in the Arab Spring's Aftermath, Democracy Retreats

Despite the hopes raised by the Arab Spring, democracy is actually in retreat around the world. Here's how to revive it

In the year since Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising, some of the world’s longest-surviving dictators have fallen from power, men who once seemed likely to die in their (very plush) beds. The Arab Spring that spread from Tunisia to Egypt claimed Yemen’s Ali Saleh and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and is now gunning for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Closed societies and quasi-autocracies from Myanmar to Russia to Singapore have also witnessed stirrings of democratic change. Carl Gershman, head of the National Endowment for Democracy, the leading American democracy promotion organization, wrote that we may be entering “a Fourth Wave of democratization, which could extend democracy’s reach into other regions of the world that have been most resistant to democratic change.”
Don’t count on it. Despite the Arab Spring, democracy actually retreated around the globe in 2011, as has been true for the last five years. For every country that has made the transition to democracy, there are numerous others—from Hungary to Pakistan, Nigeria to Thailand—that have gone backward. And public opinion surveys reveal increasing skepticism among people everywhere about whether democracy is the form of government that can best improve their lives.
The decline of democracy is a story of dashed hopes, as elected leaders have failed to deliver on their promises to boost growth while using state institutions to destroy their opponents. The economic crisis that has battered Europe, North America, and parts of Asia is also placing more stress on fragile democracies, creating a vicious cycle: The development record of dictatorships is abysmal, and they are much more likely to stumble into destabilizing conflicts. Should more countries regress into authoritarian rule, instability will increase, darkening the world economy’s recovery prospects.
So what can be done? Restoring the world’s commitment to democracy would bolster growth and improve the quality of life for billions. But doing so requires those in the developed world to fix what ails their democracies, too.

Only a handful of countries, mostly in North America and Western Europe, could truly be called democracies after World War II. Beginning in the mid-1970s, a major surge of democracy—what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called the Third Wave of democratization—swept across Latin America and Asia. It continued through the early 1990s, transforming Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. By the mid-2000s, more than half the world lived under freely elected governments, the highest point for democratic governance in recorded history.
But since that zenith, the spread of democracy has slowed; it now appears to be going in reverse. In its most recent annual survey, Freedom House found that democracy—as measured by a wide range of political and social indicators—regressed in 2010 for the fourth straight year. Some of the countries going backward were once seen as beacons of hope. In Hungary, long a star of the post-Communist world, an increasingly authoritarian government has passed laws neutering opposition parties and silencing much of the press. In Thailand, which in the 1990s was held up as a democratic example, a 2006 coup toppled an elected government, and since then politicians have used lèse-majesté laws to crack down on free speech and crush independent politics.
Even in Egypt, the cradle of the Arab Spring, hopes for the emergence of a healthy democracy have dimmed. Since last February, a resurgent military has tossed some 10,000 Egyptians in jail, while religiously conservative Islamists have gained ground; such groups may participate in elections, but they are far less tolerant of democratic principles such as a free press and women’s rights. Many of the educated businesspeople who sparked the original Tahrir Square uprising are fleeing the country.