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How Did Europe Democratize?

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AcemogluDaron and RobinsonJames A.. The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
BoixCarles. Democracy and Redistribution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
CollierRuth Berins. Paths toward Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Daniel Ziblatt
Daniel Ziblatt
Affiliation:
Harvard University, [email protected].
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Abstract

How was democracy achieved in nineteenth-century Europe? This article reviews fours recent books that bring democracy's first wave “back in” to mainstream political science. By launching an important two-way interchange between earlier and subsequent waves of democratization, the books address three core questions: what prompts democratic openings; who are the most important actors in the push for democratization; and once undertaken, how is democracy secured. The four works offer different and at times competing answers to these questions, but all suggest that democracy's first wave was neither exceptional nor inevitable. Instead, it was marked by its own share of concessions and uncertainties, indicating the enduring relevance of Europe's democratization for contemporary cases.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , January 2006 , pp. 311 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

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References

1 See Moore, Barrington, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966)Google Scholar; Linz, Juan and Stepan, Alfred, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Luebbert, Gregory, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Stephens, Evelyn Huber, and Stephens, John, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

2 The notion of a “democratic wave” and the dates of democracy's first wave draw on Huntington, Samuel, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

3 See Diamond, Larry, “Elections without Democracy: Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levitsky, Steven and Way, Lucan, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zakaria, Fareed, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003)Google Scholar; Schedler, Andreas, “The Menu of Manipulation,” Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The idea that economic organization drives political change is a central assumption of what Andrew Janos calls the classical paradigm of social theory; see , Janos, Politics and Paradigms (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

5 Among the many, two standard accounts of modernization theory that emphasize the impact of economic change on scarcity and cultural change and hence democratization are Lipset, S. M., Political Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar; and Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James S., The Politics of Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

6 Moore (fn. 1); Przeworski, Adam and Limongi, Fernando, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics 49 (January 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 This portion of Boix's framework, like large portions of A&R's, clearly builds on the influential Meltzer-Richard model; see Meltzer, Allan and Richard, Scott, “A Rational Theory of the Size of Government,” Journal of Political Economy 89, no. 5 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 In the last, empirical chapter of the book, Boix explores the autonomy of political leaders and analyzes the sources of asset specificity and inequality. He argues that structural reforms such as agrarian reforms tend to be ineffective because they are blocked for the same reason democratization is blocked (pp. 219–22).

9 This point is suggested by Ferguson, Niall, The Cash Nexus (New York Basic Books, 2001), 194–95Google Scholar.

10 This is the impression that emerges from the enormously useful work by Seymour, Charles, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915)Google Scholar.

11 Indeed, there appears some reason to believe that rather than being a preexisting sociological category, the very concept and significance of the “middle class” was created by the process of democratization itself See, for example, Wahrman, Dror, Imagining the Middle Class: The PoliticalRepresenta-tion of Class, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 In the discussion below, I focus on the former variable rather than on the latter, though a significant portion of the book does deal with the latter, as well as with the impact of globalization. In large measure, the arguments of Boix are very similar to those of Acemoglu and Robinson in emphasizing how less mobile sectors of the economy will be resistant to democratization. See Acemoglu and Robinson, 287–320.

13 Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James, “Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (November 2000)Google Scholar.

14 For example, because conventional wisdom asserts that late-nineteenth-century Britain was “more democratic” than Imperial Germany, the authors mistakenly imply that Britain's franchise was extended earlier and more extensively than Germany's (see A&R, 200). This is of course not empirically accurate. While other institutions in Germany, including its parliament, may perhaps have been less democratic than Britain's, its franchise was in fact more generous earlier on and remained so until the twentieth century. See data in Peter Flora, Jens Alber, Richard Eichenberg, Jiirgen Kohl, Franz Kraus, Winfried Pfennig, Seebohm, Kurt, eds., State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe, 1815–1975 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1983)Google Scholar.

15 See Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (fn. 1).

16 Ibid.

17 One denning statement of this perspective is found in Harrison, Royden, Before the Socialists (London: Routledge, 1965)Google Scholar. It is worth noting that it is a thesis that finds much more support in the 1832 Reform Act than in the 1867 Reform Act, where both historians and political scientists have long recognized the existence of—but have tended to dispute the importance of—revolutionary agitation, noting that in all important Hyde Park riots of July 1867 there were no deaths and the major destruction was limited to the flower beds of Hyde Park. See, for example, the discussion in Walton, John, The Second Reform Act (London: Methuen, 1987), 14Google Scholar.

18 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “The Politics of Democracy: The English Reform Act of 1867,” Journal of British Studies 6 (November 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Among the many accounts of these two episodes, two of the best are found in Huard, Raymond, Le suffrage universel en France, 1848–1946 (Paris: Aubier, 1991)Google Scholar; Biefang, Andreas, “Modernität wider Willen: Bemerkungen zur Entstehung des demokratischen Wahlrechts des Kaiserreichs,” in Pyta, Wolfram and Richter, Ludwig, eds., Gestaltungskraft des Politischen: Historischen Forschungen (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1998)Google Scholar, 63:239–59.

20 Just as key parts of the research agenda on the link between economic development and democratization were shaped by Barrington Moore, so too has his work in this area been influential. In Moore's framework, without political revolution from below, economic development might lead to malevolent revolutions “from above.”

21 The work also is full of insights on a set of other topics, but I focus largely on his contributions in this area.

22 The onset of the first two mechanisms in reverse can lead to dedemocratization.

23 Tilly does speculate that there is probably a “high point” beyond which the absorption of private networks reduces democracy, but he does not specify precisely where this point is.

24 It is precisely these gray zones that authors such as Thomas Carothers have suggested should be the focus of contemporary scholarship. See , Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002)Google Scholar.

25 For example, 1878 German antisocialist laws, restricting the third dimension of democracy (right of assembly, freedom of press, and so on), were intended to counteract any future growth of the Social Democratic Party, whose relatively early electoral success might ironically be attributed to the generosity of the suffrage.

27 See Ertman, Thomas, “Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited,” World Politics 50 (April 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Or, even within these three categories, we might focus on the emergence of what arguably are causally discrete features within each that did not emerge simultaneously. For example, within the category of universal suffrage are four distinctive innovations that may have different causal origins: (1) direct voting, (2) equal voting, (3) the secret ballot, and (4) universality of voting rights. For an overview of the nonsimultaneous emergence of these four features of electoral regimes see data in Flora et al. (fh. 14).

29 This list, incomplete but suggestive, is part of a larger data set of democratizing events I am developing. A source for some of these democratizing events is Bartolini, Stefano, The Political Mobilization of the European heft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 321Google Scholar, 349.

30 One could ask, for example, does the sequence in which the amalgam of democracy is created matter? Did it matter, for example, that Britain institutionalized its democracy in one sequence (civil liberties, responsible executive, universal suffrage), while the United States followed a second sequence (responsible executive, universal male suffrage, civil liberties), and Germany followed yet a third sequence (universal male suffrage, responsible executive, civil liberties)?

31 Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 33–40Google Scholar.

32 Similarly, the notion of asynchronic regime change may offer a conceptual “lens” to examine the causes and consequences of “subnational authoritarianism” prevalent in nineteenth-century Germany. See Gibson, Edward L., “Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic Countries,” World Politics 58 (October 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the U.S., see Mickey, Robert, “Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2005)Google Scholar.