Levitsky and Way developed their model in response to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Glasnost and perestroika, the withdrawal of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR itself set in train the powerful forces which not only led to the crucial changes in international attitude which so interest Levitsky and Way but also helped create several of the states they have since examined. In the space of just a few years, authoritarian practices were dismissed as inappropriate and the regimes which employed them worthy of censure. Liberal democracy was confirmed as the preferred and only truly legitimate political system. The amount of material support provided to dictatorships was either reduced or ended entirely, while that offered to governments which were willing and trying to democratise was increased. Indeed, just as colonialism had been quickly ruled unacceptable following World War II, so authoritarianism was deemed undesirable in the wake of the Cold War.

Yet the triumph of democratic ideals these changes heralded was by no means total. While the number of democracies in the world certainly increased, especially in Eastern Europe, authoritarianism lingered on. As well as surviving in some of the places where it had long been practised, it was adopted by many of the governments of the new states that emerged out of the Soviet Union. Moreover, some of the regimes which claimed to have embraced democracy – claims that they often tried to substantiate by pointing to new practices they had adopted or alterations to their political processes and systems they had made – had done so reluctantly, half-heartedly and imperfectly. Levitsky and Way describe such semi- or pseudo-democracies as competitive authoritarian.

Of course, the Third Wave of democratisation and the Arab Spring remain inextricably interlinked. First, there is the term ‘Arab Spring’ itself which is derived from that of the ‘Prague Spring’ that was applied to the Czechoslovakian government's ill-fated efforts in 1968 to challenge Soviet hegemony by extending its citizens’ civil and political rights. Memories of the Prague Spring later fed into the popular protests that helped launch and sustain the Third Wave and have also been invoked elsewhere in the world including North Africa.