Authoritarian Resilience in Northern Europe

Chapter 6 adopts a cross-national perspective to reassess the overall strength of the first wave of democratization outside of Britain and France. It argues that four states that scholars have long considered examples of vanguard democracies or “settled cases of democracy” in northern Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) do not really fit this description. Belgium and the Netherlands were clearly competitive oligarchies on the eve of WWI. Denmark was indeed one of the most democratic states in Europe by WWI, but its path there had been marked by periods of militarism and rollbacks of suffrage. Sweden was not a democracy by any measure until after WWI. In each of these cases, elites ran clean elections that, because of counter-majoritarian institutions and suffrage restrictions, fell significantly short (outside of Denmark from 1901 to 1914) from the principle of one man, one vote.