Neoliberalism and the Third Wave

Abstract: Fifty years out from the third wave of democratic transitions, democracy is under threat across the world, in a wave of global retreat for more than a decade (Bermeo, 2016; Carothers and Press, 2022; Carothers and Hartnett, 2024; Freedom House, 2024; V-Dem 2024; Riedl et al., 2025; Svolik, 2020; Somer, McCoy, and Luke, 2021; Haggard and Kaufman, 2021). What is particularly striking is that the increase of authoritarian rule and tactics is occurring across very distinctive buckets: the advanced industrial democracies; longstanding, postindependence democratic regimes; competitive authoritarian regimes consolidating their authoritarian-ness; and more recently established Third Wave democracies with potentially tenuous institutional and economic foundations. And it is even more striking that this global retreat stems from the very combination of liberal economic order with political competition that was fruitful at the outset of the third wave. While the third wave largely rode a global wave of neoliberalism, late-stage neoliberalism's crisis has now become democracy's crisis.