Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

Figure 14-1: Democracy versus autocracy, 1800–2015 Source: HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/f1/2560, based on Polity IV Annual Time-Series, 1800–2015, Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers 2016. Scores are summed over sovereign states with a population greater than 500,000, and range from –10 for a complete autocracy to 10 for a perfect democracy. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 5–23 of Pinker 2011. The graph shows that the third wave of democratization is far from over, let alone ebbing, even if it has not continued to surge at the rate of the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the world had 52 democracies (defined by the Polity Project as countries with a score of 6 or higher on their scale), up from 31 in 1971. After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.14 Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood at 103. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded that year to a coalition of organizations in Tunisia that solidified a transition to democracy, a success story from the Arab Spring of 2011. It also saw transitions to democracy in Myanmar and Burkina Faso, and positive movements in five oth...