The First Wave That Wasn't

This paper uses the historical lens of democracy’s “first wave” in Western Europe to reexamine two enduring questions in comparative politics. The first is how one should understand (and/or code) political regimes that are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic, and the second is the power of socioeconomic variables to tell a compelling story about political change. Linking these two issues together, I ask specifically: to what extent does the introduction of hybrid political regimes force us to rethink socioeconomic explanations for regime change in Europe before WWI? I argue that the concept of hybrid regimes (and particularly the concept of a “competitive authoritarian regime”) travels relatively well, though not without some difficulty, to the critical phase of European political development between 1848 and 1918. I use the illustrative examples of the French Second Empire and “Liberal” Italy under Giolitti to demonstrate that what may look like new forms of hybrid political regimes have important historical precursors. This is important for our theories of democratization in two major ways. First, when one makes finer grained distinctions among first-wave regimes it becomes clear that most of Western Europe was still authoritarian to a significant degree by the eve of 1914. This suggests that it we might want to rethink the role of international war as a major factor in the “first wave” of democratization.