Carsten Schneider has produced a serious, ambitious, and rigorous analysis of a fundamental challenge in world politics, the consolidation of democracy. The question he addresses is, simply put, why do some countries consolidate their democracies while others do not? And to respond to this question, Schneider looks at societal features and political institutions, and the relationship between them. His main hypothesis is that an adequate fit between the dispersion of power in a society and the dispersion of power that characterizes the institutional rules of a democracy is a sufficient condition for the consolidation of democracy. In broad terms, thus, rather than positing a one-to-one relationship between explanatory and outcome variables, Schneider argues that multiple configurations are conducive to democratic consolidation. And, it is interesting to note, he posits that under certain circumstances, the concentration, as opposed to the decentralization of power may be conducive to the consolidation of democracy.

Schneider tests his key hypothesis using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis and a new data set on 32 countries, from Europe and Latin America, during the 1974–2000 period. He also tests a number of rival hypotheses that are standard in the literature, such as the necessity or sufficiency of societal factors taken in isolation. The results of these tests largely conform to Schneider's theoretical expectations. He shows that i) no societal factor is necessary for the consolidation of democracy, but socioeconomic development and ethnic homogeneity are sufficient for the consolidation of democracy; ii) some societal conditions—specifically, a lack of socioeconomic development and a lack of a prior democratic experience—are necessary but not sufficient for the failure of a democracy to consolidate (in other words, when there is an adequate fit between societal features and political institutions, countries with “adverse” societal conditions can become consolidated democracies); and iii) different types of democracy, distinguished by different institutional configurations, can consolidate (in other words, there is no best type of democracy for all societies). Two other results of his empirical analysis are that liberalization does not always lead to democratization and that pacts as a mode of transition do not always lead to a consolidated democracy.

This book has some important strengths. It is well grounded in the theoretical debates in the literature. Yet it avoids the tendency to explain politics solely in terms of supposedly more fundamental social or economic underpinnings, on the one hand, and the propensity to study political institutions in isolation from their societal setting, on the other hand. It spans multiple world regions and occupies an attractive middle ground between small-n case study research and quantitative analyses of nearly global scope. Most critically, it builds on the strengths of qualitative research—its nuanced conceptual distinctions and creative theory generation—while avoiding its weakness—a lack of testing. The book also incorporates the key strength of quantitative research—a dedication to rigorous testing—while avoiding the debilitating disjuncture in the quantitative literature between the theories that are purportedly tested and the actual tests that are conducted. Indeed, an important merit of Schneider's work is that he makes a concerted effort to bring theory and empirics more in line.

At the same time, various aspects of the analysis call for further discussion. By defining democratic consolidation simply as the expectation that democracy will persist, Schneider avoids many of the problems that have made the fashionable concept of democratic consolidation unsuited for a community of researchers who value analytical clarity (see Gerardo Munck, “The Regime Question,” World Politics 54 [October 2001]: 119–44). Yet two problems remain in Schneider's approach. First, an argument about expectations is future oriented and embeds in the concept of democratic consolidation an element of prediction. Thus, to use such a concept to address his question—“Why do some countries consolidate their democracies while others do not?”—another question must have already been adequately answered—“Will democracy persist in democratic countries?” But Schneider handles this implied task only indirectly and informally, in the process of producing the data set on the consolidation of democracy used in his tests. Essentially, the expectation that democracy will persist is assessed in each case by the data coders, rather than being explicitly theorized and tested. Second, the question of whether democracy will persist in democratic countries in turn assumes a satisfactory response to yet another question: “What countries are democracies?” Yet this question, which remains a matter of much discussion in the literature, is never confronted head-on by the author. Indeed, one is left wondering precisely how Schneider distinguishes democracies from nondemocracies. Therefore, the conceptualization and measurement of the book's dependent variable should be considered as quite tentative, and in need of further refinement.

Schneider's explanation of democratic consolidation is also open to question. His causal argument about the consolidation of democracy hinges on the relationship between political institutions and societal factors, and thus, as noted, he avoids the common shortcoming of explanations that consider these factors in isolation. But he spells out his argument about this relationship in terms of a loose and essentially functionalist conjecture about the “fit” between institutions and societal factors (p. 4). Indeed, as he states, “certain contexts require more concentration of political power than others,” and democracy is consolidated “if the rules of the democratic game reflect the needs of the relevant actors” (pp. 4, 85; emphasis added). Such an argument is theoretically weak. Not only are the mechanisms whereby democracy is sustained or undermined not spelled out. In addition, this argument runs counter to the increasingly recognized point that two of Schneider's societal factors—socio-economic development and ethnic homogeneity—both affect and are affected by political institutions, and are thus not exogenous to democracy, something that is not captured by the static notion of fit. As a result, some basic questions regarding the specification of the causal model and the depth of the causal explanation can be raised.

In sum, Schneider's book addresses a big question in light of realities in the two regions of the world with the greatest experience with democracy. It is thus an ambitious undertaking. It leaves unresolved some of the more complicated conceptual and theoretical issues involved in such a research agenda. But it offers an interesting analysis that pushes many debates in the literature forward, sometimes by developing conceptual distinctions and insights about causal claims as a way to cast old discussions in a new light, other times by conducting a systematic empirical analysis that goes some way to providing a satisfactory answer to questions that had never been subjected to a rigorous test. The Consolidation of Democracy is a valuable contribution to the study of comparative politics, and it puts forth important ideas that comparativists should consider and absorb.