Plattner, Marc F. "The End of the Transitions Era?" Journal of Democracy, 25:3 (Jul. 2014): 5-16.

The year 2014 contains two anniversaries of great significance in the history of democracy. Global attention will no doubt focus primarily on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Revolutions of 1989, and deservedly so. But there is also another important anniversary for students of democracy to celebrate and to reflect upon this year—the fortieth anniversary of the launching of the Portuguese Revolution in 1974. Thanks to Samuel P. Huntington’s classic study The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, which opens with an account of the military revolt of 25 April 1974, the Portuguese Revolution has come to be acknowledged as the starting point of the cascade of transitions that Huntington dubbed democracy’s “third wave.”

– Excerpt

Online:
Journal of Democracy