The Third Wave of Autocratization, and Studying It using New Methods

Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy’s eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. In this talk, Professor Staffan I. Lindberg provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem Institute, Gothenburg). He will demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding, mainly affecting democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. Many of these countries have large populations and are important international players. This presents a dangerous outlook for the coming years. Lindberg will also introduce the approach of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) to produce the world’s largest data set on democracy with 27 million data and some 50 indices covering 180+ countries.