The Three Worlds of First Wave Democratization

The paper compares the three scenarios of first wave democratization: Western Europe, the United States, and Latin American countries that became independent early in the 19th century. Prior studies of democratization have neglected this third scenario, and therefore its propositions are derived from an incomplete set of cases. This has led, for example, to overemphasize the importance of religion (Protestant=democratic; Catholic=authoritarian) in determining democratization. Catholic Latin American first wave democratizers saw no incompatibility between liberal-democratic republicanism and Catholicism, unlike their Latin European counterparts. The literature also over-emphasizes the modalities of suffrage expansion in determining democratization outcomes. The Latin American cases had, like the United States, broad suffrage rights early on (and earlier enfranchisement of Afro-descendants except for Brazil), but what they show is that the way elections were conducted was more important than the number of participants in generating successful democratization. This suggests that democratizing European monarchies (like England and Sweden) succeeded not because they expanded the number of participants in elections more slowly, but rather because they created more solid electoral procedures for vote reception and vote counting from the very beginning. The contrast between Europe and Latin America also indicates that this sort of electoral institutional building is easier to accomplish when elections do not, in the end, have an effect on who will become the head of state. The paper builds its propositions on successful and unsuccessful cases (as defined in it) in Europe (England vs. Spain, etc.) and Latin America (Chile vs. Peru or Mexico, etc.).