Conclusions

Several observers have recently invoked interwar political developments to make the case that even established democracies are fragile. The main takeaway point from our analyses is pretty much the opposite, namely, that democracies have proven remarkably resilient if they have had time to become rooted and/or have strong associational landscapes. Crises—even as devastating as the Great Depression and the appeal of totalitarian movements—had little bite under such circumstances. It was only in new democracies with weak parties and civil societies that the economic, political, and social dislocations of the 1920s and 1930s spelled the end of democracy. On this basis, recent warnings about the fragility of contemporary democracies in Western Europe and North America seem exaggerated. At least, they cannot be sustained by interwar evidence.

Denmark and the United Kingdom

Denmark and the United Kingdom are analyzed in-depth as examples of clear positive cases, i.e. surviving democracies with substantial democratic legacies and vibrant associational landscapes. The two case studies show how Denmark and the UK had developed consolidated democracies on the eve of the interwar era. These democracies were bolstered by broad acceptance of democratic procedures among elites and masses as well as strong parties interlaced with lively civil societies. The result of this combination was political regimes, which were immune to the political radicalization of the day. Antidemocratic movements and parties found preciously little support, the established parties remained loyal to democracy, and they came together to strike political agreements in order to counter economic crisis and anti-democratic mobilization in the 1930s. The evidence offered by these case studies thus provide additional support for our theoretical mechanisms.

Democratic Legacies, the Associational Landscape, and Democratic Survival

A simple cross-tabulation of experience with minimalist democracy before 1918 and interwar democratic breakdown reveals a manifest empirical pattern: All the old democracies of north-western Europe and the former British settler colonies survived the interwar crises. Moreover, in Latin America the countries with democratic legacies experienced longer spells of interwar democracy. A subsequent statistical analysis demonstrates that the strength of the associational landscape is robustly associated with interwar patterns of democratic breakdown even when we control for a number of structural and institutional factors. Finally, both democratic legacies and the vibrancy of associational landscapes were strongly associated with deeper background conditions. These findings indicate that deeper structures shaped the baseline risk of interwar democratic breakdown, but also that it was the more proximate factors of democratic experience and vibrant associational landscapes, which translated structural conditions into either democratic resilience or fragility.

Introduction

Against the backdrop of the economic crisis that began in 2008 and the rise of populist parties, a new body of research has used interwar political developments to warn that even long-established Western democracies are fragile. We challenge this interwar analogy based on the fact that a relatively large number of interwar democracies were able to survive the recurrent crises of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this book is to understand the striking resilience of these democracies, and how they differed from the many democracies that broke down in the same period. Previous theoretical accounts, which can be divided into structuralist, elitist, associational, and performance-based perspectives, do not adequately explain this variation. We advance an explanation that nests an associational perspective in a structuralist perspective. The model centres on democratic legacies and strong associational landscapes (i.e. vibrant civil societies and party institutionalization). These factors are rooted in a set of structural conditions associated with socio-economic development and state- and nation-building processes. Our empirical strategy consists of a combination of systematic comparisons of all interwar democratic spells and in-depth case-studies.

An Age of Crisis

To understand what interwar democracies were up against, we need to recognize that a number of mutually linked crises affected social and political life in the 1920s and 1930s. Besides the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933, these interwar crises included the aborted attempt at communist world revolution in 1917–20, the legacies of World War I in general and the Versailles and Trianon Treaties in particular, the post-war economic slump of the early 1920s, the advent of fascist and Nazi ideologies and mass movements, and the breakdown of the liberal world order in the 1930s. All of these crises had the potential to undermine democracy.

Economic Crisis and Democratic Breakdown

Economic crisis is the explanatory variable that, among both scholars and laymen, has traditionally been emphasized as the main cause of interwar democratic breakdowns. However, there are also studies which have questioned the presence of an empirical relationship between economic crisis and democratic breakdown in the interwar period. Against this backdrop, we carry out a systematic large-N analysis of the relationship between economic crisis and democratic breakdown in the period 1918–1939. The analysis shows that the degree of economic crisis in itself was not strongly associated with the risk of democratic breakdown in this period. The emphasis on economic crisis in much of the literature seems exaggerated, though it may have contributed to democratic breakdown in some countries, including the paradigmatic case of Germany. These results lend further support to our focus on democratic legacies, associational landscapes, and the underlying clusters of structural conditions.

Uruguay and France

Uruguay and France are examples of cases situated somewhere in-between the two extremes of resilient and fragile democracies. The case study of Uruguay shows that crisis could in fact terminate interwar democracies, even if they had a pre-war legacy of electoral competition for political power. This was possible because civil society was underdeveloped vis-à-vis the parties. However, the Uruguayan case also shows how democracy was quickly reintroduced in such a situation, once the economic crisis was over. French democracy was more challenged than those of Denmark and the United Kingdom in the crisis-ridden 1930s. However, despite less institutionalized parties, especially on the right, and a somewhat less organized civil society, the regime could still rely on the broad recognition of republican ideals among key political actors. Indeed, our analysis of the French case questions the widespread notion that this was a ‘near miss’, where democracy came on the verge of breaking down in the 1930s.

Interwar Democracies and Dictatorships

A number of democracy measures cover the interwar period. However, these datasets differ remarkably with respect to which countries were democratic and when democracy broke down. These disagreements are particularly pronounced when it comes to Latin America and southern and eastern Europe. Against this backdrop, we use country-specific works of historians to identify all democratic spells between 1919 and 1939. This recoding is based on a minimalist ‘Schumpeterian’ definition of democracy. The resulting overview shows that there are two categories of interwar democracies: those where democracy survived and those where it broke down. Moreover, our coding identifies a large number of short democratic spells—discontinued by, or interspersed with, undemocratic spells—that have been ignored by most extant datasets. Finally, there are some noteworthy cross-temporal trends in the data, including a spike of democratic breakdowns in the early 1930s.

Pillars of Democratic Stability

On the eve of the interwar period, a set of interrelated structural factors (i.e. socio-economic development and state- and nation-building processes) had created a distinction between resilient democracies installed before the end of World War I and fragile new democracies. Our theoretical framework proposes that these deep structural conditions were linked to interwar democratic survival via a set of more proximate factors, namely, democratic legacies and a strong associational landscape (i.e. vibrant civil societies and institutionalized parties). These factors increased the likelihood that political actors would comply with the democratic rules of the game via a number of mechanisms, such as democratic learning, mutual trust among key political actors, and the capacity to channel the ideas and frustrations of opposing societal groups via the established political institutions. Anti-democratic forces had only little support and room to manoeuvre in cases with firm democratic legacies and associational landscapes. On the contrary, where these factors were absent, democracies broke down after a few years. Finally, where they were partly present, democracies went through prolonged crises only to eventually break down, often during the Great Depression of the 1930s.