During the Cold War, a number of countries established stable democracies despite low levels of modernization and a relative lack of democratic neighbour countries—factors otherwise consistently related to the endurance of democracy. Meanwhile, the Cold War superpowers often supported autocracies, making conditions for maintaining democracy even more difficult. Analysing these stable but deviant democracies provides us with a unique opportunity to examine how domestic factors influence regime stability. More particularly, such historical cases can inform our understanding of contemporary patterns of democratic stability. However, so far no-one has attempted to systematically identify deviant democracies before 1989. This research note does so via a large-N analysis of 125 countries during the first part of the third wave of democratization, i.e., in the period 1975-1988. 11 deviant democracies are identified, including Bolivia, Botswana, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.