While ample scholarship has examined the diffusion of democracy, it was autocracy that spread in striking waves in Europe during the interwar years and in Latin America during the 1960s/70s. These “reverse waves” arose largely from counter-diffusion, namely reactionary efforts to forestall the spread of revolutionary impulses. As the Russian and then Cuban Revolution stimulated emulation attempts by radical leftists in many countries, status-quo defenders sought to immunize the body politic against Communism by embracing new models of authoritarianism or fascism. Interestingly, right-wingers’ disproportionate responses to leftist challenges reflected core mechanisms of bounded rationality. Inferential shortcuts induce people to overrate the significance of dramatic, vivid events and to draw surprisingly firm conclusions from such outstanding occurrences. Accordingly, the left overestimated the replicability of the Russian and Cuban Revolutions – but the right did so as well. As Conservatives feared Communism, their panic prompted the wave-like adoption of reactionary autocracy.

Kurt Weyland is Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts at the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Weyland’s research interests focus on democratization and authoritarian rule, on social policy and policy diffusion, and on populism in Latin America and Europe. His latest book, “Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America since the Revolutions of 1848”, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014.