Although the comparative literature on democratization says much about the experiences of early democratizers in Latin America, South America often receives less attention. The Birth of Democracy in South America remedies this by providing a comparative historical analysis of ten countries from independence to 1929. The central puzzle is a familiar one: why did some countries, like Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, develop democratic regimes in the early twentieth century while others did not? The book’s answer rests on two key explanatory factors, plus one important condition. Democracy emerged in countries that strengthened their militaries and developed strong opposition parties, but only when a ruling party split created the legislative opening for democratic reform to pass.
Chapter 1 describes the central argument, which represents a “thick explanation” that identifies not only key actors and their preferences, but also the structures that enable them. Military professionalization, driven by the late nineteenth-century export boom and the persistent threat of interstate war, gave states a monopoly on violence and ended opposition revolts that had destabilized the region for decades. Once the violent route to power was closed, opposition parties were motivated to shift toward electoral contestation and push for reforms that would level the playing field. But strong parties alone were insufficient; the opening came when dissidents from the ruling party aligned with opposition to make democratic reform possible. The author differentiates this explanation from other approaches, such as modernization theory, geographic and cultural explanations, and the class pressure model, arguing that they fail to adequately explain the timing of democratization.
In the three chapters that follow, the author marshals various quantitative data sources to assess the degree of democracy over time, the relationship between military professionalization and conflict, and the origins of strong parties. In doing so, the book makes two original empirical contributions. The first is a database of 263 presidential elections across South America from independence to 1929. Chapter 2 uses it to assess the degree of democracy across the region before 1930, showing that suffrage restrictions were significant, voter turnout was low compared to industrializing Western countries, and the winner’s average margin of victory was substantially larger in South America during the nineteenth century. Democratic episodes did occur but were ephemeral, and durable democracy did not appear until the twentieth century: Uruguay after the 1918 Constitution, Chile following the 1890 electoral law establishing the secret ballot, Colombia after the constitutional reforms of 1910, and Argentina with the sweeping Sáenz Peña reform of 1912.
The second major empirical contribution is a database of historical revolts in South America from 1830 to 1929. Chapter 3 argues that nineteenth-century revolts were made possible by the weakness of the region’s militaries, and that the export boom allowed governments to professionalize their armed forces in ways that coincided with a dramatic reduction in revolts. Madrid offers a typology of revolts along two dimensions—whether the rebel leader came from inside or outside the state apparatus, and whether the leader was drawn from elites or the masses. They show that the decline in revolts was driven primarily by a drop in outsider revolts, and indicators of military professionalization were significantly associated with this decline. They attribute military professionalization in the region to three factors: foreign currency inflows from the export boom, the continuing threat of regional interstate conflict, and the tendency of countries that won interstate wars to invest more heavily in their militaries than those that were defeated.
Chapter 4 examines the origins of strong parties, arguing that they tended to arise where populations were geographically concentrated and where religious or territorial cleavages were intense and relatively balanced. Chapters 5 through 8 then trace these dynamics through the full set of cases, moving from the strong democracies (Chile and Uruguay in Chapter 5, Argentina and Colombia in Chapter 6) through stable authoritarianism (Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela in Chapter 7) to unstable authoritarianism (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay in Chapter 8).
The case chapters are detailed and well-constructed. In Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, the liberal-conservative cleavage over church-state relations generated durable party organizations with broad electoral roots; in Argentina, a center-periphery cleavage played an analogous role. Uruguay is the most convincing illustration of the theoretical sequence. President Batlle built up the military in response to a major Blanco revolt, secured a decisive victory, and negotiated power-sharing arrangements that eventually enabled the opposition and ruling party dissidents to push through the landmark 1918 Constitution. The sequence of military consolidation, opposition reorientation, and ruling party fracture maps clearly onto the causal framework. The contrasting cases in Chapters 7 and 8 are also instructive. Where states lacked the resources to build effective armed forces and parties remained personalistic and organizationally shallow, stable or unstable authoritarianism resulted. The comparative analysis is stronger for its analysis of cases that did not democratize.
The reforms that the book focuses on are concrete and varied, encompassing suffrage restrictions, the secret ballot, minority party representation, independent electoral authorities, and limits on military involvement in elections, among others. This catalogue underscores that democratization was not a single event but an accumulation of institutional changes, each of which required legislative support that opposition parties could only provide when they had developed organizational strength and once cracks emerged in the ruling coalition.
There are only some minor issues that a reader might take with the explanation. One is a nagging endogeneity problem that attends the core argument. The book asserts that military professionalization caused the decline in opposition revolts but does not spend much time addressing the reverse possibility: that opposition parties abandoned violence because an electoral path to power opened up, and that states were therefore better able to develop coercive capacity. In Chile, for example, presidents permitted opposition candidates to win legislative seats “in order to keep the social peace or satisfy powerful interests” (133).
The inclusion calculus on the part of the ruling party is largely absent from the theoretical framework. Ruling parties often “resisted meaningful democratic reforms during their period and used their influence to block or water down proposed measures” (29), so why did they sometimes relent? In Argentina, the electoral reform of 1912 was introduced partly to persuade the UCR to participate in elections; the book notes that negotiations reflect the president’s desire to bring the radicals to the table through reform rather than force. But this logic of strategic inclusion appears in the cases as contextual detail rather than as a theoretically central mechanism.
The book’s emphasis on military professionalization overshadows the organizational capacity of elite coalitions in explaining national-level institution building. This issue extends to the question of party origins. The book argues that strong parties emerged where populations were geographically concentrated and where religious or territorial cleavages were intense and relatively balanced, but takes them largely as given, without explaining why cleavages emerged where they did, what made them salient and durable, or why parties on opposing sides developed in rough counterbalance. These are precisely questions that a “thick explanation” should endeavor to address.
These criticisms should not obscure what is a substantive contribution to the literature on comparative democratization. The original databases will be useful to scholars of Latin American political development, and the typology of revolts is an analytical advance over undifferentiated treatments of political violence. Readers interested in the historical roots of democracy in Latin America, the political consequences of military development, or the comparative historical analysis of regime change, will find much of value here. It is well suited for graduate courses on Latin American politics and democratization, but also comprehensible enough for undergraduates.
The book is most illuminating when read as part of a broader conversation about how elite-led statebuilding projects in the nineteenth century shaped the likelihood and timing of democracy in the twentieth. This includes works by Marcus Kurtz and Hillel Soifer on the nineteenth-century roots of state capacity, on the one hand, and Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñan on the role of party systems in shaping democratic outcomes in the twentieth century, on the other. Madrid’s argument is squarely situated between them. The strong parties and professional militaries identified as proximate causes of democratization were themselves products of the statebuilding processes that Kurtz and Soifer analyze. Whether ruling-party–opposition dynamics led to democratization also depended on the willingness of key actors to embrace democratic norms, as Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñan show. Madrid’s work is an essential bridge between the nineteenth-century statebuilding literature and the study of twentieth-century democratic outcomes in South America.
