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See, for example, Valerie Bunce, “Comparative Democratization: Big and Bounded Generalizations,” Comparative Political Studies 33 (2000): 703–34.
Similar qualifications appear on pages 113 and 206. In each instance, the assertion is made with no explanation or further elaboration.
See, for example, Gretchen Casper and Claudiu Tufis, “Correlation versus Interchangeability: The Limited Robustness of Empirical Findings on Democracy Using Highly Correlated Datasets,” Political Analysis 11 (2003): 196–203; David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49 (1997): 430–51; and Jonathan Krieckhaus, “The Regime Debate Revisited: A Sensitivity Analysis of Democracy's Economic Effect,” British Journal of Political Science 34 (2004): 635–55.
On the analytic utility of these characteristics in case study research, see John Gerring, Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See, for example, Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination, and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass, Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005); and Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652–2002 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002).
In making this case, MacDonald refines the thesis—advanced most prominently in Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)—that racial hierarchies are crystallized in the wake of explosive episodes of dissension between dominant-race factions as a means for reconciliation.
Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), ix. For a more general account of the U.S.'s fluctuating suffrage policy, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
This seems to be Acemoglu and Robinson's stand; while they do not discuss the American case at any length, they make note of its “attain[ment of] universal male suffrage more than a century before many Latin American countries” and classify it, along with Britain and Sweden, as exemplars of countries where “democracy persist[ed] and consolidat[ed]” (xii). Within comparative democratization scholarship, the “early democratizer” view is especially prevalent in large-n studies that use indices that code the United States as a democracy since the early nineteenth century. See, example, Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
See, for example, Francisco E. González and Desmond King, “The State and Democratization: The United States in Comparative Perspective,” British Journal of Political Science 34 (2004): 193–210; Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Göran Therborn, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (1977): 3–41.
The former view is associated especially with Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955) and, more recently, Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1997). The latter is the thesis of Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Understandings of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1944).
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I thank an anonymous reviewer for Polity, Michael Goodhart, and Abhishek Chatterjee for their suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.
On the colonial origins of racial stratification in both countries, see George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
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Gelbman, S. Race, Inequality, and Liberal Democracy. Polity 39, 259–275 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300085
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300085