Governments change. Monarchies become republics, dictatorships become democracies, and democracies sometimes slide back into autocracy. This final level looks at how regime change happens, how researchers measure regimes today, and what the evidence suggests about how different types of government affect human lives.

Waves of democracy

In his 1991 book The Third Wave, the political scientist Samuel Huntington described democratization as coming in waves, each followed by a partial reverse wave. The first long wave, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spread voting rights in Europe and the Americas; it was reversed in the 1920s and 1930s as fascism and dictatorship spread. A second wave followed the Second World War and decolonization. The third wave began in Portugal on 25 April 1974, when military officers overthrew the dictatorship in the nearly bloodless Carnation Revolution, so called because people placed carnations in soldiers' rifles. The wave spread through southern Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Eastern Europe and Africa.

How transitions happen

Transitions take many paths. Some come through negotiation between regime and opposition, as in Spain after Franco, Poland's Round Table talks in 1989, or South Africa's negotiated end of apartheid, leading to elections in 1994. Some come through mass protest that splits the regime, as in the Philippines' People Power revolution of 1986. Some follow defeat in war or economic collapse, as in Argentina in 1983. Others are imposed from outside, as in postwar Germany and Japan.

Democracies can also break down. Classic breakdowns came through coups. Today, more often, elected leaders gradually weaken checks on their power, by packing courts, harassing the press, changing election rules and extending term limits, a process scholars call democratic backsliding or autocratization. Because it happens step by step, often legally, it can be hard to recognize until it is far advanced.

Measuring regimes

Several organizations rate countries every year.

• Freedom House, a US-based organization, classifies countries as Free, Partly Free or Not Free based on political rights and civil liberties.
• The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index divides countries into full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes.
• The V-Dem project, based in Sweden, uses thousands of experts to rate hundreds of indicators and classifies regimes into four types: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, electoral autocracies and closed autocracies.

These indexes disagree in some cases and can be criticized for their methods and possible biases. But they broadly agree on the overall picture. In the early 2020s, several of them reported a decline in democracy worldwide over the previous decade or more, and V-Dem reported that a majority of the world's population lived in autocracies.

What the evidence suggests

Researchers have studied whether regime type affects outcomes for people. Several findings are widely discussed, though each has critics.

• Peace. Established democracies have very rarely, if ever, fought wars against each other, a pattern called the democratic peace. The philosopher Immanuel Kant anticipated it in Perpetual Peace (1795), arguing that when citizens must consent to war, they will hesitate to bear its costs. Scholars debate the explanation and how to define democracy in borderline cases.
• Famine. The economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, observed that no major famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press, because governments that face elections and criticism have strong incentives to prevent mass starvation.
• Mass killing. The largest state killings of their own citizens in the twentieth century were carried out by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
• Growth. The evidence on economic growth is mixed. Some authoritarian states, such as China and South Korea in its authoritarian period, grew very quickly; many others stagnated. Some studies find democracies grow somewhat faster on average over the long run; others find little difference.

Choosing

No form of government is perfect. Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in 1947 that democracy had been called the worst form of government except all the others that had been tried. The evidence surveyed in this course suggests why many people agree. Regimes that allow citizens to criticize leaders, replace them peacefully and protect their rights through independent courts make it harder for rulers to commit great crimes and easier for societies to correct mistakes.

Worked example: a constitution for a new country

Imagine you are helping draft a constitution for a newly independent, diverse country with three major language groups. Apply this course.

• Head of state. A ceremonial president or monarch might unite; a powerful elected president might divide, if each group fears losing.
• Executive. A parliamentary system with coalition governments could encourage cooperation among groups.
• Territory. Federalism could let language groups govern their own regions, while protecting minorities within each region.
• Rights. A bill of rights enforced by independent courts would protect individuals regardless of group.
• Change. Amendment rules should be hard enough to protect basic rights but possible enough to allow reform.

No design guarantees success; much depends on leaders, history and economic conditions. But the comparison of government types gives us a vocabulary for these choices. Universal Humanism adds a test for any design: does it treat every person as an equal holder of rights, and does it give ordinary people the power to protect those rights when rulers fail?