ABSTRACT
As the third wave of worldwide democratization ebbed away in the 2000s, a growing interest in the causes for autocratic survival emerged. After a decade dominated by a focus on democratization and transitology, the ‘turning tides’ in freedom (Puddington 2007) and the ‘rollback of democracy’ (Diamond 2008) was declared. Even those who view the current situation more optimistically, as one in which liberal democracy is not in retreat and competition between political regime type as merely frozen, come to the conclusion that the number of autocracies is unlikely to decrease soon (Merkel 2010). Indeed, the global financial crisis has been another backlash for democracy. In many developing countries, the breakdown of the global financial system was interpreted as more than just a failure of the liberal economic order. As several Western democratic governments under political and economic pressure appeared unable to prevent social disruption, democracy as a political model was critically questioned too.
