How did Europe democratize?

World Politics

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 311-338

  Ziblatt, Daniel ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEMOCRACY; DEMOCRATIZATION; NINETEENTH CENTURY;

EURASIA; EUROPE;

EID: 33750128671     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/wp.2006.0028     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. See Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966);
2. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978);
3. Gregory Luebbert, Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
4. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
5. The notion of a "democratic wave" and the dates of democracy's first wave draw on Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
6. See Larry Diamond, "Elections without Democracy: Thinking about Hybrid Regimes," Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002);
7. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism," Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002);
8. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003);
9. Andreas Schedler, "The Menu of Manipulation," Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002).
10. 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).
11. 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 S. M. Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960);
12. and Gabriel Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
13. Moore (fn. 1);
14. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts," World Politics 49 (January 1997).
15. This portion of Boix's framework, like large portions of A&R's, clearly builds on the influential Meltzer-Richard model; see Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard, "A Rational Theory of the Size of Government," Journal of Political Economy 89, no. 5 (1981).
16. 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).
17. This point is suggested by Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 194-95.
18. This is the impression that emerges from the enormously useful work by Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915).
19. 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, Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class, 1780-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
20. 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.
21. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, "Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (November 2000).
22. 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, Jürgen Kohl, Franz Kraus, Winfried Pfennig, Kurt Seebohm, eds., State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe, 1815-1975 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1983).
23. See Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (fn. 1).
24. Ibid.
25. One defining statement of this perspective is found in Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists (London: Routledge, 1965). 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.
26. See, for example, the discussion in John Walton, The Second Reform Act (London: Methuen, 1987), 14.
27. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Politics of Democracy: The English Reform Act of 1867," Journal of British Studies 6 (November 1966).
28. Among the many accounts of these two episodes, two of the best are found in Raymond Huard, Le suffrage universel en France, 1848-1946 (Paris: Aubier, 1991);
29. Andreas Biefang, "Modernität wider Willen: Bemerkungen zur Entstehung des demokratischen Wahlrechts des Kaiserreichs," in Wolfram Pyta and Ludwig Richter, eds., Gestaltungskraft des Politischen: Historischen Forschungen (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1998), 63:239-59.
30. 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."
31. The work also is full of insights on a set of other topics, but I focus largely on his contributions in this area.
32. The onset of the first two mechanisms in reverse can lead to dedemocratization.
33. 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.
34. 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).
35. 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.
36. This is one of the chief insights of the "transitions" approach to democratization. See O'Donnell and Schmitter, "Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies," in O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
37. See Thomas Ertman, "Democracy and Dictatorship in Interwar Western Europe Revisited," World Politics 50 (April 1998).
38. 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 at. (fn. 14).
39. 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 Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 321, 349.
40. 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)?
41. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 33-40.
42. 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 Edward L. Gibson, "Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic Countries," World Politics 58 (October 2005);
43. on the U.S., see Robert Mickey, "Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2005).