Institutions and the Fate of Democracy (review)

Michael Bernhard’s book sets out to answer two critical questions: Why do new democracies choose particular institutions? And how does institutional choice influence democratic survival?

Bernhard posits that a variety of interests inform decision-makers’ preferences over institutions: concern for their political parties, for democracy, and for their own power. This institution-framing coalition (the group of leaders in charge of choosing the initial institutional framework) needs to be broad so that the institutions it founds can prove durable. Its members interact in several ways that constitute institutional choice: consensus, imposition, or compromise (splitting differences and trading support across issues). Democracies then survive or fail depending on how the resulting institutional choices interact with the broader economic and social environment. When the founders choose institutions that are ill suited to this context, defective institutional choice results, as in Weimar Germany. When no democratic set of institutions can provide a satisfactory solution to a society’s conflicts, democratization is doomed. Bernhard argues that poor democratic institutional performance is the result of a conflict between the logic of institutional choice, which centers on fulfilling the founders’ preferences, and the logic of democratic functioning, which centers on preventing any one set of actors from automatically gaining the upper hand. Effective democratic institutions thus create “compromises between political forces that maintain broad political support for the system” (p. 19).

The argument is supported with evidence from four cases: Weimar and post-1945 Germany and interwar and post-Communist Poland. Each case study discusses executive, legislative, and electoral institutions, as well as “other institutional features that played an important role in the overall process of choice” (p. 22). Bernhard also carefully documents the complexities of the social, political, and economic context in which decision-makers chose and established these institutions. He emphasizes the importance of contextual variables, including societal cleavages, ethnic fragmentation, economic vulnerability, legacies of the authoritarian past, charismatic leaders, the distribution of political ideologies represented by parties, and levels of economic development and modernity. These contextual factors meant that “whether a set of institutions proves effective in channeling conflict in a given society is determined by how those institutions interact with the broader set of domestic and international economic, social, and political conditions present after democratic transition” (p. 263). The core claim, then, is that the process of institutional choice interacts with a variety of context-specific social, economic, and political variables to affect how democratic institutions function.

The result is a rich, nuanced study of the processes of institutional choice in four distinct settings. The book examines not only the decisive actors and their strategies but the dynamics of the processes of institutional creation. Bernhard shies away from facile generalizations or universal claims, and provokes several broader insights.

First, the scholarly consensus is that successful institutional design is premised on institutions that create their own coalitions and broaden their support. Bernhard’s contribution to this literature is a more sophisticated claim about the initial need for a stable coalition in order to generate longer-term institutionalization. The rapid entrance of excluded societal representatives and leaders can backfire. For example, in the failed (and short-lived) case of interwar Polish democracy, the initial set of representative institutions could not absorb the participation of the newly enlarged Polish electorate. With the enfranchisement of minorities, 20 percent of Sejm seats were now held by minorities, up from the 3–4 percent they held in the Constituent Sejm. The result was a fragmented parliament incapable of producing stable and effective governments, and no new coalitions coalesced around democratic institutions. In other words, temporality matters: Successful democratic institutions need broad supporting coalitions at the outset rather than attempting to broaden such coalitions subsequently.

Second, although Bernhard argues that a variety of contextual variables influenced the success of democratic institution-building, the clearest difference between the failed interwar democracies and the successes of postwar German and post-Communist Poland seems to be the changed international context. In Bernhard’s account, the Allies supervised (albeit in very different...