LIPSET'S LEGACY

LIPSET'S LEGACY The Democratic Century. By Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason M. Lakin. University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. 478 pp.

During a scholarly career that has spanned more than half a century, Seymour Martin Lipset pioneered the comparative analysis of why democracies emerge and endure. In The Democratic Century, coauthored with Jason M, Lakin, Lipset continues to make outstanding contributions to the field of comparative politics. This volume revisits Lipset's many pathbreaking works and provides an extraordinarily thoughtful, data-rich, and up-to-date synthesis of scholarly knowledge about the correlates of democracy worldwide. Lakin, who was Lipset's research assistant at the time of his mentor's debilitating stroke in 2001, has done a remarkable job of communicating Lipset's vision and his fervent hope that the first hundred years of the third millennium will indeed be the democratic century.

Almost fifty years ago, in a much-cited 1959 article in the American Political Science Review and in his landmark study Political Man (1960), Lipset demonstrated the correlation between economic development and democracy. Distinguishing among stable democracies, unstable democracies, unstable dictatorships, and stable dictatorships both in Europe and the Americas, he showed how these regime types correlated with indices of wealth, industrialization, education, and urbanization. In essence, his argument was that the richer a nation is, the greater its chances of developing and sustaining democracy.

This analysis became known as "modernization theory"-arguably the only work in the field of comparative politics that has ever truly earned the accolade of "theory." Lipset's argument was widely accepted in the 1960s, then contested in the 1970s after the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America's wealthier nations, and ultimately reaffirmed in the 1990s as these and many other nations transited to democracy. In 2000, Lipset's argument was reassessed by political scientist Adam Przeworski and his collaborators, who argued that economic development explains why democracy endures, but not why it emerges. In 2003, however, this argument was strongly rebutted by Carles Boix and Susan Stokes in the journal World Politics.

While Lipset will always be known as the founder of modernization theory, he relentlessly emphasizes-both in previous works and in The Democratic Century-the complex interplay between economic and cultural variables in influencing the chances of democratic government. His books Agrarian Socialism (1950) and Union Democracy...