The study of democracy is one of the most long-standing and venerable traditions within comparative politics. And it has never been more relevant: After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing wave of democratic transitions, the majority of the world’s countries achieved democracy. Its march seemed unstoppable. Scholarship did not entirely keep pace. Notwithstanding several seminal contributions, such as Adam Przeworski et al.’s Democracy and Development (2000), there were few novel takes on democratic change.
To be sure, Carles Boix’s Democracy and Redistribution (2003) and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Economic Origins of Democracy (2005) were triumphant elucidations of the median voter model of distributive politics. Both formalized long-held intuitions about the role of inequality in driving and shaping democracy. Yet at the dawn of the twenty-first century, scholars turned to studying more vexing problems: ethnic conflict, civil war, and failed states.
No more, however. Recent years have seen an explosion of research on democratization. Dictators and Democrats is one of the most important new contributions. Focusing attention on democracy during and after the Third Wave, Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman gainsay the notion that democratization typically revolves around distributive conflict among classes. The authors argue that while about half of democratic transitions exhibit some elements of class conflict, many democratic transitions occur from above and have nothing to do with redistributionist threats. Some involve international actors that impose democracy, but most are determined by domestic political factors and tend to center on elite splits and bargains. Moreover, these latter cases are not a monotonic reflection of a country’s degree of economic development or the distribution of assets and income. Their framework, therefore, harkens back to work by intellectual titans, such as Dankwart Rustow, Terry Karl, and Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter.
Part of the return to democratization studies stems from global events of the last decade. The Arab Spring revolutions forced observers around the world to bitterly recall that uprooting entrenched authoritarianism takes more than protests and a pent-up desire for change. Meanwhile, budding authoritarian rulers in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere began eagerly chipping away at democratic institutions, feeding off the discontent unleashed by the global financial crisis. Recep Erdogan has overrun civil liberties and pluralism to consolidate power in Turkey; Viktor Orban has done the same in Hungary; illiberal democracy has strengthened its grip over countries as diverse as Poland, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Venezuela and Russia have marched unflaggingly toward authoritarianism.
Then citizens across the developed world seemed to turn on the liberal part of liberal democracy: The Brexit vote in Britain in 2015 and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016 were followed by the return of the Far Right to political relevance in Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. Populism arrived with a vengeance. Ostensibly, “the forgotten men and women” who were victims of deindustrialization in the heartland finally found their voices, shrill with xenophobia and nationalism while eschewing “political correctness.” Globalization in all its forms was blamed for threatening traditional ways of life and genuine patriotism.
On the back of this earthquake to the liberal international order, time-honored theories about voter preferences, the role of ideology and identity in electoral politics, and core beliefs about the coherence and integrity of political parties have been shaken. For academics who study democracy and have a normative commitment to its ideals, including individual liberty, a free media, and public policy dictated by reason and evidence, it has been a time of soul searching.
One of the fundamental and widely espoused premises about democracy is the idea that it is a great equalizer. Because democracy reflects the popular will, it allows otherwise marginalized groups to have a seat at the table and pursue their interests in a systematic manner. The rules of the game are structured to incentivize politicians to be responsive to the demands of average citizens and to contest power peacefully. Policy areas are constrained to a few bread-and butter-issues that can be neatly arrayed on a left–right spectrum, and predictable, if not banal, left-of-center and right-of-center parties stick to a preordained script.
A few intrepid scholars have begun to question some of these long-held beliefs about democracy, particularly as inequality has churned inexorably higher and polarization inexorably deeper. Haggard and Kaufman are among the most clear-eyed and perspicacious.
Dictators and Democrats goes a long way toward shattering a Pollyannaish view of democracy. It fundamentally challenges many dogmatic notions of where democracy comes from, what it is about, whom it serves, and what it achieves.
Haggard and Kaufman identify three main types of transitions from above: 1) elite displacement transitions, in which domestic rivals to incumbent elites push for regime liberalization; 2) preemptive transitions, in which incumbents themselves initiate a transition; and 3) institutional transitions, in which incumbents gradually introduce incremental changes that culminate in democratic transition. What these cases tend to have in common is that they reflect the “perceived opportunities” of democratization for elites, typically due to advantages they hold over the opposition, such that they can expect favorable political outcomes under democracy. On this score, our own work points in much the same direction.
To be sure, Haggard and Kaufman also recognize that democracy sometimes comes from below. They point to cases such as Argentina, South Africa, and South Korea. But even then they challenge conventional wisdom. Transitions driven by class conflict do not hinge on inequality and the desire by the masses for redistribution, but on political factors such as how authoritarian regimes co-opt or exclude social forces and the capacity of the masses to mobilize.
The consequences of this argument for democracy are profound. Democracies are, in several respects, no more likely than dictatorships or competitive authoritarian regimes to be stable, prosperous, or egalitarian. Poor countries are not necessarily destined to revert to dictatorship, and achieving a middling level of development is not necessarily, contra Przeworski et al.’s Democracy and Development, an inoculation against democratic breakdown. Moreover, democratic breakdowns are rarely the result of reactionary backlashes by wealthy landlords and industrialists against redistribution. Indeed, “populist reversions” are characterized by left-wing authoritarian governments that seize power in the wake of widespread dissatisfaction with the lack of redistribution. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez is an example.
Methodologically, the book pushes the frontier in showcasing a strategy for making sense of rare events, such as democratic transitions. It exploits the entire universe of transitions, submitting it to “structured causal process observation.” The authors created a data set of 78 democratic transitions and 25 reversions to autocracy from 1980 to 2008. They are therefore able to identify the key players that took part in each democratization and outline their interests, motives, and interactions. This monumental undertaking allows Haggard and Kaufman to carefully assess their “political” explanations against alternatives rooted in distributional and similar “structural” accounts.
Like any book as ambitious in topic and scope, this one is not without its faults or blind spots. For one—and this is by design—when it comes to fleshing out the mechanisms that explain the why and how of democratic transitions and breakdowns, Haggard and Kaufman create a data set in which they select their cases on the dependent variable. This, of course, creates problems for causal inference, in that it potentially introduces selection bias. There are no counterfactual cases where a democratic transition does not occur, and so it is hard to know if, in the presence of key variables, there may not have been a transition with the sequence of events they anticipate. For example, we do not hear about the cases where elite splits are present but no transitions follow. Cases such as Egypt, Iran, and Sudan come to mind. If we had access to these “placebo” data points, it might call into question whether these splits are the type of dispositive intervening variable privileged by Haggard and Kaufman.
This brings us to another weakness: The authors only look at Third Wave transitions. They choose this scope because, besides being enmeshed in different economic contexts and geopolitical dynamics, they argue that the political actors involved during them were qualitatively different from those who struggled either to bring democracy about or to prevent it in the iconic historical cases. We are not entirely convinced on this point, but in any case, readers may be disappointed that the approach fails to capture a rich source of time-series variation within countries, especially those that experienced multiple transitions before 1980. This includes canonical cases such as France, Argentina, Peru, Turkey, Thailand, and Pakistan. By the same token, the book fails to document gradual transition paths over time that begin much earlier than 1980, such as Sweden or, arguably, Mexico.
Finally, Dictators and Democrats leans too heavily, perhaps, on a typology of democratic transitions in which different types of transitions have their own players, logic, and end points. The first type reflects splits within elites that catch incumbents by surprise. The second encompasses scenarios in which crafty elites initiate a transition on their own terms. The third entails incumbents gradually, but inexorably, yielding power, paving the way for democracy. The fourth are transitions from below that catch everybody off guard, including the revolutionaries themselves.
While the book gets a lot of traction out of this scheme, the trade-offs involved with typologizing democratic transitions are not trivial. The typologies seem to collapse the effect with its cause. And it is only possible to categorize each transition ex post, instead of ex ante. This seems to rule out the elegance of a unified and more deductive framework.
Of course, Haggard and Kaufman’s more inductive account may have the benefit of being the correct one, even at the expense of parsimony. Indeed, this is the book’s finest accomplishment. It is a much-needed dose of realism, messiness, and honesty.
It is courageous in that it follows the evidence to its logical conclusion, even if doing so cuts democracy down to size. Deep down, proponents of liberalism and justice want to believe that democracy can cure many of the world’s ills: instability, inequality, poverty, famine, and the weakness of citizens against the rich and powerful. Dictators and Democrats helps alert us to the fact that our faith might be misplaced.
