DEMOCRACY:
Is the Third Wave Receding?*

By Larry Diamond

The rapid emergence of new democracies during the past two decades is often termed the third wave of democratization. (The first wave took place from the 1820s to the 1920s, the second, from the 1940s to the early 1960s.) Hoover fellow Larry Diamond argues that the third wave is substantially over-and that we must act now to prevent a reverse wave from sweeping the weaker democracies away.

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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where he coordinates the democracy program of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. He also co-directs, with Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani, Hoover’s Iran Democracy Project. His research focuses on comparative trends in the stability of democracy in developing countries and post-communist states and on U.S. foreign policy.