Inspired by Seymour Martin Lipset’s seminal 1959 study on the “social requisites” of democracy (“Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53[1]: 69-105), the past sixty years have seen an ever-expanding list of “determinants of democratization” (e.g., Jan Teorell, Determinants of Democratization: Explaining Regime Change in the World, 1972–2006, 2010.). While these determinants are far from settled, the literature does provide evidence of several consistent predictors of democratization and democratic survival. For example, imagine you are interested in testing the effect of a new variable on democratic survival. What other factors should you control for in your models to avoid Reviewer #2’s harsh criticisms about omitted variable bias? Several variables immediately come to mind—economic development, economic growth, ethnic fractionalization, inequality, state capacity, culture, religion, and neighborhood effects. The debate over the importance of these factors continues to fill the pages of political science journals; however, each has accumulated sufficient empirical support to warrant their inclusion as control variables in most studies of democratization and democratic survival. Indeed, these variables broadly define our perceptions about which countries are most likely to become stable democracies.

Yet many countries have achieved comparatively high levels of democracy for long periods without favorable structural conditions. What explains the emergence and survival of democracy in hard places? In other words, why do we sometimes find stable democracies despite unfavorable structural conditions? In Democracy in Hard Places, editors Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud have assembled a team of scholarly experts to answer this question. By focusing on “off-the-line” cases, this volume provides novel insights to help us better understand why democracy emerges in unlikely places and how it endures. This is particularly important because democratic institutions and practices spread to nearly all corners of the globe during the third wave of democratization. Evidence suggests that this wave has now receded, giving rise to a third wave of autocratization (Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg… “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New About It?” Democratization 26[7]: 1095-113, 2019). Growing interest focuses on explaining democratic resilience, particularly in places where the literature suggests democracy has low odds of survival.

In Chapter 1, Masoud and Mainwaring provide a thorough overview of the book, its goals, and its central argument. Using a large-N analysis, the volume’s coeditors illustrate that the standard variables associated with democratic survival are “nonetheless collectively unable to account for the durability of the many democracies around the world” (p. 18). The findings presented in this volume are particularly compelling because the contributors have carefully selected nine cases where democracy emerged under unfavorable conditions and endured for at least a dozen years (the average duration for third-wave democracies): India, Indonesia, Benin, South Africa, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Timor-Leste, and Argentina. Masoud and Mainwaring do a phenomenal job explaining in detail the rationale for selecting each of these cases by drawing on comparative data to support their claims that these are indeed “hard places”.

Throughout the volume, historical legacies and the power of preferences emerge as important explanations for democracy in hard places. In India (Chapter 2), Varshney argues that elite values at the time of independence subsequently shaped elite interests, allowing the world’s largest democracy to sustain itself. Similarly, comparing Benin and South Africa (Chapter 4), Reidl shows that historical conditions produced a set of elites who preferred to avoid redistribution, making them more interested in negotiated compromise and inclusive power-sharing agreements than hegemonic control. Meanwhile, Slater (Chapter 3) finds that the development of robust institutions and a preference for egalitarian nationalism during the authoritarian period have facilitated stable democracy in Indonesia. Likewise, Way (Chapter 5) argues that weak but persistent ruling parties from the communist period combined with robust media institutions enabled democratic “moments” in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine that have nonetheless experienced contradictory effects from Russian influence. In Timor-Leste, Bermeo (Chapter 6) concludes that violent conflicts weakened authoritarian actors, created an inclusive nationalism, facilitated a competitive party landscape, and professionalized the military, all of which have helped democracy endure. Finally, Mainwaring and Simison (Chapter 7) find that the harrowing failures of Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976–1983 led to a decline in extremist parties and encouraged actors to mobilize for democracy, which explains Argentina’s robust democratic institutions despite its long history of military rule.

Taking these two factors together—history and preferences—Mainwaring concludes the volume by providing a norms-based theory to explain why democracies survive in hard places (Chapter 8). In the cases with the strongest track records of democracy—Argentina, India, South Africa, and Timor-Leste—the failures and abuses of the previous authoritarian regimes encouraged actors to embrace democratic norms. This “repudiation of the past” did not occur in Benin, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, where we see more fluctuation in democratic quality over time. Drawing on evidence from the Varieties of Party (V-Party) dataset, Mainwaring provides empirical support for this argument, showing that in the cases with higher democratic resilience, parties exhibit lower illiberalism scores. This does not mean that democracy is “easy” in cases where actors have embraced democratic norms. For example, Varshney (Chapter 2) shows that India’s democracy is primarily electoral, with severe deficits in liberal components. India’s democratic quality also tends to deteriorate during periods of Hindu nationalist rule when elites in power are more illiberal in their orientation. Slater (Chapter 3) also warns that illiberalism poses the greatest threat to democracies “because it is the easiest for a single irresponsible elected politician to bring about” (p. 74).

This raises important conceptual questions about democracy and liberalism. Democracy remains a contested concept, despite the abundance of attention it receives. Scholars disagree about what role attributes of liberalism should play in our definitions of democracy (see Varshney, Chapter 2, for example). The rising prominence of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, combined with the recent wave of scholarship on democratic backsliding, has reinvigorated these debates. Despite the importance of these concepts for core arguments in the text, Democracy in Hard Places does not attempt to provide conceptual clarity on the relationship between democracy and liberalism (e.g., Varshney in Chapter 2, Slater in Chapter 3, and Mainwaring in Chapter 8). As a result, the volume exhibits a certain degree of ambiguity about what democracy means and how we should measure it. While the contributors have commendably made efforts to speak to one another across chapters, the use of multiple measures of democracy (V-Dem, Polity, Freedom House) without addressing their conceptual implications muddles the findings somewhat. Of course, achieving conceptual and operational consistency is a common challenge for edited volumes.

Overall, Democracy in Hard Places is a welcome addition to the literature and expands our knowledge about the emergence and survival of democracy. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, explanations of democracy based solely on structural conditions are woefully incomplete. While structural conditions may provide a more or less fertile ground for democratization, accounting for history and how this shapes actors’ normative preferences allows us to understand better why democracy takes root.