)Google Scholar; Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore, “The Transformation of the Western State: The Growth of Democracy, Autocracy, and State Power since 1800,” in Inkeles (fn. 7); Jaggers and Gurr (fn. 7).

22 Gurr himself talks about scores of autocracy and democracy, but it is nevertheless clear that what he is measuring is competition. That is why I label this scale a “competition-scale.”

23 These choices are more fully explained in Doorenspleet, Renske, “Democracy, Transitions, and Waves” (Manuscript, Department of Political Science, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, July 1998)Google Scholar.

24 Countries that did not pass the requirement of competition are authoritarian; therefore, in the context of this research there is no need to investigate the inclusiveness of these noncompetitive systems.

25 Coppedge and Reinecke (fn. 19) used the same four categories in measuring inclusive suffrage for all political regimes in 1985. The authors dropped this variable (and dimension) of inclusiveness from the final scale because they came to the conclusion that it contributed very little empirically to the measurement of polyarchy. Consequently, their final scale is a unidimensional scale of contestation. This result is hardly surprising, in that by 1985 the dimension of “inclusiveness” had largely ceased to play an independent effect. In earlier stages of democratization, on the other hand, it is of crucial importance.

26 This is in fact a critical choice: when do countries fulfill the requirement of inclusiveness sufficiently? Of course, if a country falls in the first category. But what if there are partial restrictions? In the event, however, only two countries appear to fall in the second category “suffrage with partial restrictions” (less than 20 percent of the population is excluded): Chile excluded 10 percent of the population by literacy requirements until 1970, and in the United States, a variety of devices, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and property qualifications, prevented virtually all blacks (10 percent of the population) from voting. I decided to treat these two cases as exceptional ones and I will consider Chile in 1949 and the United States in 1920 as “inclusive” enough when they granted women the right to vote. It has to be pointed out, in addition, that a country is considered to be inclusive since the year in which the formal right to participate can be carried out, that is, since the year in which the first inclusive elections are actually held. Hence, although Dutch women had the formal right to vote already in 1919, they could not exercise this right until the 1922 elections; consequently, the Netherlands is classified as a “minimal democracy” only since 1922.

27 Examples of the handbooks and almanacs that were used to investigate the inclusiveness over time of the political regimes in this study are Cook, Chris and Paxton, John, European Political Facts, 1918–1973 (London: MacMillan, 1975)Google Scholar; Delury, George E. et al., World Encyclopedia of Political Systems, 2 vols. (Essex: Longman, 1983)Google Scholar; Gorvin, Ian et al., Elections since 1945: A World-wide Reference Compendium (Harlow: Longman, 1989)Google Scholar; Lipset, et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Democracy, vols. 1–4 (London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; Mackie, Thomas T. and Rose, Richard, The International Almanac of Electoral History (London: MacMillan, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rokkan, Stein and Meyrat, Jean, International Guide to Electoral Statistics (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1969)Google Scholar.

28 Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore (fn. 21,1989), 6–8.

29 Huntington (fn. 1); Jaggers and Gurr (fn. 7); Gleditsch, Kristian S. and Ward, Michael D., “Double Take: A Reexamination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Polities,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 (lune 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Huntington (fn. 1), 20–21.

31 Ibid., 21.

32 One could object that I neglect the new state's choice of its own regime type by excluding those states that have become newly established as independent regimes. However, Huntington himself defines a wave as a group of transitions, and I do not regard as “transitions” the institution of new regimes as a result of decolonization. Processes of state building should be separated from processes of transition.

33 Huntington(fh. 1), 292.