Democratization Without Transformation: Reassessing the Third Wave Through African(ist) Democratic Theory

Over the past decade, scholarly interest in democracy’s erosion on a global scale has grown exponentially. Political scientists have produced an extensive literature probing the historical origins and varied expressions of so-called “democratic backsliding.” In response to fears of resurgent authoritarianism, liberal scholars have advanced a range of proposals aimed at ‘making liberal democracy great again’. In this vein, some advocate reinforcing liberal institutions through notions like “democratic resilience” (Riedl 2025; Levitsky and Way 2023), or by experimenting with “democratic innovations” that deepen participation (Warren 2025). Yet within these conversations, critical scholarship written on—and from—the African continent remains strikingly marginal. Dickson Eyoh’s (1998) decades-old observation that democratization studies showed “sparse regard for the African debate” continues to hold in contemporary analyses of democratic erosion. This paper asks how engagement with African(ist) democratic theorists might reshape prevailing understandings of democratic decline. What would a deeper consideration of Africa’s critical ideas about democracy reveal about the possibilities and limits of democratization during this period of crisis? And how might such engagement help challenge the liberal assumptions that structure the subfield’s current impasse? Drawing on the critical tradition of African(ist) democratic theory—especially work produced during the Third Wave—this article argues that reengagement with this scholarship unsettles dominant framings of democratization in two key ways. First, unlike the methodological nationalism that underpins much contemporary work in comparative politics, critical Africanist studies foreground international political economy, centering imperialism and global structures of power in explanations of democratic outcomes (Abrahamsen 2001; Mkandawire 1999, Saul 1998). Second, rather than focusing on “democratic consolidation,” the extent to which liberal democratic institutions and cultural attitudes come to be hegemonic in the democratizing society in question, these theorists assess democratization in terms of democratic transformation: the extent to which processes of change produces a more equitable distribution of material and political power (Shivji 2003). Viewed through this lens, these scholars presciently predicted that the Third Wave would not usher in sustained democratic progress. Rather, they argued that the very transitions celebrated for “universalizing democracy” were, in fact, “trivializing” it (Ake 1997), thus foreclosing the possibility of deeper, more radical forms of democratic transformation. In doing so, their work suggests that contemporary accounts of democratic decline vastly overstate how much “frontsliding” actually occurred during the 1990s.