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Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. By Ziblatt Daniel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 448 p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.
One of the many lessons of Daniel Ziblatt’s book is the uncomfortable idea that democracy is a deeply unusual way to govern. After all, why would the powerful voluntarily give up their power? Standing in a grand Jacobean home, surrounded by portraits of wealthy aristocrats, Ziblatt wonders: How did these people, who had so much to lose from democratization, “ever come to terms with political democracy without fatally preventing its birth in the first place” (p. xi)?
In many cases, they did not. Attempts at democratization were often mired in revolutions, violent protests, and external impositions. But in some countries, like Britain, democratization unfolded through the acquiescence and willing participation of the elites. Ziblatt calls these the “settled” cases. Here backsliding, violence, and constitutional crises were rare, and the path to democracy was relatively stable, even boring. Besides Britain—the author’s paradigmatic peaceful case, which takes up three chapters—the settled group includes Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and France after 1879. The book contrasts these with the “unsettled” group, as exemplified by Germany, which takes up another four chapters. In these cases, the trajectory of democratization is marked by sudden breakthroughs but also by reversals, breakdowns, and collapses. In addition to Germany, this volatile and uncertain path is taken up by Italy, Portugal, Spain, and France before 1879.
What made the difference? Ziblatt points to a single, somewhat counterintuitive factor: the strength of conservative forces. In the settled cases, conservative parties were well organized, self-assured, and ready to participate in the messy business of democratic governance. Their leaders looked upon democratization not as a catastrophe but as a gamble—a risky one, to be sure, but one on which they could place their own bets, and even win.
Strong conservative party organizations, in other words, were key to peaceful transitions. Where conservative parties maintained control over candidate selection, over the mobilization of party activists, and over the financing of their campaigns, they felt sufficiently confident to cautiously embrace democratization, instead of resisting it at all costs. In this way, Europe’s conservative parties became the unlikely midwives of peaceful democratization. Having developed strong organizational capacity...