Ben Ansell and David Samuels have written an elegant and powerful book that engages with a number of questions that are central to the literature on democratization, especially the relationship between inequality and democratic reforms. Their book presents a compelling theoretical and empirical critique of the conventional explanation, which suggests that elites adopt democratizing reforms to appease redistributive demands of the poor. The authors argue that much of the conventional wisdoms rest on very weak empirical foundations, and they propose an alternative theoretical framework that reconceptualizes the relationship between inequality and the adoption of democratizing reforms.

Ansell and Samuels depart from the conventional account of democratization in two ways. First, they propose a different account of the political actors that are at the center of the conflict over democratizing reforms. Secondly, they reconceptualize the nature of the political conflict over decisions to extend suffrage. The adoption of democratizing reforms, they argue, does not result from a conflict between high- and low-income groups, but from a distributional conflict among groups with incomes located at the high end of the income distribution. In their account, rising economic elites demand the extension of suffrage in an effort to rein in the power of incumbent elites to expropriate their assets and limit their opportunity for economic development. According to Ansell and Samuels, democratizing reforms result from conflicts over the protection of property rights.

The authors make use of extensive empirical evidence to support their core predictions while, at the same time, debunking predictions originating in alternative accounts of democratization. One of the most significant yet, at the same time, intriguing empirical results of the book is the finding of a positive relationship between income inequality and the adoption of democratizing reform. Rising income inequalities, the authors argue, reflect the rise of an economic group, such as the bourgeoisie, which is disenfranchised politically and fears economic expropriation from landed elites who control the apparatus of the state.

The inclusion of Inequality and Democratization as part of a critical dialogue with From Open Secrets to Secret Voting provides me with the opportunity to reflect on similarities, but also differences, among the findings presented in these two books. One important theme that is central to both approaches is the multidimensionality of inequality. While previous scholars examining the relationship between inequality and the adoption of democratizing reforms considered only one dimension of inequality, namely, inequality in the distribution of landholding, Ansell and Samuels point to the importance of both inequalities in landholding and inequalities in income, demonstrating that these two dimensions of inequality have different implications for democratic reforms. By contrast, From Open Secrets to Secret Voting disaggregates different dimensions of rural inequality. It distinguishes among inequalities in the distribution of land, inequalities in the distribution of employment on farms, and inequalities among rural wages. It demonstrates that these three different dimensions of inequality—land, employment, and wages—have different consequences for electoral politics and support for electoral reforms. Considered together, both contributions suggest the fruitfulness of empirical analyses that disaggregate among various dimensions of inequality. Given that each of these studies focuses on different dimensions of inequality, the books open up fruitful avenues of further research that considers simultaneously the political consequences of all different dimensions of inequality.

The two books offer diverging predictions about the relationship between bourgeois strength and support for democratic reforms. For Ansell and Samuels, bourgeois strength is unambiguously associated with demand for democratizing reforms. By contrast, Open Secrets suggests that the relationship between bourgeois strength and support for democratic reforms is ambiguous. As the book extensively documents, manufacturing employers in Germany’s economically advanced regions were some of the most systematic offenders against democratic electoral practices. These employers engaged in pervasive electoral harassment and intimidation of voters and in layoffs of voters that made the “incorrect” political choice. Studies of electoral practices in nineteenth-century British elections or French elections report similar practices of electoral intimidation carried out by industrial employers. These findings thus raise a number of questions about the kind of electoral institutions desired by the rising bourgeoisie, whose goal was to protect its economic property rights. Could it be the case that the optimal protection of property rights could be achieved by electoral rules that enfranchised middle classes but created extensive opportunities for the disenfranchisement of low-income groups? Further research might examine this question, by providing a more precise disaggregation of the variation in electoral rules that are introduced as part of the democratizing reforms.

Finally, an important difference between the two books rests in the method of analysis. The study by Ansell and Samuels relies on the analysis of cross-national data to examine the relationship between various dimensions of inequality and support for democratic reforms, on the one hand, and various forms of spending, on the other hand. This is a natural choice, given that this is the preferred mode of empirical analysis of contributions by Carles Boix or Adam Przeworski et al., which this book engages in dialogue. In contrast to this empirical strategy, Open Secrets relies on the use of “micro-historical” analysis. Such analysis combines highly disaggregated economic and political variables and examines the relationship between these factors and the support or opposition to democratic reforms of individual legislators.

My objective here is not to engage in a long discussion of the relative advantages and limitations of these two distinct methods of analysis. My contention, however, is that the analysis presented by Ansell and Samuels could have benefited from supplementary micro-historical analysis to test for some of the important theoretical mechanisms presupposed by their theory. Consider some of the propositions of Inequality and Democratization that would have benefited from such a micro-historical approach. One central theoretical proposition advanced in the book is that rising bourgeois elites demand changes in suffrage and the adoption of democratic institutions to protect their property rights against expropriation. I wish that the authors had presented richer empirical evidence demonstrating that these considerations about property-rights protection and limitation of the potential abusive power of the state motivated the decisions of legislators to support democratizing reforms. An analysis based on available roll-call data for countries where such data is available (such as Britain, which remains a crucial case for the book) could have allowed the authors to analyze the importance of these considerations for legislators, while ruling out other possible motives accounting for legislators’ support for electoral reforms. Such alternative considerations are not only the concerns emphasized by the redistributivist theories of democratization but also the immediate electoral considerations of legislators about their expected vote share and the vote share of their party under a more expansive suffrage. A micro-historical analysis could have allowed the authors to distinguish between the relative importance of economic variables—such as inequality in income or landholding inequality—and that of political variables, such as the competitiveness of the race or partisanship in explaining legislators’ support for democratizing reforms.

The analysis of the relationship amont inequality, democratic reforms, and social spending presented in Chapter 7 also represents a very important contribution that overturns conventional wisdom. One important theoretical prediction of the Ansell-Samuels elite competition approach is that redistributive spending should decline as inequality increases, because wealthier citizens should have the incentives to invest in club goods but not in redistributive policies that favor low-income voters. This prediction reverses the main prediction originating in the Melzer Richard model. Using a new data set on inequality and spending for the period between 1880 and 1930, Ansell and Samuels show that the relationship between democracy and aggregate spending is weak and insignificant in several models. Moreover, they find that the relationship between democracy and spending is higher at higher levels of inequality. These results hold for both measures of income and landholding inequality. Yet again, these results could have been strengthened by a micro-historical analysis that tests the “elite competition” component of the theory more precisely. What happens to levels of spending in localities or districts where rural elites and rising manufacturing compete both politically but also economically for access to a scarce pool of labor? Should we not expect increases in spending in conditions of high levels of landholding and income inequality that result from intraelite competition? My broader point here is that analysis generates a wealth of additional empirical implications that remains as yet untested. A shift to the micro-level analysis might give these authors the opportunity to test a range of additional observable implications of their theory.

These remain, however, only small quibbles. Ansell and Samuels have written a fundamental contribution to the literature on democratization. Inequalities and Democratization successfully challenges the dominant “redistributivist” approach to democratization, while opening up a number of avenues for future investigation. One of the most exciting opportunities for future research is the study of the political consequences of various additional dimensions of inequality for democratic reform.