Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART ONE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
- PART TWO MODELING POLITICS
- PART THREE THE CREATION AND CONSOLIDATION OF DEMOCRACY
- PART FOUR PUTTING THE MODELS TO WORK
- PART FIVE CONCLUSIONS AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
- 11 Conclusions and the Future of Democracy
- PART SIX APPENDIX
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - Conclusions and the Future of Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART ONE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
- PART TWO MODELING POLITICS
- PART THREE THE CREATION AND CONSOLIDATION OF DEMOCRACY
- PART FOUR PUTTING THE MODELS TO WORK
- PART FIVE CONCLUSIONS AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
- 11 Conclusions and the Future of Democracy
- PART SIX APPENDIX
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In this book, we proposed a framework for thinking about why some societies are democratic whereas others are not. We emphasized the two related aspects of this question: (1) why some societies become democratic in the first place, and (2) why some democracies persist and consolidate whereas others collapse. In this chapter, we revisit what we have learned, discuss some of the areas where we believe our framework can usefully be extended, and discuss what our model implies for the future of democracy.
Paths of Political Development Revisited
We now revisit the four narratives of political development that we outlined in Chapter 1. How does our framework help to account for these differing paths?
Britain
What explains why Britain followed a path of gradual democratization and why democracy was so easy to consolidate in Britain? At some level, the answer from our analysis is clear: the parameters – in particular, the nature of political and economic institutions, the structure of the economy, the collective-action problem, and the costs and benefits of revolution – were such that there was a sufficient threat of a revolution in predemocratic Britain and the elites could not defuse those pressures without democratization. They also did not find it beneficial to use repression to prevent democratization. However, this answer is incomplete. We also need to understand how Britain came to have the parameters that it did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy , pp. 349 - 360Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005