Neoliberalism and the Third Wave

Issue Date April 2025
Volume 36
Issue 2
Page Numbers 130–143
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Fifty years out from the “third wave” of democratic transitions, democracy is under threat across the world, in a wave of global retreat for more than a decade. What is particularly striking is that the increase of authoritarian rule and tactics is occurring across very distinctive buckets: the advanced industrial democracies; longstanding, postindependence democratic regimes; competitive authoritarian regimes consolidating their authoritarian-ness; and more recently established third wave democracies with potentially tenuous institutional and economic foundations. And it is even more striking that this global retreat stems from the very combination of liberal economic order with political competition that was fruitful at the outset of the third wave. While the third wave largely rode a global wave of neoliberalism, late-stage neoliberalism’s crisis has now become democracy’s crisis.

About the Author

Rachel Beatty Riedl is professor of public policy and government at Cornell University and the Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Brooks Center on Global Democracy. Her latest book (edited with Valerie Bunce, Thomas Pepinksy, and Kenneth Roberts) is Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience (2025).

View all work by Rachel Beatty Riedl

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