HOW DID EUROPE DEMOCRATIZE?

HOW DID EUROPE DEMOCRATIZE?

By DANIEL ZIBLATT*

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Carles Boix. Democracy and Redistribution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Ruth Berins Collier. Paths toward Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Charles Tilly. Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

INTRODUCTION

When we pause to reflect on the tangle of challenges and dilemmas currently facing democratization efforts across the globe, the successful emergence of democracy in the largest countries of Western Europe in the last part of the nineteenth century looks truly remarkable. Occurring in the reactionary shadow that followed the French Revolution, facing new and not entirely understood economic dislocations and absent the certainty of carrying out reforms with the "democratic transition" playbook in hand, the relative success of democratic reforms in late-nineteenth-century Europe should strike contemporary political scientists as nearly an unfathomable puzzle.

Indeed, how was democracy achieved in Europe? This article reviews four books that make clear that the advent of democracy in Europe in the late nineteenth century was not the exceptional and overdetermined outgrowth of modernization as traditionally portrayed by comparative scholarship. Instead, as these works demonstrate, the muddled political reality of nineteenth-century Europe was marked by its own share of uncertainties, fears, and concessions that are often thought to be symptomatic exclusively of contemporary democratization. It is true that the movement toward universal male suffrage, the increased accountability of executives to elected national parliaments, and the institutionalization of civil rights did mark a dramatic reordering of political authority in Europe's "democratic age." But questions remain. How were these difficult institutional innovations achieved under what may not in fact have been the most promising of conditions? And are there lessons to be learned from this experience for contemporary efforts at democratization?

The traditional narrative of Europe's democratization follows a familiar though misleading periodization that suggests that Europe's path to democracy was difficult but exceptional and achieved under nearly inescapable "forces" of history. Preceded by feudalism, absolutism, and the age of revolution, it was during industrialization and the "age of democracy," so the traditional account runs, that most major Western European countries successfully made the hard-fought democratic transition, crossing the "threshold" of...