Lipset's Legacy

The Democratic Century. By Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason M. Lakin. University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. 478 pp.

During a scholarly career that has spanned more than half a century, Seymour Martin Lipset pioneered the comparative analysis of why democracies emerge and endure. In The Democratic Century, coauthored with Jason M. Lakin, Lipset continues to make outstanding contributions to the field of comparative politics. This volume revisits Lipset's many pathbreaking works and provides an extraordinarily thoughtful, data-rich, and up-to-date synthesis of scholarly knowledge about the correlates of democracyworldwide. Lakin, who was Lipset's research assistant at the time of his mentor's debilitating stroke in 2001, has done a remarkable job of communicating Lipset's vision and his fervent hope that the first hundred years of the third millennium will indeed be the democratic century.

Almost fifty years ago, in a much-cited 1959 article in the American Political Science Review and in his landmark study Political Man (1960), Lipset demonstrated the correlation between economic development and democracy. Distinguishing among stable democracies, unstable democracies, unstable dictatorships, and stable dictatorships both in Europe and the Americas, he showed how these regime types correlated with indices of wealth, industrialization, education, and urbanization. In essence, his argument was that the richer a nation is, the greater its chances of developing and sustaining democracy.

This analysis became known as "modernization theory"—arguably the only work in the field of comparative politics that has ever truly earned the accolade of "theory." Lipset's argument was widely accepted in the 1960s, then contested in the 1970s after the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America's wealthier nations, and ultimately reaffirmed in the 1990s as these and many other nations transited to democracy. In 2000, Lipset's argument was reassessed by political scientist Adam Przeworski and his collaborators, who argued that economic development explains why democracy endures, but not why it emerges. In 2003, however, this argument was strongly rebutted by Carles Boix and Susan Stokes in the journal World Politics.

While Lipset will always be known as the founder of modernization theory, he relentlessly emphasizes—both in previous works and in The Democratic Century—the complex interplay between economic and cultural variables in influencing the chances of democratic government. His books Agrarian Socialism (1950) and Union Democracy (with Martin Trow and James Coleman, 1959) stressed the importance of independent voluntary associations for the development of robust political parties and democracy. In his influential edited volume Elites in Latin America (1967), Lipset argued that in the context of a predominantly feudal and Catholic region, elite values were ascriptive and anti-entrepreneurial, and that only when the power and privilege of traditional landholding elites were reduced would either economic growth or democracy markedly advance.

The Democratic Century displays Lipset and Lakin's interest in the mix of economic and cultural variables, as well as political factors, that influence democracy. As they put it in the book's introduction, "The study of democratization is, quite simply, an exercise in multivariate thinking." The authors are adamant that although economic variables correlate more strongly with democracy than do cultural variables, this means not that the latter are unimportant, but rather that they are much harder to conceptualize and measure.

In The Democratic Century, Lipset and Lakin compare democracy to a kickball game, and the book's three parts address different issues related to that game. The first part assesses the rules and the playing field (electoral and executive systems), the players (the political parties), and the spectators (civil society). The second part examines the socioeconomic and cultural factors that determine whether the game is played according to the rules from start to finish, or whether "the opposing sides and fans butcher each other, steal each other's resources, and head for the hills." The third part explores why the game has been played more successfully in the United States than in Latin America.

After thoroughly reviewing recent empirical research, Lipset and Lakin forcefully reaffirm the fundamental idea behind modernization theory: "national wealth is the single most consistent predictor of democratic success." Compared to Latin America, the United...