Waves and Diffusion of Authoritarian Regimes

Since their introduction by Huntington (1991), democratic waves and diffusion have been extensively studied in the past decades. However, we still know frighteningly little about their authoritarian counterparts. Studies on autocratization are mostly focused on internal factors (to name a few: Przeworski & Limongi, 1997; Boix, 2003; McCoy et al., 2018; Grossman et al., 2022). The idea of international factors on democratic backsliding has been only recently explored by some scholars, as in Gunitsky (2017) and Weyland (2021). Lührmann and Lindberg (2019), inspired by the contemporary fear of a general worldwide democratic backsliding, suggest we are potentially facing a new third autocratic wave. This claim has been dismissed by Skaaning (2020) and Tomini (2021), who claim the results are biased because of the adopted methodology. The goal of this paper is to improve on previous work by using a more refined definition of regime and democratic backsliding, to show the attractive force of specific types of authoritarian regimes from both democracies and other dictatorships. Instead of adopting Geddes’ (2014) renowned classification based on executive power, I build a dataset on post-WW1 regime types focusing on the ideological divisions among different countries. Dividing authoritarian governments according to their ideology shows waves in the data, both worldwide and regionally, but there is no evidence for a contemporary one. After that, I show that these waves do not occur randomly but follow the logic of diffusion. Mirroring existing studies on democracies, I use a cross-lagged panel model to verify if international factors play a crucial role in regime change. My final goal is to argue that autocratization processes follow similar patterns to democratization.