By Omar G. Encarnación
Nearly three decades have passed since the 1991 publication of the political scientist Samuel Huntington’s The Third Wave, the most important scholarly take on the global democratic transformation that took place in the late twentieth century. The book traced democratic openings around the world, beginning with the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which ended the West’s longest dictatorship, and concluding with the democratization of eastern Europe following the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Between those two landmark events, nearly 30 new democracies emerged.
According to Huntington, this was the third time such a wave had washed over the world; the first arrived in the nineteenth century, with the advent of mass democracy in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the second came in the immediate aftermath of World War II, ushered in by the democratization of West Germany and Japan. He attributed the third wave to a
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