Democracy and Redistribution.

By Carles Boix. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 280p. $70.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Carles Boix offers “a complete theory of political transitions” and a “unified model” (p. 2) that traces regime outcomes to structures of economic inequality, asset specificity versus mobility, and the balance of organizational power between classes. The first two explain the induced preferences of social sectors over regime alternatives, the third their capacity to achieve those preferences.

The core argument will be familiar to those who know the research done in the tradition of Robert Dahl's (1971) Polyarchy and its influential depiction of rulers weighing the costs of including versus excluding others from decision making. In this tradition, elites have varying capacities to exclude opponents and confront threats under democracy. Several scholars have fleshed out this schema. Perhaps most clearly, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John Stephens's (1992) Capitalist Development and Democracy emphasizes the effects of variation in Dahl's “costs of suppression,” resulting from changing class balances of power. The “costs of toleration” have received more varied treatment. Researchers within the materialist tradition emphasize foremost the threat of redistribution of property, income, or both, which elites face at the hands of electoral majorities. One strand of this theorizing argues that redistributive impulses are likely to grow with heightened inequality.

A second strand traces variation in redistributive impulses to degrees of mobility versus specificity of assets. Ronald Rogowski (“Democracy, Capital, Skill, and Country Size: Effects of Asset Mobility and Regime Monopoly on the Odds of Democratic Rule,” in Paul Drake and Mathew McCubbins, eds., The Origins of Liberty, 1998) argued that a ruler can afford to exploit sectors with specific assets but must be more inclusive of owners of mobile assets. Rogowski used this to explain, inter alia, why advanced industrial societies tend to be democracies, while oil states tend toward authoritarianism despite high income.

Boix's innovations are to combine inequality, asset specificity, and class balances of power into a single model; to execute an important shift in one of Rogowski's assumptions; and to test the results in a range of impressive ways. Whereas Rogowski modeled a ruler contesting power with a homogeneous population owning assets, Boix depicts an elite that owns more versus less mobile assets, and which contests power with subordinate social groups, with the system additionally characterized by a variable degree of inequality.

The result is crisp predictions. In settings with either high inequality or highly specific elite assets (or both), redistributive threats in democracy are likely to be high, and so elites strongly prefer authoritarian policies. In contrast, either greater equality or the credible threat of capital flight (which requires mobile assets) makes subordinate groups less likely to pursue redistribution. In either case, varying costs of repression complete elite calculations regarding regime strategy. This model allows Boix to explain the well-known correlation between wealth and democracy (modernization diminishes inequality and causes capital to become increasingly mobile, making democracy less threatening to elites), to account for occasional democratic outcomes at low levels of income, and to offer a revised explanation for authoritarianism in oil states: Now the rulers are the elite owners who fear taxation of immobile asserts in democracy.

Boix tests these against both qualitative evidence (concerning Switzerland and the United States) and quantitative evidence drawn from two data sets jointly covering relevant proxies from 1850–1980 and 1950–90. These two chapters, otherwise effective and impressive, have one very unfortunate characteristic. His model has two independent variables: the level of likely redistribution in democracy, and the balance of power between classes. But the second is dropped in these empirical chapters, which test the very different prediction that “[t]wo broad structural conditions, the distribution of income among individuals and the mobility of assets, determine both the type of political regime and the extent of political violence in any country in the long run” (p. 65). The obvious risk Boix runs is not so much of running directly from preferences to outcomes as of portraying elite strategies as resulting only from elite consideration of the costs of toleration alone, and not also the costs of repression. Later in the book, the latter reappear sporadically.

That said, Boix's creative and valuable quantitative analyses consistently demonstrate correlations in expected directions. He persuasively concludes that “per capita income, as employed in the modernization literature in postwar samples, is simply a proxy for other more fundamental factors” (p. 92). His qualitative sections permit intriguing intranational comparisons, whose findings are consistent with the quantitative results.

Boix considers how his model's predictions might be affected by economic growth, social mobility, trade openness, and variation in democratic decision rules. The last substantive chapter uses his assumptions to consider a truly wide-ranging battery of issues revolving around the politics of redistribution across centuries and continents. Along the way, he improves the core model of Mancur Olson's (2000) Power and Prosperity in order to move several large-scale discussions in truly exciting directions.

Any such far-reaching book must contain shortcomings. The foremost concerns how Boix situates his own core model in preexisting theorizing. His explicit engagement with Barrington Moore's (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy—which details both their overlap and Boix's improvements—is exemplary (p. 40). Similarly, explicit engagement would have been highly appropriate in the case of others, especially Rogowski. A second shortcoming concerns the model's domain of applicability. The notion of “a complete theory” suggests one that transcends a key and frustrating limitation of the most prominent and influential traditions of theorizing about regime outcomes. That theorizing consistently speaks best to the left/right, class-based regime contestation characteristic of Western Europe and Latin America. But it remains unclear to what extent Boix's model overcomes this limitation. Most obviously, state socialist systems are difficult to analyze in terms of contestation over private property and income, which remain central to Boix's analysis. It seems no coincidence that he repeatedly excludes the state socialist countries from his quantitative analysis and does not otherwise address transitions from the communist subtype of authoritarianism.

Neither of these shortcomings nor other minor ones, however, can overshadow how much Boix has accomplished in Democracy and Redistribution. He combines into a single analysis factors that others had treated in isolation. He shifts selected assumptions in highly fruitful directions. He tests resulting predictions in a range of very impressive ways. And he demonstrates, with his consideration of extensions of the model, the analytic dexterity and imaginative reach for which his research is already justifiably well known.