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Book Reviews: Comparative Politics
The evolution of institutions for popular governance is one of the most important developments in political history. To say that we already have multiple competing explanations of this process is putting it mildly. And yet this literature has blossomed in recent years. Roger Congleton's recent book adds a weighty, thoughtful, and original contribution to this scholarship.
As its title suggests, Congleton's account of Western democratization is institutional and evolutionary. Democratization, he suggests, fundamentally had to do with the changing status and authority of the institution of parliament, an assembly accountable to ordinary citizens. And the emergence of this institution has typically taken the form of a gradual "perfecting" of its rules and authorities, rather than any revolutionary change. In many countries of Europe, North America, Japan, and Oceania, these governance reforms took place over a relatively short period during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically from around 1825 to about 1925. They were driven by (and interdependent with) the Industrial Revolution, as well as by the spread of liberal ideas stemming from the Enlightenment, the British Levellers, and the American Founders. But the same changes were in many cases prior to the massive social changes that followed in the wake of industrialization, including working-class mobilization. And democratization, or at least the stable versions thereof, was typically peaceful and incremental, rather than revolutionary. Briefly stated, Congleton's study tells us that "the road to democracy requires institutions in which constitutional bargaining and reforms can take place and support of politically active persons with an interest in more liberal forms of political decision making" (p. x).
Congleton presents and supports these ideas in a massive but neatly structured and highly readable book that falls into three distinct parts. In the first of these sections, Congleton...