The Resilience of Democracy’s Third Wave

The Resilience of Democracy’s Third Wave

By Steven Levitsky, Harvard University, and Lucan Way, University of Toronto

The literature on democratization has experienced radical mood swings in recent decades, from extreme optimism in the 1990s to extreme pessimism today. These mood swings have resulted in not only misguided claims about the state of democracy in the world but also a muddied understanding of what drives both democratization and democratic erosion.