Should We Try to Predict Transitions to Democracy ? : Lessons for China

It has been 20 years since the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted that “the limits of democratic development in the world may well have been reached.”1 That forecast, substantiated by a survey of the evidence as it existed in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, was famously wrong. In particular, Huntington’s prediction that the possibility of democratic change in Eastern Europe was “virtually nil” was disproved within a few years. Between 1984, when he wrote, and 2003, Freedom House reckons that the proportion of the world’s states that are electoral democracies rose from 41 to 61 percent, while the proportion of the world’s population living under “free” or “partly free” conditions rose from 56 to 65 percent.2 In terms both of polities and of people, democracy’s limits had clearly not been reached. So, was Huntington’s exercise in prediction a waste of time? Not at all. Huntington performed a signal service to the scholarly and policy-making community despite being largely wrong (except perhaps with respect to the Middle East). He highlighted an important issue concerning the global political future and discussed the factors that remain central to the study of democratization. A retrospective look at the literature on regime change prior to the Third Wave of democratization3 suggests that it was the failure to think seriously about macro-level political change in authoritarian states, not the failure to predict accurately, that was the main shortcoming of research in the 1970s. Today, we confront the same issue with respect to many authoritarian states, the most important of which may be China. With 1.3 billion people, China represents about 60 percent of the world’s “unfree” (neither “free” nor “partly free”) people.4 Were it to democratize, it would represent the equivalent of a democratization wave by itself, and would almost certainly create more favorable conditions for an actual wave involving other Asian dictatorships like North Korea, Vietnam, and Burma. In a recent book, China’s Democratic Future,5 I made some bold predictions about the