Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (review)

Every five or ten years, the field of comparative politics is graced by the appearance of a big book. Such a book has several traits. It addresses a central and enduring question in the field, typically one that "travels" beyond a particular area or region and encompasses a range of cross-regional cases. It addresses this central question by systematically evaluating all relevant arguments and debates, and in so doing, presents compelling evidence, including quantitative and qualitative data from both original and secondary sources. Most important, a big book causes us to rethink the question in a new way; to see things differently. In the best of cases, it is also lucidly organized and clearly, even gracefully, written.

This is such a book. It should be read by every comparativist, not just Latin American scholars, for it illuminates one of the central questions of the field: Under what conditions does democracy break down? That 4 of Bermeo's central cases are South American gives this book particular interest for readers of this journal; however, the book's scope is broader, embracing a total of 17 European and Latin American cases from throughout the twentieth century. The author seeks to assess perhaps the most influential argument in the "breakdown of democracy" literature: Sartori's polarization thesis. Sartori argues that democracies crumble when antisystem parties of both the left and the right gain strength at the expense of centrist, prosystem parties. In such situations, which are often prompted by economic crises, there is "the likely prevalence of centrifugal drives over centripetal ones, . . . the enfeeblement of the center [and] a persistent loss of votes to one of the extreme ends (or even to both)" (Sartori 1976, 132-34, quoted in Bermeo, 19).

The real culprits, in Sartori's view, are the masses of average citizens who become, in crisis moments, the "masons of polarization" (Bermeo's term), who "use their votes, one by one, to create distant and uncooperative political blocks" (Bermeo, 5). Sartori's perspective belongs to a long tradition of what one might call the "fickle masses" view. This tradition links, among others, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Proudhon, Lipset, and Huntington, all of whom view ordinary people as being susceptible to radical appeals in moments of economic or political crisis. Lacking accurate information, strong political party affiliations, or organizational ties, ordinary people, in this view, can become disoriented in crisis situations and thus "available" for mobilization by elites of the extreme left and right. In Bermeo's phrase summarizing this perspective, "If citizens experience severe material scarcities in new democracies, they don't just get mad, they go mad" (21).

Bermeo takes issue with this "blame the masses" view. Her basic argument can be summarized roughly as follows (to paraphrase a famous writer): the fault (for democratic breakdown) lies not in ordinary people but in our elites, that they are inept, power-hungry, and ignorant of public opinion. In almost all her cases in which democratic breakdown leads to dictatorship, the essential dynamic is not that of voters deserting centrist, prosystem parties, but of elite polarization; namely, divisions among leaders in the military, government, and interest groups. Even in the relatively rare instances of growing support for extremist parties--Nazi Germany being the notable example--polarization does not stem from vote switching as much as from the expansion of the vote to new groups and the mobilization of nonvoters. Bermeo concludes, "Those who have attributed the breakdown of democracy to popular defections have mistaken changes in the composition of the electorate for changes of mind and heart" (5).

Bermeo thus recognizes that polarization is a crucial component of democratic breakdown, but she contests the dominant view that party polarization based on volatile voters is the driving force. She convincingly establishes this argument by first distinguishing two types of polarization: public and private. The former refers to manifestations of political division that occur...