The End of the Transitions Era?

Thanks to Samuel P. Huntington’s classic study The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, the 1974 Portuguese Revolution has come to be acknowledged as the starting point of the cascade of transitions that Huntington dubbed democracy’s “third wave.” There may well be new transitions to democracy, but there are also likely to be new reversals that will more or less balance them out. The magnitude of democratic change brought by the third wave—the era par excellence of democratic transitions—is unlikely to be matched in the future.