1.1 Introduction
Following decades of unprecedented democratic progress, political development in the world seems to have changed direction. From Eastern Europe to Latin America , relatively young democratic countries elect governments that adopt illiberal laws to expand their decision-making power and to limit political pluralism, justifying these measures by the need of tackling urgent social and economic issues. Democracy in Asia and in the Middle-East North Africa region continues to struggle to take root, and some of the few success stories in these geographical areas either have proved ephemeral or have ended unhappily. Many democratizing post-Soviet countries have returned to autocracy. Virtually any sub-Saharan country in which democracy advances is matched by another country in the continent that moves towards autocracy. Even in Western countries, democratic institutions and liberal values are increasingly seen as inefficient instruments to address the contemporary social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, the worldâs major authoritarian powers consolidate and project an appealing image of success.
Obviously, these events cause distress to anyone believes democracy to be a good in itself and the direction towards which the political development of any nation should tend. Anxiety, in turn, fuels the perception that a new era of authoritarian resurgence could begin, but hampers our ability to analyse the phenomenon with rigour, at the same time. With a focus on the post-Cold War period, this book deals with the contemporary processes of autocratization, that is, regime changes opposite to democratization, and tries to get a better understanding of this syndrome, its actual import and nature. To be sure, we do not take a specific position in the dispute between demo-optimists and demo-pessimists. Defined paraphrasing Huntington, as âa group of transitions [âŚ] that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that periodâ (1991, p. 15), an outright wave of autocratization is probably not underway, thus far. However, the phenomenon exists, is empirically relevant, and for these reasons deserves attention.
More specifically, this monograph pursues a threefold goal. First, we elaborate a conceptual framework for the analysis of these processes of regime change and of the different forms they can take. Second, we identify a cross-regional sample of autocratization cases occurred between 1990 and 2015, map them, and highlight the main historical and geographical trends. Third, we analyse the modes of contemporary processes of autocratization, that is, how these regime transitions unfold. Before accomplishing these tasks, the remaining of this introductory chapter reviews the literature on autocratization, clarifies how our research contributes to this debate, and illustrates the structure of the book.
1.2 The World of Autocratization Studies
Since Linz and Stepanâs pioneering work on democratic breakdown (1978), the processes of regime change opposite to democratization have received relatively scarce scholarly attention. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, the debate on regime change has focused on the so-called âthird wave of democratizationâ (Huntington 1991), that is, the dramatic series of democratic transitions that occurred in Southern Europe, Latin America , part of Asia, the communist world, and sub-Saharan Africa in that period. Given that many democratizing countries lacked the social, cultural and economic conditions that have historically favoured the transition and survival of democracy (Lipset 1959; Almond and Verba 1963; Moore 1966), scholarsâ attention shifted from the determinants of democratization to the modes according to which democratic transitions unfold. In stark contrast with the pre-conditionist approach inspired by modernization theory, the emphasis was on agency (OâDonnell and Schmitter 1986; Przeworski 1991), that is, the preferences of the relevant actors, their choices, and their interactions. This change of perspective was symbolic of a different spirit: the âdemocratic momentâ (Plattner 1991) seemed to have finally come.
However, demo-optimism was short-lived and, by the mid-1990s, it gave way to more pragmatic questions about the âchallenges of consolidationâ (Haggard and Kaufman 1994), the âdangers and dilemmasâ (Schmitter 1994) that newly established democracies were facing, and the âillusionsâ (OâDonnell 1996) drawn from few successful cases. Linz and Stepan discussed the complex balance between the different societal arenas that should be achieved to make democracy âthe only game in townâ (Linz and Stepan 1996). Others called attention again to socioeconomic development as a factor for sustainable democracy (Cheibub et al. 1996).
This was the prelude to a phase of demo-scepticism concerning the actual impact of third wave democratic reforms, in the first part of the 2000s. Democratic consolidation was not the natural endpoint of any transition from authoritarian rule. With some delay, the âfallacy of electoralismâ, to which Schmitter and Karl alerted (1991) years before, became manifest (Carothers 2002). Scholars thus engaged in the analysis of the problems related to the quality of democracy (Morlino 2004, 2012), and to the defects of many new democratic regimes (Merkel 2004). In fact, several of them have been relabelled âhybrid regimes â (Diamond 2002; Morlino 2009), âelectoral â (Schedler 2002) or âcompetitiveâ forms of authoritarian rule (Levitsky and Way 2002).
By the mid-2000s, disenchantment about the actual record of the third wave of democratization has transformed in outright demo-pessimism. The still vague âworrisome signsâ noted by Puddington and Piano in a (2005) Freedom House report turned into more alarming claims regarding the âresurgence of the predatory stateâ (Diamond 2008), and the acceleration of an erosion process (Puddington 2010). In 2015, the Journal of Democracy celebrated its own twenty-fifth birthday with a special issue on the decline of democracy (Diamond and Plattner 2015). Freedom House (2018) considers 2017 as the 12th consecutive year of worldwide decline in political freedom, the worst decline in years, indeed, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (2018).
The processes of regime change opposite to democratization have thus re-gained attention. Much of the current debate on the topic revolves around the reverse wave hypothesis. Even if it has already been demonstrated that the âdemocratization by ebbs and flowsâ theory has a limited explanatory potential (Doorenspleet 2005), Huntingtonâs (1991) wave metaphor has not lost its allure. Moreover, the idea that the third wave of democratization will ebb eventually is not new. Every previous wave of democratic transitions was followed by a trend of regime changes in the opposite direction. However, there is no clear answer to the wave of autocratization question. Scholars agree that the era of democratic transitions is over (Plattner 2014). Yet while Diamond describes the last ten years as âa mild but protracted democratic recession â (2015, p. 144; see also Mechkova et al. 2017), others discard it as a myth (Levitsky and Way 2015) or refer to a period of stagnation rather than to an outright reverse trend (Merkel 2010).
Another increasingly rich strand of this literature engages in a deeper analysis of the processes of autocratization. Some studies remain focused on cases occurred in the interwar and post-World War II periods (Berg-Schlosser and Mitchell 2002; Bermeo 2003; Capoccia 2005; Skaaning 2011). Others report large-N and large-T analyses (Diskin et al. 2005; Kapstein and Converse 2008; Svolik 2008, ...