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 develops his theoretical argument on the basis of a set of rational-choice governance models and their evolution. In the second part, he buttresses his argument through historical analysis of the institutional histories of six countries: the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and the United States, showing that democratization in these countries was largely evolutionary, peaceful, and incremental. The author argues that much of the political evolution of these societies was driven by liberal enlightenment ideas, which over time transformed their king-and-council governance architecture into modern, liberal democracy. Finally, in his third and concluding section he introduces additional cross-national quantitative evidence and discusses the implications of his results.

Perfecting Parliament is novel and noteworthy in many respects. One of Congleton's key analytical arguments is that democratization resulted from the adoption of a common “king-and-council” governance model across many otherwise diverse societies. The challenges of governance historically favored the evolution of such a model as an effective compromise between the need for strong executive leadership and coordination (king) and the virtues of specialization and division of labor (council). Moreover, the king-and-council template provided informational advantages, alleviated succession problems, and maintained enough flexibility to withstand the tug-of-war between the king and the council up through the centuries.

Once the king-and-council model had taken root, it introduced competition between these two agents for control over the national policy process and the spoils of sovereignty. As Congleton models this competition, the king was favored by the fact that he was more likely to be decisive (untroubled by preference cycles or internal decision costs), whereas the council, which in later stages of this game typically means parliament, benefited from the fact that kings were more likely than legislators and councillors to vary in their political abilities and interests. Consequently, the council could take advantage of weak or disinterested monarchs and move the constitutional balance of power in its own favor during such reigns. Britain and Denmark in the eighteenth century offer excellent examples.

The second part of the book is taken up with six case studies. Yet before these cases are introduced, Congleton sets the stage in three broad-ranging chapters that trace the philosophical and constitutional origins of liberal reform in Europe. Liberal reform was facilitated in various ways by European explorations and colonialism, by the Enlightenment, by experiments with new forms of republican government in the Netherlands and North America, and by the Industrial Revolution. The subsequent case-study chapters then demonstrate the impact of these forces on a range of European and other modernizing societies. The author finds that three of these cases—Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands—fit his model comfortably and straightforwardly. His remaining three cases, he maintains, can be similarly explained, though with a few more twists and turns in their respective histories. Congleton's extensive theoretical argument, coupled with such a broad set of case histories, is indeed an impressive accomplishment. Yet there are obviously other modern societies that may fit his model less well, such as Russia, France, Spain, and perhaps many of the states of Latin America.

Theoretically, Congleton could have provided stronger evidence for the attractions of the king-and-council model. No doubt many national political regimes can be said to approximate this model, but that is not to say that this is the only, or the most effective, governance model that they could have adopted. Thus, his analysis would have been stronger if he had identified alternative governance models (other than, implicitly, “king-without-council” or “council-without-king”) and demonstrated the competitive advantage of the king-and-council template.

The author cogently challenges much of contemporary scholarship on predatory rule, which tends to presuppose the existence of predatory rulers, as well as societies capable of producing a social surplus. He argues that these two assumptions conflict; instead, prosperous communities are likely to precede the existence of roving bandits, but being prosperous, such communities are also likely to be able to arm themselves against such intruders. He also persuasively challenges the tendency of much of the literature to model these communities of “subjects” as mutually independent and isolated. In contrast, he explicitly models the interaction between rulers and subjects as one in which the latter have exit options. This analytical perspective dramatically alters the political game, as exit options constrain the possibilities for predation. The less costly it is for subjects to exit, the less severely their rulers can prey on them. In this context, it is interesting that several of the cases in which Congleton finds robust support for his theory are in fact societies (such as Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden) in which, during the relevant period, exit options such as emigration were manifold and freely accessible.

In sum, Perfecting Parliament is a remarkable achievement and an important contribution to the search for the keys to the evolution of democratic political institutions. It is an unabashed exemplar of Whig history, but it is also much more. Congleton's institutional focus, his insistence on modeling the microdynamics that gradually strengthened elected representatives at the expense of monarchs, his recognition of the importance of exit options, and his claim that many of the critical democratizing events were incremental, peaceful, and idea-based are all persuasive and well supported. And each of these arguments is in fact a critical and valuable corrective to much of the existing literature in this field. For all of these reasons, this is a seminal, reader-friendly, impressive, and cogent account of modern liberal democracies and how they came to be.