Why the poor should accept democratization as credible when even the model allows the rich to stage coups if they are dissatisfied by the later tax rate is not clear. The introduction of recessions, which vary in both intensity and frequency, substantially complicates making predictions about the effects of inequality on elite behavior. Equality makes democratization less threatening to elites, but how they react to inequality depends on the seriousness of the threat of revolution and the cost of repression. Frequent recessions, however, increase the likelihood that the elite can credibly offer redistribution without democratization because frequent recessions allow the poor to threaten revolution often, thus enforcing the bargain.
So intense recessions destabilize dictatorships leading to democratization, revolution, or repression, but frequent recessions lead paradoxically to stable authoritarianism with redistribution. In contrast to the Boix argument, Acemoglu and Robinson expect income inequality to lead to unstable regime changes, not continued authoritarianism.
The model seems to be a plausible simplification of events in much of Latin America and in a few other developing countries. It does not fit most of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia, where fear of redistributive taxation is not a plausible reason for resistance to democratization since substantial portions of productive assets were state or foreign owned for much of the late twentieth century. State elites who control a large portion of productive assets may certainly fear loss of power since it will dispossess them, but they will not suffer less dispossession because the income distribution is more equal.
Acemoglu and Robinson do not offer systematic empirical tests of their arguments so we cannot assess their fit with the real world. Models linking democratization to inequality seem highly plausible initially, but the empirical investigation of the relationship between regime type and income inequality does not offer strong support for their basic assumptions.
Nor does empirical investigation of the relationship between democracy and redistribution. If these arguments were correct, we would expect to find the remaining dictatorships in the world more unequal on average than democracies, but Bollen and Jackman find no relationship between democracy and inequality. They find a stronger relationship between inequality in democracies and democratic breakdown, which might explain any relationship that exists between democracy and equality if one does exist , but does not support the idea that equality makes democratization more likely.
The models also assume that the main reason elites fear democracy and ordinary citizens want it is that they expect it to lead to redistribution. LIndert has shown that the expected redistribution occurred in Western Europe after the first steps toward democratization were taken, but Mulligan, Sala-i-Martin, and Gil show that contemporary democracies do not on average distribute more than dictatorships. Income distribution varied greatly among late twentieth-century dictatorships.
Many, both communist and noncommunist, expropriated traditional elites and redistributed income and opportunities through land reform, much increased public education, and industrialization policies that led to the movement of large numbers of people out of agriculture and into factories. It is hard to imagine that elites in these kinds of authoritarian regimes would be motivated by a fear of greater redistribution.
They would fear loss of their own power and wealth, but not via redistributive taxation. Income equality would not reassure them. This approach to the study of democratization, which owes much to seminal articles by North and Weingast and Olson , sees rulers as maximizing their own individual revenue via taxation and citizens as sharing a desire for productivityenhancing policies and public goods, regardless of whether they are rich or poor.
In this image of politics, taxes redistribute wealth from citizens to rulers, not from rich to poor. Rulers may want revenue in order to pursue wars, to buy support in order to stay in power, or for personal consumption; their reason does not affect the logic of the argument. Rulers are motivated by their desire for revenue to offer public goods and a tax rate that does not reduce investment or effort. Consequently, they are the ones most likely to be accommodated when the ruler offers an institutionalized form of participation in return for their cooperation.
As in the Boix argument, democratization becomes more likely as capital becomes more mobile, but the reason for the relationship changes. The more mobile capital, according to Bates and Lien , the harder it is to tax without contingent consent and thus the more likely the ruler will offer representative institutions. Their model, to reiterate, includes: In democracies, the selectorate is the enfranchised population, and the winning coalition is made up of those who voted for the winning party or coalition, that is, roughly 50 percent of the selectorate.
In single-party authoritarian regimes, the winning coalition is the small group of actual rulers, and the selectorate is made up of all members of the ruling party. In military regimes, the winning coalition is the junta and the selectorate is the officer corps. They do not discuss reasons for different authoritarian institutional choices.
If enough members of the ruling coalition defect because they are dissatisfied with their share, the ruler is overthrown. Citizens outside the winning coalition benefit only from the public goods provided when the winning coalition is too large to be maintained by private goods alone. Residents and sometimes members of the selectorate may hold demonstrations or join rebellions to challenge rulers who tax them too heavily or provide insufficient public goods, but rulers in this model always respond with repression.
If revolutionary challengers win despite repression, the new rulers face the same incentives that other rulers do to narrow the winning coalition and keep resources for themselves. In other words, revolutions and popular uprisings in this model do not threaten redistribution or lead to democracy.
Instead they lead to a seizure of power by a new leader and winning coalition who maximize their own wealth at the expense of those they exclude.
One of the most useful and empirically realistic points made by Bueno de Mesquita et al. Thus democracy cannot arise as a response to popular uprising in this model. Instead, it arises when the members of the winning coalition can benefit themselves by expanding its size. Members of winning coalitions are cross-pressured when it comes to the size of coalition they prefer to be part of. Their individual share of private goods is larger when the coalition is smaller, but the ruler keeps less for himself and provides more public and total private goods when the coalition is larger.
In the model, the winning coalition has a tipping point at the size at which it prefers to increase further. Once that happens, democracy will eventually follow. This model, like those described above, portrays democratization as elite led. In the Bueno de Mesquita et al. They are not responding either to a challenge from the excluded or to the threat of capital strike.
Models that emphasize conflict between revenue-maximizing rulers and politically powerless citizens capture elements of reality in many recent transitions in developing countries. Once the changes in the international economy provoked by the debt crisis had rendered state interventionist development strategies unsustainable, many authoritarian governments were forced to begin liberalizing their economies.
In order to attract private investment to replace state investment that could not be sustained without foreign inflows, governments had to offer more predictable policies and certain public goods conducive to private investment Roberts As noted by North and Weingast , Acemoglu and Robinson , Escriba Folch , and others, policy promises made by dictators inherently lack credibility. Dictators can increase the credibility of these promises by creating institutions p.
Democratic institutions such as legislatures and multiparty electoral competition can create those constraints if the commitment to the institutional change is itself considered credible. If the institutions benefit both the ruler, by increasing revenues, and the ruled, by increasing productivity or welfare, then the institutional bargain is self-enforcing and thus credible.
These models, in other words, provide a reason for expecting institutional bargains to be more credible than offers to provide desired policies in the absence of institutional change, which the Acemoglu and Robinson model does not. These models thus suggest intuitions about why democratization and economic liberalization tended to vary together in the late twentieth century Hellman Prior to the debt crisis of the s, governments had a choice between relying primarily on state investment or private investment.
Since the s, the state investment strategy has become unworkable except possibly in countries reliant on the export of oil or other high-priced natural resources. The emphasis on the interest differences between rulers and ruled and on redistribution in favor of rulers as a central fact of dictatorship fits well with what we know about many of the dictatorships referred to as personalistic, sultanistic, or patrimonial by different authors.
These models do not accommodate the role that popular uprisings have played in many late twentieth-century democratizations, however. Moreover, most of these models are very abstract, and most tests of them have been narrowly focused or open to multiple interpretations. Some features of late twentieth-century democratization have not found their way into models, though they have been included in large-N statistical studies. The correlation between reliance on oil exports and authoritarianism, for example, has been found repeatedly.
In developing countries, oil is usually state owned or owned by foreign multinationals and taxed heavily. Whether it is state owned or not, the government draws its revenues largely from natural resource production, not from taxation on domestic wealth holders. A large mostly descriptive literature on the effects of oil on politics exists Karl ; Chaudhry ; Anderson ; Crystal Yet, I know of no model that has grappled seriously with state ownership of productive resources and its effect on the struggle over democratization. All models assume a capitalist economy with private domestic investors as important actors.
During the third wave of democratization, however, most transitions affected authoritarian regimes in which state investment was high. In many, foreign investment also played a large role, and revenue from foreign aid was more important than revenues from taxation in some. Many observers have suggested that international forces, such as the diffusion of democratic ideas and pressure from international financial institutions to democratize, have affected transitions, especially since the s.
Earlier quantitative studies found it hard to document these influences, but Gasiorowski and Gleditsch and Choun show that the proportion of democratic neighbors increases the likelihood of transitions to democracy in neighboring countries, lending some support to the diffusion argument. Jon Pevehouse shows that membership in regional international organizations in which most other members are democratic increases the likelihood of democratization. Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson, and Woller ; Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson show that war affects the survival of both political leaders and regimes.
Gleditsch and Choun show that wars increase the likelihood of transition from one authoritarian government to another, but neither Gleditsch and Choun nor Pevehouse shows strong evidence that wars in the neighborhood decrease the likelihood of democratization, as some have suggested. Marinov shows that although sanctions are effective at bringing down democratic leaders, they have little effect on the survival of dictators and therefore we can infer little effect on authoritarian regimes.
It may be that the focus on domestic causes is appropriate when explaining democratizations before the Second World War, but that international influences—both economic and political—have become more pronounced over time. Assuming that there is one explanation of democratization may be the reason that scholars continue to disagree about its causes. Different analysts have deeper knowledge about some sets of cases than others, and naturally their intuitions formalized in models fit the cases they know best better than those they know less well. The findings of large-N studies differ from each other depending on specification, time period included, and cases used, leaving very basic ideas contested.
Such varying results should be expected if single statistical models are being imposed on a set of p. Two context differences that might influence the democratization process are the historical period in which it takes place and the type of regime that democracy replaces.
Early democratizations took place in capitalist economies in which the rich usually held political power. Later democratizations have also occurred in countries with high levels of state ownership of productive assets, especially natural resources. State ownership makes possible both the accumulation of wealth by political leaders and also the distribution of benefits to supporters, and in some cases citizens, without the need for high taxation of private wealth holders. Rulers who have acquired wealth through access to state resources, in contrast to those who hold political power because they own private wealth, have to fear losing most of their assets if they are deposed, regardless of the income distribution or other factors that might affect future taxation.
Most transitions before the Second World War were transitions from some form of oligarchic government; many were gradual transitions from very limited suffrage to nearly universal. Post-Second World War democratizations have occurred in several quite different ways, but nearly all have involved a transition to immediate universal suffrage democracy.
These have included the transition from colonial rule to universal suffrage democracy at independence; transitions from universal suffrage authoritarianism to universal suffrage democracy; and redemocratizations in which most of the parties and political institutions of a prior democracy are reinstated at the conclusion of an authoritarian interlude. Gradual transitions from limited to almost universal suffrage have been rare during the last fifty years cf. If elite opposition to democracy is motivated by fear of redistributive taxation, gradual increases in suffrage should be easier than rapid ones because the median voter after a limited enfranchisement would be richer and thus demand less redistribution.
Such institutional choices are often made during bargaining over the conditions of transition. We might expect authoritarian rulers concerned about redistributive taxation to negotiate incremental enfranchisement, but dictators with different fears might not consider universal suffrage threatening. Various international influences on democratization have arguably had greater effects since the Second World War and perhaps greater still since the s. Nearly all developing countries initiated development strategies that increased state investment, ownership, and regulation of their economies.
The ability to use state resources to expropriate traditional and foreign wealth holders and create new elites beholden to the government may have reduced pressures for democratization during the decades when this strategy remained viable. A second change in the international economy, beginning around with the debt crisis, brought that period to an end.
When foreign lending was no longer available to cover the trade and budget deficits characteristic of the state interventionist development strategy, developing country governments faced intense pressure to adopt policies conducive to attracting investment. Attracting investments depends on credible policy commitments and secure property rights. If, as various analysts have argued, dictators can use legislatures and other quasi-democratic institutions to make their policy commitments credible, the economic strategy changes brought about by the debt crisis of the s should have created strong incentives toward some degree of democratization.
In the post period, we see an increase in both democratizations and also the adoption of quasi-democratic institutions by authoritarian regimes Levitsky and Way The end of the Cold War has also changed the process of democratization. Before , authoritarian regimes were supported with extensive aid and other help from both superpowers.
Since , Levitsky and Way show that those authoritarian regimes with the closest linkages to the USA and Western Europe are the most likely to have democratic-looking institutions such as multiparty elections in which some real competition is allowed. Such regimes may be easier to dislodge since opposition is usually less risky and costly in them.
The reduction in foreign support for dictatorships since the end of the Cold War also contributed to the increase in democratizations in the late twentieth century. Thus, for both domestic and international reasons, we might think that a model of the early process of democratization would be different from a model of the later process. The finding by Boix and Stokes that economic development and income distribution have much stronger effects on the likelihood of democratization before than after lends support to the idea that modeling separate processes for the two time periods would be fruitful.
These cross-time differences in the causes of democratization may be caused in part by differences in the kinds of regimes from which democracies emerge. Pre-Second World War democratizations, which occurred primarily in Europe and Latin America, generally replaced governments controlled by the rich, whether these were p. In most of these non-democratic regimes, legislatures existed, elite parties or proto-parties competed for office, and struggles by legislatures to limit the power of monarchs or executives had played an important role in determining the shape of political institutions.
Democratization tended to occur through the extension of suffrage to new groups without other large institutional changes. More citizens voted, sometimes new parties formed to attract the votes of the newly enfranchised, and elections became fairer, but parliamentary systems in Europe and separation of powers systems in Latin America accommodated the inclusion of new voters and parties. We cannot make the same kinds of generalizations about late twentieth-century transitions. The authoritarian regimes from which late twentieth-century democratizations emerged differed from the stylized portrait in the paragraph above.
Few of their rulers were born to wealthy families. Most came to prominence via either a military career or a rise to leadership in a revolutionary or nationalist party. Some contemporary authoritarian regimes have repressed all political activity, but many have held regular elections with universal suffrage. Competition for control of government has been limited by restrictions on opposition parties or manipulation of voters and playing field, not restrictions on suffrage.
Some contemporary authoritarian regimes have protected the interests of the rich, but others have redistributed land, nationalized natural resources, and expropriated other wealth. In the former situation, regime supporters fear the loss of power entailed by more competitive politics, not redistribution. Because of these differences, late twentieth- and twenty-first-century democratizations may not only be different from earlier ones but also different from each other. If wealthy private sector elites rule countries, then they may indeed resist democratization when they expect more redistributive taxation, and their fears may be allayed by a relatively equal income distribution or capital mobility Boix Incremental suffrage extensions may be especially easy for them to endure.
If, however, ruling elites came to power either through election or revolution as the leaders of movements determined to overthrow traditional elites, then regardless of whether they actually carried out their promises or have simply stolen in their turn, their fears of being deposed seem unlikely to be allayed by factors that reduce future taxation. Instead, their fears might be allayed by enforceable bargains not to prosecute them for corruption and human rights abuses i. Unsurprisingly, they find that countries that are more democratic at time one are likely to be even more democratic at time two.
We cannot tell, however, whether the analysis means that less repressive forms of authoritarianism are less stable or that democratization is often incremental, and dictatorships that have liberalized somewhat in one year often continue on that path in subsequent years.
A more fruitful approach to classification would begin by thinking about how the causes of democratization seem to vary from one context to another. Then classification could be based on expectations about how those differences would be likely to unfold. They expect the usual characteristics of these different kinds of authoritarian regime to have systematic effects on different aspects of democratic consolidation.
These arguments have not been tested, but they do suggest plausible links between characteristics of particular kinds of authoritarianism and expected outcomes. If post-Second World War authoritarian regimes with different kinds of leadership tend to have different institutional structures and different relationships with supporters and ordinary citizens, then we would expect them to break down differently because different institutions privilege and disadvantage different groups.
These regime types emerge from struggles among elite contenders with different backgrounds, support bases, and resources after seizures of power. They do not derive in an obvious way from underlying social or economic structures, and all have been compatible with a wide range of economic ideologies. All types were common in the late twentieth century, so understanding something about how they break down might help to explain why post democratizations have been different from those that came before.
In the real world, there are of course lots of borderline cases, but we can use the simple types to develop theories and empirical expectations. On average, governments ruled by the professionalized military are more fragile than other kinds of authoritarianism Gasiorowrski ; Geddes Since military rulers usually decide to return to the barracks rather than being forced out, transitions from military rule tend to be negotiated and orderly.
Negotiation is more likely to lead to democracy than is violent overthrow, and the successors to professionalized military regimes are nearly always elected in competitive elections. Thus the fall of a military regime usually results in a democracy, though it may not last. In contrast to the military, several scholars have noted the robustness of hegemonic party regimes. Geddes shows that regimes ruled by dominant parties last substantially longer than other non-monarchic forms of authoritarianism.
When dominant or single-party regimes face severe challenges, they try to hang on by changing institutions to allow some participation by moderate opponents—thus isolating and rendering less threatening more extreme opponents Lust-Okar ; Magaloni When they see the writing on the wall, they put great effort into negotiating electoral institutions that will benefit them when they become exauthoritarians competing in fair elections Geddes ; Magaloni If members of a dominant party regime cannot maintain their monopoly on power, they prefer to be replaced by a democracy since they have a good chance of being able to continue their political careers as democratic politicians.
Replacement by an opposing authoritarian regime is likely to exclude them from the political game at best. Consequently dominant party governments negotiate their extrications through elections. The elections that end the rule of hegemonic parties most often initiate a democracy, p. This happens because the new ruling party can sometimes make use of institutions originally devised to help the previous ruling party. Regimes in which power has been personalized under one individual, however, are more likely to be replaced by a new dictatorship than by a democracy Hadenius and Teorell Personalistic dictators are less willing to negotiate leaving office because they face a greater likelihood of assassination, prosecution, confiscation, or exile than do the leaders of other kinds of authoritarianism.
Transitions from personalist dictatorship are seldom initiated by regime insiders; instead, popular opposition, strikes, and demonstrations often force dictators to consider allowing multiparty elections Bratton and van de Walle Personalistic dictators are more likely to be overthrown in revolutions, civil wars, popular uprisings, or invasions Skocpol and Goodwin ; Geddes Linz and Chehabi have described the difficulties of democratization following what they call sultanistic regimes.
Several observers have suggested that transitions from personalist rule are more affected by international factors, such as pressures from international financial institutions and invasion by neighboring or ex-colonial countries, than are other kinds of authoritarianism.
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International financial institutions pressured a number of African dictators to agree to multiparty elections Bratton and van de Walle For these reasons, the process of transition from personalized dictatorship should not be modeled as an elite-led bargain. Transitions from personalized dictatorship are less likely to result in democracy, but sometimes they do. A model that focused on such transitions would help us to understand the special circumstances that lead to this outcome. Neeman and Wantchekon have proposed that democracy occurs when neither of two contending forces can defeat the other.
They address situations in which opposition to dictatorship has developed into civil war, but the model might be generalizable to non-violent forms of political conflict. Models that explain transitions to democracy from personalized dictatorship should be on the democratization research agenda, as should models that include foreign pressures.
There may be other fruitful ways of disaggregating the democratization process. My point in this section has not been to argue that there is one true way to break the process into theorizable parts, but rather that we have considerable evidence that not all democratizations occur in the same way and that these differences are systematic not random. If the current state of empirical knowledge allows us to see that there are theoretically important differences in democratization processes depending on when they happened, what kinds of dictatorship were being replaced, or something else, we should not expect a single model to capture all the processes well.
Nor should we combine all democratizations in the same statistical tests without making an effort to specify cross-time or other theoretically relevant differences. Recent empirical research on democratization has confirmed the relationship between economic development and democracy. Most research also agrees that countries with oil and mostly Muslim populations are less likely to be democratic, though these conclusions have been challenged by some analysts.
It has also confirmed that countries with highly educated populations are more likely to be democratic. The explanations for these correlations remain contested. Boix and Stokes , however, show that economic development had a substantial impact on democratization before the Second World War and continues to have a smaller effect. Middle East scholars have described a process through which oil rents are translated into popular acquiescence to authoritarianism, but Herb argues that oil wealth leads to a misspecification of statistical tests of the effect of economic development on democratization in oil-rich countries, not to a special kind of rentier authoritarianism.
Most observers have attributed the apparent affinity between Islam and authoritarianism to traditional values widely held by individual Muslims, but Fish claims that the treatment of women in Muslim societies hinders democratization. These empirical regularities with contested interpretations bring two tasks to the forefront of the research agenda in the study of democratization: Some progress is being made on both fronts. Fish tests his argument about the treatment of women. Herb attempts to disaggregate the effects of rentierism from the effect of economic development as a way of testing the rentier state argument.
Boix tests his argument that income equality and capital mobility increase the likelihood of democratization. None of these tests is fully persuasive, but they are very useful steps in the direction of identifying causal mechanisms. Boix , Acemoglu and Robinson , , Zak and Feng , North and Weingast , Weingast , Bates and Lien , Neeman and Wantchekon , and others have proposed formal models of democratization that offer a number of useful insights.
Most of these models have been proposed as universal explanations of democratization, but when examined carefully, most turn out to be useful simplifications of democratization or elements of it in one specific context. I suggest that we take seriously our own research showing systematic differences in the process of democratization across time and type of authoritarianism. Other differences in the process may also be theoretically important. We might make progress faster, both empirically and theoretically, if we identified clear domains for our arguments about the causes of democratization rather than assuming that just because we cover many processes of democratization with one word we should also uncritically model it as one process regardless of what we know about historical and other differences.
A theory of political transitions. American Economic Review , Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. The state in the Middle East and North Africa. Comparative Politics , Journal of Political Economy , Homer gets a tax cut: Perspectives on Politics , 3: A note on taxation, development, and representative government. Politics and Society , World Politics , Economic and non-economic determinants of political democracy in the s. Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective.
The political economy of recent Mexico—U. Bueno de Mesquita, B. War and the survival of political leaders: American Political Science Review , War and the fate of regimes: American Political Science Re v iew , 86 3: The Logic of Political Survival. Scott argues that governments may find it difficult to claim a sovereignty over a population when that population is in motion.
These responses can include planting crops that are more difficult for states to count, or tending livestock that are more mobile. In fact, the entire political arrangement of a state is a result of individuals adapting to the environment, and making a choice as to whether or not to stay in a territory. A sustainable democracy has to involve far more than fair and open elections. It rests on a solid foundation of economic and political freedom that, for Western nations, had to be pried from governments over centuries.
It goes back at least to when King John accepted limits on his powers and conceded certain rights in the Magna Carta. Then, as now, governments will be motivated to support rights and freedoms only when it directly impacts the government's ability to maintain and exercise political power. It does not arise with idealistic notions of democracy and freedom, implied fiscal contracts with citizens, exhortations from donor states or pronouncements from international agencies.
Fukyama was essentially correct with his assertion regarding the end of history — that Western liberal democracy represents the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution. It represents a mechanism whereby our free market system efficiently allocates resources in our economy while co-existing in a symbiotic relationship with our democratic system of government.
Our governments are incentivized to protect the economy while the foundations for that economy create the conditions for democracy. According to a study by political scientist Daniel Treisman, influential theories of democratization posit that autocrats "deliberately choose to share or surrender power. They do so to prevent revolution, motivate citizens to fight wars, incentivize governments to provide public goods , outbid elite rivals, or limit factional violence.
Examining the history of all democratizations since , I show that such deliberate choice arguments may help explain up to one third of cases. In about two thirds, democratization occurred not because incumbent elites chose it but because, in trying to prevent it, they made mistakes that weakened their hold on power. These mistakes reflect well-known cognitive biases such as overconfidence and the illusion of control.
Although democratization is most often thought of in the context of national or regional politics, the term can also be applied to:. The concept of democratization can also be applied in corporations where the traditional power structure was top-down direction and the boss-knows-best even a " Pointy-Haired Boss " ; This is quite different from consultation, empowerment of lower levels and a diffusion of decision making power throughout the firm, as advocated by workplace democracy movements.
The loose anarchistic structure of the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet itself have inspired some groups to call for more democratization of how domain names are held, upheld, and lost. They note that the Domain Name System under ICANN is the least democratic and most centralized part of the Internet, using a simple model of first-come-first-served to the names of things. Ralph Nader called this "corporatization of the dictionary. The democratization of knowledge is the spread of knowledge among common people, in contrast to knowledge being controlled by elite groups.
The trend that products from well-known designers are becoming cheaper and more available to masses of consumers. Also, the trend of companies sourcing design decisions from end users. The dictionary definition of democratization at Wiktionary. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Globalization portal Politics portal. Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, Sorting Out the Causal Connections".
American Journal of Political Science. Pushing beyond the borders of logic to explain a strong correlation? British Journal of Political Science. University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Western-educated Leaders and Regime Transitions". Journal of Conflict Resolution. Leadership Transitions in and out of Dictatorships". Democracy in Latin America. American Political Science Review. Does Urbanization Promote Democratic Change?
Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. Origins, Features and Significance. International Organizations and Democratization". Capital and suffrage cover title ". Hidden Functions of the War on Terror. The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation. Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture. Magna Carta in the 17th century". Retrieved ; "Magna Carta: Magna Carta in the 17th Century".
The Society of Antiquaries of London. Retrieved 7 April Retrieved 22 December Retrieved 27 November The key landmark is the Bill of Rights , which established the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown The Bill of Rights then settled the primacy of Parliament over the monarch's prerogatives, providing for the regular meeting of Parliament, free elections to the Commons, free speech in parliamentary debates, and some basic human rights, most famously freedom from 'cruel or unusual punishment'. Archived from the original on 24 October Retrieved 30 October The earliest, and perhaps greatest, victory for liberalism was achieved in England.
The rising commercial class that had supported the Tudor monarchy in the 16th century led the revolutionary battle in the 17th, and succeeded in establishing the supremacy of Parliament and, eventually, of the House of Commons. What emerged as the distinctive feature of modern constitutionalism was not the insistence on the idea that the king is subject to law although this concept is an essential attribute of all constitutionalism.
This notion was already well established in the Middle Ages. What was distinctive was the establishment of effective means of political control whereby the rule of law might be enforced. Modern constitutionalism was born with the political requirement that representative government depended upon the consent of citizen subjects However, as can be seen through provisions in the Bill of Rights, the English Revolution was fought not just to protect the rights of property in the narrow sense but to establish those liberties which liberals believed essential to human dignity and moral worth.
The "rights of man" enumerated in the English Bill of Rights gradually were proclaimed beyond the boundaries of England, notably in the American Declaration of Independence of and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in The Charters of Freedom.
Archived from the original on July 6, Retrieved April 21, Archived from the original PDF on Two Logics of Governmental Reform December 23,