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 in part to oppose democracy, they suddenly found themselves willing participants in its creation and maintenance.
Ziblatt cleverly uses bond market volatility as a rough measure of risk perception among the British elite. Episodes of suffrage expansion in 1832 and 1867 were preceded by an increase in perceived risk, but by the 1884 reforms, the bond market barely budges. This suggests two things. First, Britain’s path to democratization was not as settled and low stakes as it appears in retrospect. Investors continued to worry about revolutionary upheaval well past the constitutional settlement of 1832. Second, more optimistically, the fear of such upheaval declined over time. The spikes of volatility shrank in size, and expectations of turmoil receded after each episode of democratic experimentation. By the 1880s, conservatives actually helped to negotiate and pass the Third Reform Act, which created majority male suffrage. By piecemeal adaptation and organizational strengthening, they had learned to live with something they had previously despised.
By contrast, in the unsettled cases, the Right remained organizationally weak, insecure, and thus deeply threatened by any attempts to democratize. They had been caught flat-footed—refusing or unable to organize, weakly institutionalized, riven by factional or ethnic divisions, relying on the heavy hand of the state, or simply too stubborn and blinkered to anticipate, let alone take part in, any demands for democratization. When the demands came, conservative elites lashed out with resistance and repression. They believed, probably correctly, that unlike their better-organized counterparts, they would not survive a major institutional shake-up. The result was resistance, bloodshed, and radicalization.
In Germany, for example, attempts by conservative forces to organize a well-institutionalized party were jump-started by the scare of 1848 but never coalesced into a coherent strategy. Instead of embarking on the long road to party building, German conservatives looked for shortcuts in the form of collusive bargains with other parties and “manipulative interventions” by the state (p. 22). Despite a strong working-class movement and economic development, German democratization stalled because its opponents were too strong to allow democracy, yet too weak to participate in it through institutionalized channels. What killed the Weimar Republic and opened the door for radicalism, Ziblatt argues, was not the fragility of the pro-democratic coalition but the lack of a cohesive, constitutional, center-right party.
In this story, institutional sequencing and party organization matter much more than elections or constitutional reforms. Before a country can begin to democratize, it needs strong, coherent, well-institutionalized conservative parties. Otherwise, the door is left open to right-wing groundswells and disruption by the old elites.
More pessimistically, the argument suggests that conservative elites’ commitment to democracy is always conditional on the promise of rewards. Even successful democracy, therefore, is bound to retain features of oligarchy, since its maintenance requires that the elites maintain a “diffuse but disproportionate influence on society” (p. 368). Ziblatt does not dwell on this uncomfortable conclusion, which could have used a bit more unpacking. Can conservative parties really be called the reluctant stabilizers of democracy if they tolerate democracy only so long as they can disproportionately partake of its benefits?
By focusing on the moderating role of conservative parties, the book also occasionally understates the pitfalls associated with conservative party building. Ziblatt documents the mid-nineteenth-century rise of techniques to bypass the democratic process—electoral fraud, institutional manipulation, clientelism, and general corruption—and contrasts these with the alternative strategy of “building the machinery” of competitive parties in order to win “clean” elections (p. 35). In practice, however, the two strategies have often gone together, and the same organizational strengthening that can help preserve democracy can also threaten its existence. Current threats to democracy in Eastern Europe, for example, stem not from the weakness of right-wing parties but rather from their seemingly unchecked strength. Relatedly, the book argues that strong party organization acts as a firewall from radicals seeking to hijack the party platform. But why would the mainstream conservatives not court the radicals if they thought it might help their electoral chances? Interwar Europe offers plenty of examples of conservative parties pandering to militarism and anti-Semitism in order to outflank the fascists. In the process of trying to defeat the Radical Right, they came to resemble it.
The book usefully critiques explanations that emphasize economic development or the role of the working class, showing that a focus on party organization can explain outcomes that these theories cannot. But it also would have helped the argument to more deeply engage international factors as a complementary set of influences. This seems like an easy international relations critique of a book that explicitly aims to focus on domestic trajectories. But the role of external forces lurks under the surface for much of the author’s argument. Even the book’s periodization of Europe into the pre-democratic age and the age of mass democracy hinges on World War I as the dividing line. By fundamentally transforming the social compact between rulers and masses, the Great War also changed the strength and viability of Europe’s conservative parties. Accordingly, international factors are not a foil but a complement to the argument. For example, how did learning from foreign examples shape elite fears of democratization? And how might hegemonic shocks like major wars shape party ideology or capacity for organization inside states?
These are perhaps unfair demands to make of a book that already accomplishes a number of important things. It makes a novel and compelling argument involving the well-trodden subject of European democratization. It supports the argument with both deep historical process tracing and elegant uses of quantitative data. And it is an exemplary case of a deeply researched controlled comparison, one that performs the valuable service of offering paths to more questions. The book is self-consciously limited in scope, spending seven chapters on its two major cases and only one chapter to draw out the implications for other countries in Western Europe. But the broadness of the argument compels the reader to draw parallels to other cases. Unfortunately, we travel beyond the European continent only briefly, for fascinating but brief comparisons like Egypt after the Arab Spring.
Although Donald Trump does not appear anywhere in the book, his specter looms over the argument. When Ziblatt talks about “the backlash and takeover from within by radicals of a moderate conservative party” (p. 300), one cannot help but think about the recent evolution of the Republican Party. To unfairly transpose the argument to modern day: By Ziblatt’s definition, the modern GOP is a weakly organized party. It does not control candidate selection, as the 2016 election demonstrated. (Or, as a 2018 Fox News headline put it: “Nazis and anti-Semites slip through GOP primaries, causing headaches for party.”) Financing of Republican campaigns is increasingly decentralized and multisourced. Yet by other measures—control of the federal government or state legislatures—the GOP is clearly in a position of political strength. Whatever the limits of historical analogies here, the book’s argument suggests that Trump may be as much a symptom of trends in the Republican Party as he is their catalyst. If so, the problems will only continue after he leaves.
I began the review by mentioning the historical rarity of democratic rule. In its modern form, democracy took root in a few isolated outposts two centuries ago and achieved global dominance only in the last few decades. Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy suggests a major reason why this is so: Democracy did not triumph because of its institutional superiority or its moral appeal. It carried the day only when those who had the most to lose from democracy discovered that they could gain from it as well.
From this perspective, democracy is not a historical end point but a constantly renegotiated bargain, a fragile settlement whose maintenance depends not on norms but on the calculus of self-interest. When the calculus shifts, so do the ostensibly ingrained democratic values.
In key cases, Ziblatt shows, conservatives embraced democracy because they thought it might benefit them, not because of its productive advantages or moral appeals. At least, it seemed better than the possible alternatives. A cynical takeaway might be that in the long run, most attempts at democratization are doomed to failure unless its opponents can be continuously persuaded of its potential benefits. But there is also a sense of historical cyclicity in Ziblatt’s narrative. Radical upswells grow and shrink, expectations surge and deflate, democracy’s fortunes rise and fall. Things get worse; things get better. If we cannot take comfort in democracy’s permanence, perhaps we can take comfort in its capacity to adapt. So far, at least.
