The Resilience of the Old Regime

In The Resilience of the Old Regime, David Art reevaluates the so-called first wave of democratization in Western Europe through the lens of authoritarian resilience. He argues that non-democrats succeeded to a very large degree in managing, diverting, disrupting, and repressing democratic movements until the end of the First World War. This was true both in states political scientists have long considered either full democracies or democratic vanguards (such as the UK and Sweden), as well as in others (such as Germany and Italy) that appeared to be democratizing. He challenges both the Whiggish view that democracy in the West moved progressively forward, and the influential theory that threats of revolution explain democratization. Drawing on extensive historical sources and data, Art recasts European political development from 1832–1919 as a period in which competitive oligarchies and competitive authoritarian regimes predominated.