The Authoritarian Origins of the Third Wave

Issue Date April 2025
Volume 36
Issue 2
Page Numbers 118–129
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The “third wave” of democratization (1974–91) did not begin with a rising tide of liberal popular resistance, as the moniker implies. It began with the global exhaustion of large-scale right-wing authoritarian repression. The only worldwide regime wave of the mid-1970s was one of peasant-led communist revolutions against decaying right-wing dictatorships. This wave of peasant revolutions signaled a new era of steeply declining deadly repression in anticommunist dictatorships around the world. Liberal democracy was not suddenly cresting; right-wing authoritarianism was gradually crashing. This exhaustion of the global right-wing authoritarian project between the mid-1970s and late 1980s was later joined by a weakening stomach for repression in the Soviet bloc from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s. Focusing on global waves of authoritarian repression rather than democratic resistance permits a more accurate historical interpretation of the third wave, offering lessons for the disturbing resurgence in authoritarian energies around the world today.

About the Author

Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and the director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the International Institute at the University of Michigan.

View all work by Dan Slater

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