Daniel Ziblatt - Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy

Margaret Levi University of Washington, Seattle

Kathleen Thelen Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Erik Wibbels Duke University

Robert H. Bates Harvard University

Stephen Hanson University of Washington, Seattle

Torben Iversen Harvard University

Stathis Kalyvas Yale University

Peter Lange Duke University

Helen Milner Princeton University

Frances Rosenbluth Yale University

Susan Stokes Yale University

Sidney Tarrow Cornell University

Continued

Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy

Daniel Ziblatt

Harvard University

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Daniel Ziblatt 2017

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First published 2017

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There is often a moment when a scholars perspective is shocked into a new awareness of the problem he is working on. That moment struck me when I found myself on a detour from the basement archives of Hatfield House, a grand Jacobean-era home in Hertfordshire. I wandered down a long hallway with marble floors and high ceilings, the walls lined with oversized oil portraits depicting four centuries of ancestors. These were the Cecils, who had helped rule England since at least the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. There, standing amid the trappings of immense social power, I asked myself: How did the historical owners of this home and others like them, who had so much to lose and so much power at their disposal, ever come to terms with political democracy without fatally preventing its birth in the first place?

This question has absorbed me ever since. I became convinced that if I could answer it if I could understand how and why powerful old-regime elites hand over political power with so much at stake then I could begin to unscramble a great historical puzzle that bears far-reaching implications: how European societies themselves democratized over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have sifted through a century of archival and quantitative historical evidence in two countries, Germany and Britain, and analyzed the histories of a wide range of other European countries. Along the way, I have discovered the narrative of one of the most critical political phenomena in the contemporary world: how political institutions of accountability and representation are created and what makes them endure even through periods of uncertainty and crisis.