As we pass one hundred years since the end of World War I, the interwar period continues to be of interest to political scientists from a wide variety of academic backgrounds, and rightly so. The years 1918–1939 produced instability on a number of fronts, all of which were experienced by countries in Europe (and elsewhere) in the long shadow of the Great War. In their book, Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis, Agnes Cornell, Jørgen Møller, and Svend-Erik Skaaning focus the reader on this precise point: World War I was the catalyst for much political and social change. This fact in itself makes relevant the examination of the book’s key question: Why did some democracies survive during the interwar years while others did not? This project, however, is motivated by more than just the specific nature of the interwar years. Scholarship on democratic survival has progressed in ways that allow scholars to reexamine key questions, such as those related to interwar regime change. Theoretically important factors that correlate with democratic resilience can now be examined with new data and statistical methods. As the authors of this book note, studying democracy in the 1920s and 1930s is no longer limited to specific cases because of the tremendous growth in available data.

The book follows a fairly standard organizational structure. The theory chapter is followed by empirical analysis, with some chapters using large-N methods and some providing case studies. By way of introduction, the authors establish the importance of World War I for much of what countries were dealing with in the 1920s and 1930s. Making this element of the book so prominent serves an important purpose, because it establishes the notion that what happened after 1918 was quite different from what came before 1914. The war serves to demarcate a new period of political and social conditions that set the interwar period apart. Indeed, chapter 1 presents a compelling summary of different crises that wracked Europe after the war, each of which alone was a challenge to nascent democracy, let alone as a group of overlapping crises.

Chapter 2 forces the reader to consider the concept of democracy and how we operationalize that concept. The heart of this chapter is an overview of different datasets used in quantitative studies of democratic survival and how the coverage of democratic spells varies between them. It is clear from this conversation that, although the major datasets have quite a bit of overlap in terms of identifying democratic spells across time and space, there are a few key differences between them as well. The authors argue that these discrepancies emerge from the basic fact that different scholars have defined democracy differently. Naturally, the authors see this as an opportunity to put forward their own notion of what democracy is and to identify the democratic spells that they will analyze based on that definition. Consistent with Schumpeter’s understanding of democracy, they identify competitive elections as democracy’s key marker. Using this definition results in an expanded number of democratic periods available for analysis. One benefit of using a broad definition is that it expands the cases for quantitative analysis. The authors identify more than a few short democratic spells in both Europe and Latin America.

The theoretical argument used to set up the comparative analysis is interesting, if not completely novel. The theoretical framework starts with a commonly identified point about democracy: democracy only survives if those actors who lose elections go along with the outcome (p. 9). Building on this point, the book argues for two factors that the authors think are central to understanding when election results will be challenged and when they will not be challenged. First, having a democratic legacy is expected to be correlated positively with democratic survival, because experience with electoral outcomes and the competitive aspect of electoral politics means it is more likely that losers will abide by the results. Second, having a strong civil society—what the authors call the “associational landscape”—should also be positively related to democratic survival. This second part of the theoretical story is interesting and well executed. I found the discussion of civil society to be comprehensive and compelling. Moreover, the authors’ construction of the associational landscape variable is a nice use of the Varieties of Democracy Project data on civil society and party institutionalization. Importantly, the operationalization flows nicely from the conceptual discussion.

The first part of the theoretical model, however, is a a different story. The idea that new democracies have different historical legacies derived from their antecedent regimes is something that the literature on democratic survival has embraced both theoretically and empirically. Given this, the authors’ focus on the historical paths of interwar democracies makes sense. However, the use of legacy in this framework is a bit puzzling because the countries that are considered to have had democratic legacies are simply those countries that were democratic before (and, importantly, during) the war and never ceased to be democratic in the interwar period. The problem here is that what the authors call “legacy” is what others might call “consolidation.” Ultimately, the reader has to ask the question of how comparable the United Kingdom and the United States, where democracy was established in 1832 and 1776, respectively, are with interwar Romania (first spell of democracy in 1919) and Greece (democracy in 1926), even when faced with the same global context of the interwar period. If these different subsets of democracies had different baseline hazards of failure, then this is something that should have been addressed. One option would have been to replace the dummy variable that marked Europe and neo-Europe relative to Latin America with one identifying states with a democratic legacy (regardless of geographic location) and those without a legacy (those new interwar democracies in both Europe and Latin America).

After the quantitative analysis, the authors provide two chapters of cases studies. Chapter 6 looks at a pair of states (the United Kingdom and Denmark) that had both a democratic legacy and a strong associational landscape. Chapter 7 covers two disconfirming cases in Uruguay and France. The case studies are systematic, rigorous, and interesting. They shed light on the key theoretical factors used, and the quantitative comparative analysis serves a real purpose here, in more than just a superficial way. In a fashion that cannot really be captured in quantitative analysis, the cases show how variation in the independent variables worked contextually and in a reinforcing manner to produce the outcome each case experienced. In chapter 7, the use of a non-European case was a good choice. However, despite the importance of including the democratic spells in Latin America for the quantitative analysis, the overall treatment of this set of countries is a bit uneven over the course of the book.

The reader can quibble with a few remaining items, such as the fact that chapter 5 seems somewhat disconnected from the rest of the material, but overall, the contribution here is significant and the positives of the research far outweigh any shortcomings. Perhaps one of the most interesting contributions of this book is to connect the historical question to contemporary politics. The issues at hand are still relevant, more than a hundred years after the conclusion of the Great War.