The process of creating, extending, and sustaining democracy has intrigued observers since the end of the eighteenth century, when democratic revolutions and movements broke out in America, France, and other parts of Europe. The failure of many of these early democratic revolutions has provoked further interest in the specific and the general reasons for democracy's few initial successes and many failures. The American democratic experiment became the subject of intense scrutiny to determine whether it was the harbinger or the exception to the European political future. For this reason Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer and politician who visited the United States in the 1830s, turned his attention from American prisons to consider why and to what extent American democracy had succeeded. In Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Tocqueville took a surprisingly modern, empirical approach to explaining American democratization, paying particular attention to the underlying civic culture of the United States. Since Tocqueville's time, American democratization has been at the center of the debate as to whether popularly elected governments were replicable from one culture to another.
Later-nineteenth-century observers took a more detached and theoretical approach to the idea of democracy and democratization. The utilitarians, particularly the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, produced what Joseph Schumpeter later called the "classical doctrine of democracy": this was primarily concerned with describing the sources of authority and the purpose of government in democratic regimes. The utilitarians saw democracy's source of authority in popular consent, and the purpose of democratic government was the collective good. Although popular consent and the common good seemed eminently rational and achievable goals before World War I, these goals seemed far more naïve and utopian to the social scientists who wrote about democracy at the onset of World War II, when the West was beset by the perils of totalitarianism.
Writing in 1942, Schumpeter rejected the classical doctrine of democracy as too reliant on the object of the collective good based on utilitarian reason. Schumpeter and other postwar social scientists urged a focus on the procedures common to democracies instead. This they judged to be a more "objective" approach to understanding democracy and democratization. During the cold war, amid the heated competition between the Soviet-style "people's democracies" and those of the West, the procedural school developed a set of common characteristics that they said defined functioning as opposed to sham democracy.
Although Robert A. Dahl has attempted to combine proceduralism with an informed, normative description of democracy, most social scientists concerned with democratization have followed the procedural approach of Samuel P. Huntington. According to Huntington, a democracy is a state in which the "most powerful collective decision makers" are chosen in "honest and periodic elections." Moreover, in a democracy, "virtually" the entire adult population is eligible to participate.
Although accused by his critics of being simplistic, Huntington has maintained that his definition's simplicity is essential to understand democracy and democratization on a global scale. The proceduralists argue that what is most important is often cast in much wider terms, encompassing such values as liberty and freedom but rejecting particularistic notions like a "civic culture" that determines the extent of democracy in a particular place.
Since the end of the cold war, some proceduralists have been accused of determinism in arguing that certain conditions inevitably bring about the emergence of democratic regimes. Francis Fukuyama has come in for some of this criticism, arguing for the global triumph of liberal democracy, which according to his definition must have electoral competition, attendance to market forces, and "judicial rights."
Huntington has argued that democratization has occurred in three historic waves: the First Wave, from 1828 to 1926, occurred after the extension of American suffrage and continued until after World War I, when it encompassed all of Western Europe, North America, and Australasia. The second wave of democratization occurred in the midst and the aftermath of World War II, from 1942 to 1962. It restored democracy to Western Europe and planted democratic regimes in the former European colonies of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. The Third Wave, from 1991 to the present, followed the end of the cold war, and included the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, some of the states within the former Soviet Union, and most of the countries in Latin America. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, all the states in Europe with the exception of Ukraine and Belarus claimed to be democratically elected regimes. Similarly in Latin America, outside of the Caribbean, all of the states claimed to be democratic, to one degree or another.
Oriented toward empirical evidence rather than theory building, American historians have taken a more nuanced approach than the proceduralists in considering democratization in the United States. Historians have typically focused on two related aspects of democratization: political participation, as measured by voter turnout, and political power, as measured by sociological patterns in officeholding and community leadership.
In the mid-twentieth century, it was standard to date the beginnings of democratization to 1828, with the election of Andrew Jackson and the dawn of the so-called Age of the Common Man. Over the next half-century, historians greatly complicated this simplistic narrative. In the 1960s William Nisbet Chambers and David Hackett Fischer argued that democratization in voting actually began with the competition of the first party system, between the Hamiltonian Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. Since then the American Antiquarian Society's First Democracy Project has amassed new voting data showing that voter turnout in Federalist vs. Republican elections sometimes surpassed 70 percent of the total adult male population, a rate of sustained participation that no European state achieved until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. By some measures, then, the first wave of democratization began in the late eighteenth century and was practically complete by the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency.
Other historians have taken issue with this idea, arguing that democratization awaited the competitive national parties of the 1830s and 1840s, the Whigs and Democrats. Historians like Ronald P. Formisano and William G. Shade have described some of the practices of the earlier Jefferson-era politics as predemocratic, or what Formisano has called a "deferential-participant" culture dominated by local notables with little input from ordinary citizens. The social historians Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin have gained some adherents for the argument that ordinary voters were indifferent to party politics even during the supposed mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the mass political parties. Altschuler and Blumin built on an older tradition, dating back to the writings of the great postwar historians Richard Hofstadter and Lee Benson, which debunked the socalled Age of the Common Man. According to these scholars, the rhetoric of the Jacksonian era was a cynical charade of powerful elites to flatter their inferiors.
A similarly complex picture has emerged concerning the democratization of political power in early America. Ardent debunkers of "Jacksonian democracy" like Edward Pessen argued that the antebellum United States groaned under the almost unbroken rule of nearly hereditary regional elites whose roots dated back to the colonial period. Sidney Aronson's study of federal officeholding more or less substantiated this idea. From John Adams to Andrew Jackson, high national, state, and local officeholders largely came from the same wealthy, educated class that they always had.
At the same time, historians have found a good deal of evidence for incremental change. Clearly the intensifying demands of democratic politics drove some of the gentleman politicians of the founding era (and their sons) from the fray. Numerous scholars have commented on the apparent professionalization of politics in the early nineteenth century, as less socially and intellectually gifted politicians who expected to make their livings in politics became much more predominant than they had been in the days of Jefferson and Washington. Sean Wilentz has written of the "embourgoisement" of American politics, noting that by Jacksonian times, wealth and professional success could as easily allow entry into the political as the family connections that were formerly essential. Jeffrey L. Pasley has upheld a more genuine but also compartmentalized form of democratization by pointing to the more than seventy newspaper editors appointed to office by Andrew Jackson and the hundreds more elected or appointed after that. In the North, most of these editor-officeholders were former journeymen printers or hardscrabble rural lawyers with little formal education, making their elevation a real advance for common men, if not the Common Man in general.
In the most systematic study of these matters yet produced, Whitman H. Ridgway analyzed political leadership in local communities, using Maryland as his test case. Ridgway argued that traditional oligarchies continued their domination in relatively homogeneous areas such as the rural South. More diverse and economically dynamic locations like the city of Baltimore underwent a specialization of leadership rather than full-out democratization. After the 1820s, the "wealthy and prominent men" who had controlled the oligarchic politics of earlier eras increasingly "eschewed direct competition in the political realm in favor of concentrating their energies in other specialized areas" such as private business, where the real power increasingly lay. Although the old oligarchs continued to wield great influence behind the scenes, during the Jacksonian era they learned to share public power with other men whose status was based more on ability and effort than wealth and family connections. The result was a system of plural oligarchies that Ridgway labels "polyarchy."
At the start of the twenty-first century, the debate among historians over democratization has moved beyond questions of officeholding and adult male voter turnout. A new wave of political history has sought to broaden the definition of democracy to include a much wider range of behaviors that should be redefined as political. Historians have shown that those on the margins of formal politics or even excluded from citizenship altogether—including landless laborers, free people of color, and women of all social classes—found ways of making their interests felt in the public sphere of the early nineteenth century. David Waldstreicher and Simon Newman have shown that parades, street demonstrations, and riots had their place in a rambunctious political culture only beginning to define who was let in and who was left out of this raucous popular scramble for a voice.
Scholars who analyze political language have also discovered the critical importance that changes in rhetorical style played in transforming the United States into a more democratic political culture in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. American political rhetoric on the printed page took on the spontaneous, emphatic quality of the stump speech. Politicians and editors found it necessary to communicate with a mass audience that needed to be informed as well as interested. The result was a simpler, cruder, starker—more democratic—mode of discourse.
Women's historians have made it clear that women's role in the early nineteenth century remained a public one that exercised critical influence on reform movements, the operations of government, and even the party politics from which they were officially excluded. Women as suffrage advocates, society hostesses, abolitionist activists, and plantation mistresses exercised a powerful role in politics even if formal democratization for women had to wait until a later century.