ABSTRACT
In one country after another, on one continent after another, democracy was spreading in the late twentieth century. Despite the recession, Diamond reckons there were 116 democratic states as the twenty-first century entered its second decade. Scholar Larry Diamond sees some thirty-five cases of reversal between the mid-1970s when the great democratic wave began and 2010. In some places democratization itself was experienced as among the plausible causes of the problems. The Burmese democracy movement had been failing to make much headway, when in 2010 the winners of a typically rigged election announced significant liberalization. And few democracy movements captured world attention more than did the Arab Spring later that same year. Political scientists commonly take note of a variety of characteristics of democratic government and combine them into an index to attempt to measure quantitatively the extent of democracy. The Middle East had an established reputation among social scientists as among the most resolutely undemocratic among large world regions.
