Fifty years of the third wave(s): from democratization to autocratization

This piece reflects on 50 years since Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, seen as a trigger for the “third wave of democratization,” a global trend that transformed many dictatorships into democracies. This article critiques how the field has studied this wave, arguing that early insights from comparative case studies were sidelined during a shift to quantitative methods, weakening our understanding of democratization and its reversal. It also challenges Huntington’s concept of “waves,” suggesting new methodologies – especially the Episodes of Regime Transformation dataset – offer better tools for analysis. This approach reveals that the third wave lasted nearly 50 years. Between 1970 and 2024, 149 democratization episodes occurred in 110 nondemocratic countries. Over the past 25 years, it came to overlap with a growing “third wave of autocratization” involving 105 autocratization episodes in 75 countries, and counting. This current wave of autocratization is unprecedented in length, scope, and magnitude – and shows no sign of cresting. With the United States of America now turning into an autocracy, the future for remaining democracies is going to be challenging, to say the least.