This is an ambitious and impressive book. It asks a big and important question about the types of class politics that emerged in cases of early industrialization and working-class development. It is theoretically ambitious in its integration of macrohistorical comparative and microagential strategic/decisional analysis. It is empirically ambitious in its treatment of 20 countries: all independent countries (of at least 250,000 in population) that industrialized between 1863 and 1919 and had a working class of at least 15% of the population. The countries include not only 17 in Europe but also Argentina, Russia, and Japan.

Konstantin Vössing seeks to account for the emergence of five models of class politics by focusing on the strategic decisions made by labor-mobilizing elites: two types of social democracy, two types of revolution, and moderate syndicalism. The argument proceeds in three steps.

The first is macrohistorical. The five models of class politics are distinguished and analyzed as “fitting,” or instrumentally rational, responses to five different types of regime openness, conceptualized as types of labor inclusion. Fitting responses are those that take advantage of institutional openings or, in their absence, pursue forms of resistance.

In a second, microanalytical step, Vössing analyzes the fitting versus ill-fitting strategic choices made by labor leaders. Drawing on heuristic theories, he posits five conditions, oddly referred to as scope conditions, for choosing a rational strategy. He asserts that ill-fitting choices will occur in the absence of any one of these conditions.

In the third step, Vössing argues that any fitting strategy (not the model itself) will produce greater “internal” and “external” institutionalization than will an ill-fitting strategy. Despite a more complex conceptualization, institutionalization is ultimately measured as party membership rates and party vote share, respectively. At one point (e.g., Table 1.1, p. 36) he indicates that fittingness also predicts five further party, regime, and labor outcomes, but there is some slippage between these and the outcomes empirically examined.

As in any work of this scope, an author confronts a major issue of presenting the relevant comparative empirical as well as theoretical expositions. Unfortunately, the author has misallocated the elaboration of theory and empirics: The former is, in many ways, overblown, and the latter is lacking. In defense of the amount of case material presented, Vössing points to space constraints, which are indeed increasingly imposing in today’s publishing market and can be severe for a comparison set of 20. Nevertheless, the result is unbalanced. The presentation of the argument is repetitive, often tedious, and in subsequent repetitions sometimes presented, confusingly, in somewhat different terms and analytical language. The theory tends to be unnecessarily elaborate, leading to a bewildering array of variables, many of which, in the end, are never examined empirically. Examples of this overelaboration are, inter alia, the aforementioned variable of institutionalization, the discussion of “components” versus “catalysts” of the decision-making context, and the 38 rules in his utility model of decision making. In addition, the author devotes too much space, sometimes repetitiously, to ways in which his arguments differ from those in the literature and to the presentation of extant theory on which he draws.

With so much space devoted to the theoretical discussion, the empirical analysis is thin. In part of one chapter, about 50 pages are devoted to narrative historical accounts of the case that innovated each model of class politics, with some treatment of the cases to which it diffused. More than case narratives, however, what is needed is greater exposition of the systematic scoring of variables throughout the chapters. Although the author should be applauded for what I refer to as “coding history” to construct theoretically relevant nominal and ordinal variables, the coding rules deserve greater discussion. One wishes that as each variable was scored, the author had done more to discuss and justify the basis for scoring decisions, and, however briefly, the empirics pertaining to that score. Examples are the variables that form the decision-making context, “systemness,” or “aristocratic strength.” Nor is it always clear on what basis some of the nominal variables are converted to ordinal variables.

The larger problem, then, is insufficient attention to carefully, consistently, and more parsimoniously laying out the main variables that will enter the empirical analysis and making explicit and justifying the coding decisions. The problem can be seen in the important variable of “labor inclusion,” conceptualized in terms of five components, which actually become six (since one has two components) and then coded on a 4-point ordinal scale, without sufficient discussion of the conceptual difference in the two scales. The nominal variable of labor inclusion does major theoretical work because it specifies the mechanisms of incentives and constraints of mobilization by revealing available points of pressure. As such, it is central to Vössing’s argument of “keys and keyholes,” by which a particular model of class politics is the “key” that “fits” the institutions that labor leaders confront. The switch to an ordinal measure, on which the author relies in examining alternative explanations of institutionalization in a multivariate analysis, is a scale of radicalness and conceptually different from the categorical variable.

Unsatisfying is the underspecification of and distinctions among labor leaders, who are the focus of this agential choice-based theory. They are specified only in an endnote as “different kinds of leaders engaged in the political mobilization of industrial workers, including union leaders, party leaders, and intellectuals, as well as political entrepreneurs that might have little to do with the organized labor movement” (p. 269 n. 1). This important point bears a longer discussion, especially because one of the major variables is whether these leaders act “loyally” on behalf of workers, rather than in their own self-interest. Yet these different types of leaders start from a position of different goals, functions, and interests, variables which are central to Vössing. Self-interest may not be the opposite of loyalty, and it is not convincingly argued that, as he asserts loyalty is best conceptualized in terms of psychological mechanisms (p.129). Rather, other institutional goals may be involved, depending on the type of leader. A consideration of types of labor leaders may also lead to ways in which the analysis presented in this book could travel to other cases, including later-developing ones where, for instance, labor mobilizers may be within the state or have a different core constituency.

Similarly, the periodization is not clearly laid out. One must dig in the text to compare passages that seem to suggest that the formative period ends in 1919, or 40 years after some onset (p. 76), or with some level of institutionalization, which itself sometimes seems to be the endpoint and sometimes a subsequent outcome. The definition of the formative stage, again stated in an endnote (p. 271 n. 17), is given as the period in which the labor movement has “national political aspirations in varying national arenas of modern party politics.” Vössing’s use of italics signals importance, yet that definition should be discussed along with his central idea of distinguishing models of class politics precisely in terms of variation in political aspirations to enter or reject participation in various national arenas.

These issues aside, Vössing presents an interesting argument of wide-ranging theoretical and empirical scope. Despite the emphasis on agential strategies to make fitting or ill-fitting choices, How Leaders Mobilize Workers is most interesting for the macrocomparative argument that relates prior patterns of institutional inclusion to models of class politics. On this point, the book makes an important contribution to the literature and has the additional advantage of theoretically accounting for the U.S. case, rather than its usual relegation to the status of an exception.