Book Review: Larry Diamond and Marc F Plattner, Democracy in Decline? and Larry Diamond, Marc F Plattner and Christopher Walker (eds), Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917718667 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsComparative Politics |
Book Reviews 641
innovation with an impressive comparative-
historical analysis, this is by far the best
account of the development of welfare capital-
ism in Spain and Portugal after democratisa-
tion, and its insights will be relevant for
scholars working on a much broader range of
countries.
Alexandre Afonso
(Leiden University)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917712140
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Democracy in Decline? by Larry Diamond
and Marc F Plattner. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2015. 127pp., £15.00
(h/b), ISBN 9781421418186
Authoritarianism Goes Global: The
Challenge to Democracy by Larry Diamond,
Marc F Plattner and Christopher Walker
(eds). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2016. 242pp., £22.50 (p/b), ISBN
9781421419978
These two books are published as part of the
Johns Hopkins University Press series for the
Journal of Democracy. The Journal is the offi-
cial publication of the American National
Endowment for Democracy. Both the institute
and the journal were created to help understand
and help advance what was being called in the
1990s the Third Wave of Democracy.
Democracy in Decline? by Larry Diamond
and Marc Plattner is a re-publication of pieces
originally published in the journal to celebrate its
25th anniversary. These pieces were written at the
time of increasing doubt in the success of the
wave of democratic transitions and the growing
concern for the anti-democratic backlash due to
the negative impact of the US-led 2003-2004
military intervention in Iraq. With a foreword
by former Secretary of State in the Bush
Administration, Condoleezza Rice, one finds
contributions from the usual suspects whose
work is often published by the journal: Francis
Fukuyama, Robert Kagan and Larry Diamond.
The book itself seems to try to address the
question whether or not there is currently a ‘demo-
cratic recession’ or not. All sides of the argument
that one often finds in the pages of the Journal of
Democracy are found here. The threefold concern
is what Marc Plattner clearly spells out for the
reader regarding the following: (1) the increased
political and economic problems that are currently
being faced by the advanced democracies, (2) the
‘new self-confidence and seeming vitality of
some authoritarian countries’, and (3) the ‘shifting
geopolitical balance between the democracies and
their rivals’ (p. 7).
The strongest case against the ‘democratic
recession’ hypothesis is found in the middle
two chapters, one by Philippe Schmitter and
the other by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way.
Schmitter makes the case that reform and
transmission are occurring rather than anti-
democratic retrenchment. He gives 15 spe-
cific examples that he argues support his
view. Levitsky and Way give an overview of
the empirical data regarding the growth and
decline of democracy between 1990 and 2013
which, they argue, suggest that the current
perception of a decline arises from what they
call the inflated expectation of the events of
the 2000s – some saw this as a harbinger of
increased democracy but in reality it was not.
Overall, Democracy in Decline? gives you
what you would expect from the set of authors
selected for the volume.
The second book, Authoritarianism Goes
Global: The Challenge to Democracy, origi-
nates out of a 2-year research project spon-
sored by the National Endowment of
Democracy on the ‘phenomena of resurgent
authoritarianism’. The articles from this
research were initially published in the Journal
of Democracy between January 2015 and
January 2016 before being collected together
for this volume in 2016.
The book is divided into two parts. The first
focuses on what is called the ‘Big Five’
Authoritarian Powers, while the second focuses
on ‘Arenas of “Soft-Power” Competition’. The
book begins with an introduction which is little
more than an overview of what is to come in
the two parts. Part I has six articles that focus
on five states that are presented as the ‘Big
Five’ authoritarian powers: Russia, China,
Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, with two of
the chapters devoted to Iran.
One of the reasons that this book is the
more problematic of the two and problematic
in general is because it fails to provide clear
and satisfying criteria regarding what ‘authori-
tarianism’ means, other than that these are
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