# Larry Diamond Political scientist at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, one of the world's foremost scholars of [[Democracy]] and democratic transitions. His concept of "democratic recession" — a sustained global decline in the quality and number of democracies — has become a standard framework for understanding the [[Authoritarianism]] wave of the 2010s–2020s. Diamond's work on how democracies erode from within, through the degradation of [[Democratic Norms]] rather than outright coups, is directly relevant to analyzing the institutional damage documented across this KB.