When Democracies Collapse: Assessing Transitions to Non-Democratic Regimes in the Contemporary World

While the process of democratization is nowadays an established scholarship, the reverse process of de-democratization has generated less attention even when the regression or even breakdown of democracy occurred on a regular basis over past decades.

This book investigates both the different combination of explanatory factors triggering the transition from democratic rule as well as the role of the actors’ involved in the process. It aims to integrate different levels of analysis and explanatory factors through a comparative analysis of the phenomenon since the beginning of the third wave of democratization. As such, it addresses the existing divide between the approaches focused on the conditions and those focused on the processes of change, using a mixed-method research design.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, democracy, democratization and de-democratization, political theory, and comparative political institutions.

Luca Tomini is FNRS Chercheur Qualifié in Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.