The Third Wave: Inside the Numbers

Recent democratic setbacks have raised the specter of a reverse wave of democratization and emphasized the importance of the gray zone between closed autocracy and liberal democracy. Mapping the frequency of different regime types in different world regions (1972–2012), we identify a set of interesting cross-regional similarities and differences and show that the recent setbacks have affected only some regions. We conclude that much indicates that we have entered a situation of overall democratic stagnation. While this entails a lot of movement forth and back, these movements are mostly confined to the gray zone regime types of electoral autocracies and minimalist democracies.