Mainwaring Publishes Article on the Third Wave’s Lessons for Democracy

Kellogg faculty fellow Scott Mainwaring has published a pivotal article, "The Third Wave’s Lessons for Democracy," in the Journal of Democracy.

The article discusses the global "third wave" of democratization, which began in 1974. The wave radically transformed Latin America from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which most countries have a democratic government. However, since around 2006, there has been a modest erosion, with the number of electoral democracies declining. The author addresses the deficit of overall assessments of the third wave, offering five broad lessons about democratization that Latin America’s third-wave experience suggests, and argues that the period from 1978 to 2002 witnessed a remarkably broad, unprecedented, and sustained burst of democratization, but that the last two decades have seen modest erosion.

Mainwaring uses data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project and Freedom House to show a dramatic increase in the mean level of democracy from 1978 until the mid-2000s, followed by some decline since then. The trends since 2006 are concerning, with the United States prioritizing drugs and immigration over supporting democracy. The author notes that the modest global turn toward authoritarianism, the discrediting of political parties, the popularity of authoritarian leaders, the power of transnational criminal organizations, and a decade of economic stagnation do not favor democratic deepening. The author concludes by presenting five lessons learned from Latin America's experience with the third wave of democracy, including that democracy can survive for an extended time in hard places and that democratization often gets stuck, with deep democratic deficits remaining.

Mainwaring is the Eugene and Helen Conley Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and coeditor of the acclaimed book Democracy in Hard Places (2022), among others. A leading expert in comparative politics, his work focuses on democratization, party systems, and political institutions.