Democracy and Retribution (review)

The resilience of modernization theory is one of the remarkable stories of the social sciences during the last several decades. In this carefully argued and always thoughtful book, Boix makes a compelling attempt to recast modernization theory in a new light, and with new methods. Boix's argument is straightforward, if sweeping. It comes in two related parts. First, economic equality favors the historical emergence of political democracy. States with high levels of inequality are likely to be authoritarian; democratic prospects improve only when assets are more evenly distributed. The micro-level insight on which Boix bases this argument is that in unequal societies, the rich use political power to maintain their wealth, and the poor have no recourse but to use revolution to gain power. Second, the emergence of democracy is more likely in economies where assets are mobile and not subject to taxes. Boix argues that capital mobility is positively correlated with the willingnessof the rich to accept democracy, since the greater the mobility, theless they can be taxed, even if the non-rich hold power through the ballot box. Economic development is associated with democracy precisely because as countries industrialize, capital tends to become more mobile.

Boix develops these two arguments in the first chapter of the book, and uses the five subsequent chapters to support and flesh them out. The chapter that uses a broad crossnational data set to test the hypotheses is not entirely convincing: Boix establishes clear bivariate relationships between inequality, democracy, and the share of agriculture in GNP, the proxy he has chosen for asset mobility. But in multivariate regressions with control variables, the relationships appear considerably attenuated. In any event, data-quality issues invariably render any results ambiguous.

In several later chapters, Boix ranges widely and impressively, bringing his central insight to bear on several recent academic crossnational debates, from the role of electoral institutions to the causes of government spending. An excellent chapter investigates these issues through two unlikely historical case studies, the United States and Switzerland. He argues that the flowering of democratic institutions came earlier in the American states and Swiss cantons because land was more equally distributed and industrialization more advanced. The argument is ultimately convincing, even if once again, the empirical evidence is spottier than he allows.

Critics of modernization theory will probably not be fully satisfied by this work. Like his predecessors, Boix ignores international factors in the diffusion of democracy, and his deterministic framework leaves little room for individual agency. Nonetheless, anyone interested in the origins of democracy or in contemporary political economy will need to read this important work.