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Now that the furor surrounding the initial incursion of rational choice methods of inquiry into the field of comparative politics has died down and a second generation of research has matured, the approach is showing its full analytic power. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy uses the technical apparatus provided by game theory to deliver empirically important insights about the origins of modern political regimes at both the micro level and, even more intriguingly and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, at the macrohistorical level. As its title suggests, with its allusion to Barrington Moore's still widely read Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), this is a big, theoretically ambitious book of the type that one feared had been permanently eclipsed in political science with the adoption of ever more technically demanding methods of investigation. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson offer new insights into an old question of major theoretical significance--namely, how to understand the origins of modern political democracy--and they do so using a remarkably elegant and unified game-theoretic framework buttressed by historical case studies.
This book aims to explain why some countries develop stable democratic political institutions whereas others do not, and yet others alternate between democratic and autocratic rule. The gist of Acemoglu and Robinson's class-based interpretation of institutional change is that democratic institutions are established because it is not credible for predemocratic political elites, in the face of a revolutionary threat by the masses, to promise citizens that, once adopted, redistributive policies will remain in force even in the future. Representative political institutions, on the other hand, once established provide the assurance that future policies will reflect the interests of the majority. The creation of democratic institutions is, in other words, designed to lock in a commitment that guarantees citizens majority control over the formulation of economic (redistributive) policies in the future. The authors work out this explanation formally, and they illustrate it with historical materials drawn from Britain, Argentina, Singapore, and South Africa.
In this view, democratic political institutions are fundamentally a device to ease social conflict and prevent revolution by the lower classes. As the authors write: "democratization ... [is] a commitment to future pro-majority policies by the elites in the face of a revolutionary...