Dialogues Across Time: Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Democratization

Abstract

This review article leverages Isabela Mares’ Protecting the Ballot: How First-Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption as a jumping off point to consider how to construct a dialogue between scholars of contemporary electoral malfeasance and historical political economists. It makes two main points. First, because both scholars of history and of the contemporary world are usually engaged in mixed-method case study research, both grapple with issues of case generalizability and external validity. This produces a naturally shared research agenda, although one that has largely gone unrecognized. Generalizability would be improved if both groups mapped their cases onto larger distributions of the phenomenon of interest. Second, the very substantial differences between party systems of first-wave and recent democratizers suggest that political elites will support reforms aimed at improving election integrity differently across the two periods. Contemporary electoral competition is unlikely to naturally give rise to the emergence of programmatic politics, instead locking parties into clientelism and various types of election malfeasance. I discuss what might be required for politicians today to support reforms aimed at curbing election malfeasance, and when the shift to programmatic politics becomes in the political interests of elected officials.