Waves of democracy

Although the term appears at least as early as 1887,[1] it was popularized by Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University, in his article published in the Journal of Democracy and further expounded in his 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century.

Some countries change their positions quite dramatically: Switzerland, which is typically included as part of the first wave, did not grant women the right to vote until 1971.

(Huntington 1991, 15) Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán (2014, 70) offer a similar definition: "any historical period during which there is a sustained and significant increase in the proportion of competitive regimes (democracies and semi-democracies).

This was followed by the historic democratic transitions in Latin America in the 1980s, Asia-Pacific countries (Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan) from 1986 to 1988, Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and sub-Saharan Africa, beginning in 1989.

In Latin America, only Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela were democratic by 1978, and only Cuba and Haiti remained authoritarian by 1995, when the wave had swept across twenty countries.

[citation needed] Third-wave countries, including Portugal, Spain, South Korea, and Taiwan became fully consolidated democracies rather than backsliding.

[14] Experts have associated the collapse of several dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa, a phenomenon known as the Arab Spring, with the events that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

[citation needed] A concrete example is provided by the story of Maikel Nabil, an Egyptian blogger convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for "insulting the military establishment".

The main causes of the regression and crisis in all the affected countries are attributed to corruption, unemployment, social injustice, and autocratic political systems.

Political scholar Larry Diamond has claimed that the role of the United States in the democratic transition of the Arab world was fundamental.