Staffan I Lindberg /V-Dem Institute

Fifty years of the third wave(s): from democratization to autocratization This piece reflects on 50 years since Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, seen as a trigger for the “third wave of democratization,” a global trend that transformed many dictatorships into democr...

Open Access:
-110 initially nondemocratic countries of the third wave from 1970 to 2024 - 105 episodes of autocratization followed in 75=60 (55 %) of these 110 countries are democracies by 2024, but 50 never became democracies or have reverted back to autocracy.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Opinion | ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants

Autocracy in the USA: “Webloc, reportedly allows law enforcement officers to identify phones and track (...) without a warrant; Tangles (..) make dossiers on people of interest, including location information scraped from their public social media posts”
Gift article. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/o...

Report by @marinanord.bsky.social
@silindberg.bsky.social prepared for the 2024 Summit for Democracy

@vdeminstitute.bsky.social

USA har allvarliga problem.

V-Dem Institute director Lindberg (4.9.2025):

"It seems blatantly obvious that the US is now an electoral autocracy."

The US, until recently the oldest constitutional democracy, is no longer a democracy at all.

May this be a temporary development, soon to be reversed.

Två cirkeldiagram som visar att 49% av världspopulationen levde i autokratier 2004 men att denna siffra 2024 är 72%.

För övrigt var jag på seminarium igår där @silindberg.bsky.social vid V-dem menade att all tillgänglig data indikerar att USA inte längre kan räknas som en demokrati, men att detta med säkerhet först kan fastslås i början av nästa år då alla siffror är på plats.

Point (2) 👇

📢Can free academia withstand democratic backsliding? Why some universities wither while others survive. Read the recently published article in #ISPR. Together with Katrin Kinzelbach and @silindberg.bsky.social (Open Access): doi.org/10.1177/0192...

Understand the emphasis on the menace of the Trump admin. But also, would prefer they also run op-eds on how they’re all losers whose wives are fucking their friends. Stephen Miller was cucked by Musk.

Yep!

Happy to contribute

🗺️ We carried on with Staffan I. Lindberg @silindberg.bsky.social (University of Gothenburg) discussing the the severity of democratic backsliding we see today in the world and what supports U-turns in autocratization.

4️⃣ “A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the ERT Dataset”.
Working Paper 113 from 2021 was the fourth most viewed (3,780 times). v-dem.net/media/public...
‪
@acrowinghen.bsky.social‬‬‬‬‬
‪@boesevanessa.bsky.social‬‬‬‬‬
@silindberg.bsky.social
3(6)

10 ways Trump attacked his enemies in the last two weeks YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel

10 ways Trump attacked his enemies over last few weeks

youtube.com/shorts/GeRne...

How Do You Know You're Living in an Autocracy? Just Look Around You. The Steady State | Charles A. Ray

Yes
open.substack.com/pub/steadyst...

Opinion | How Tyranny Begins

Yes.
How Tyranny Begins www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/o...

January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy Discover the real January 6 story: peaceful protest turned tragedy, Deep State entrapment, media deception, and President Trump's triumphant pardons restoring justice to patriotic Americans.

Declaration of intent to go further and demolish all institutional trappings of democracy. Insurgents are defendants.

www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

Information underpins Democracy – why the BBC must be defended Recent events at the BBC have wide-reaching implications for our democracy - and the sooner we realise it, the better

Yes.
Information underpins Democracy – why the BBC must be defended open.substack.com/pub/christin...

9th November: quick rundown of some classic autocratic behaviours over the past few days in America YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel

quick rundown of some classic autocratic behaviours over the past few days in America Covering attacking enemies, helping allies, cowing institutions and purging the military

All actions and more on www.trumpactiontracker.info?

youtu.be/Mx4c4JfgLeU

Bulgarian MPs To Form Commission To Investigate George Soros’s Influence The parliamentary probe based on conspiracy theories about the philanthropist’s alleged meddling is backed by Bulgaria's main pro-Russian and nationalist parties as well as by tycoon Delyan Peevski’s ...

#Trump ’ism spreapding to Europe. #Democracy under attack.

www.eurasiareview.com/06112025-bul...

2 November: 'being Anti-Trump is probably illegal' YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel

"Being Anti-Trump is probably illegal"

3 minutes on things that have happened in America over the weekend, concentrating on violating Democratic norms.

youtu.be/40OBi4acYYI

The Global Expression Report 2025 | Professor Staffan I. Lindberg Happy to contribute with facts from our #DemocracyReport2025. https://lnkd.in/eshEMcpd

www.linkedin.com/posts/profes...

Waiting for someone to explain why the announcement of a trade relationship that is worse than the one we had a year ago is received as a big success

There democracy gone in real time….

Disturbing. Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the DHS’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created 🌮… | Regina Phelps | 81 comments Disturbing. Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the DHS’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created 🌮 position might help safeguard the vote ahead of next year’s midterms. But many of them left alarmed. Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, Heather Honey used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since 🌮 falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud. Honey, a leader in that movement until her appointment in August as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, complained that her department’s cybersecurity experts tasked with combating misinformation about elections had “strayed from their mission.” The remark echoed a widespread view on the right that the agency had sought to silence supporters of 🌮’s fraud claims. Honey also repeatedly mentioned a report often cited by election conspiracists to support their claims that voting machines were rigged to favor Democrats. The ascent of Ms. Honey reflects how 🌮 and his allies, despite a clear victory last year, remain consumed with the belief that the 2020 election was stolen — and how the president is using the powers of the government to upend an electoral system that he insists helped Biden take the White House. In the past few months, 🌮 has elevated multiple proponents of his fraud claims into high-level administration jobs. Now, as government insiders, these activists could wield their newfound power to discredit future results or rekindle old claims to argue for a federal intrusion into locally administered voting systems. On a call with right-wing activists in March, before her appointment to the DHS, she suggested that the new administration could declare a “national emergency” and justify dictating new rules to state and local governments. She said this could be based on an “actual investigation” of the 2020 election if it showed there had been a “manipulation” of the vote. “And therefore, we have some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” she said in March, according to someone who joined the call, “and therefore, we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.” She added, “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.” Activist Marci McCarthy, who had spread debunked claims about voting machines in Georgia in DeKalb County, was named in May to be the director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. Nearly all of the election experts at CISA have been placed on administrative leave or reassigned this year, amid the agency's downsizing. https://lnkd.in/gBQWiZ96 | 81 comments on LinkedIn

Now it comes….subvert the elections by legal means to ensure a hold on power. Standard tactic by autocrats over the last 25 years of ’third wave of autocratization’.

www.linkedin.com/posts/regina...

New ISHR report reveals how governments work behind the scenes to defund the UN’s human rights work A groundbreaking report published by ISHR today, reveals for the first time how a small group of States led by China and Russia are obstructing and hijacking budget negotiations at the United Nations…

Led by China and Russia.....
ishr.ch/latest-updat...

here it comes...heading towards pure dictatorship...

www.reuters.com/world/us/wid...

The DOJ ignoring all the other ethical violations/criming while he makes crypto gagillions isn’t enough?

Thanks for excellent collaboration!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New article out with excellent @larslott.bsky.social and @Katrin Kinzelbach. OA, online first:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...