John Markoff - Where and When Was Democracy Invented?

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History
Where and When Was Democracy Invented?

Author(s): John Markoff
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 660-690
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Where and When Was Democracy

Invented?l
JOHN MARKOFF
Universityof Pittsburgh
INTRODUCTION
BarringtonMoore's Social Origins of Dictatorshipand Democracy made explicit an influentialbutusuallyunstatedprinciplefor comparativepolitical sociology. In his searchfor the social sourcesof differentsortsof political systems,
Moore devoted chaptersto revolutionaryor quasi-revolutionaryupheavalsin
England,France,the United States, Japan,China, and India.He did not feel it
equallyimportantto considerthe historyof democracyin Scandinavia,the Low
Countries,or Switzerland(not to mention Canada,Australia,and New Zealand). The lesser players on the world stage, buffeted by the prestigious ideologies of the greaterplayers,tied to the latter'seconomies and sometimes assaultedby their armies,are less rewardingas researchsites for comparativists
looking for distinct national"cases"to test their ideas. Small, weaker powers
are not, in this reasoning, independentcases of anything. One presumes the
same logic led Moore to include only thirdworld giants like China and India
and not the many othercountriesof Asia, Africa, and LatinAmerica. Characteristically,it is GermanyandRussiathatMooreregardsas the most significant
cases of democraticfailureomittedfrom his study:not Spain or Italy,let alone
Bolivia or Burma.2In manya theoryof "moderization,"England-or England
and France-have been taken as prototypes or paradigmaticcases, and the
broadoutlinesof theirhistoriesarethereforefar morelikely to have enteredthe
educationof Americansociologists thanthe historiesof otherplaces in Europe
or beyond. Sometimesthe presumedcentralityof one or more of these cases is
made explicit, sometimes not.
The "greatpower" perspective on world history has its uses-more weak
For comments on an earlierdraftand other suggestions I thankHermannGiliomee, Michael
Hanagan,JuanLinz, Ver6nicaMontecinos,Dora Orlansky,Rudolf Rizman,RichardRose, Lionel
Rothkrug,ArthurStinchcombe,CharlesTilly, and SashaWeitman.A fellowship from the University Centerfor InternationalStudiesof the Universityof Pittsburghis also gratefullyacknowledged.
2 BarringtonMoore, Jr.,Social Origins of Dictatorshipand Democracy:Lord and Peasant in
the Making of the Modern World(Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xi-xiii. Moore went on to
tackle the missing Germancase in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White
Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978) and, more briefly,the Russianin Authorityand InequalityUnder
Capitalismand Socialism (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1987).
0010-4175/99/4301-3446$7.50 + .10 ? 1999SocietyforComparative
Studyof SocietyandHistory
66o

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
66I
powers sneeze when the U.S. catches cold than the reverse-but it also obscures much of the dynamicebb and flow of social processes across frontiers.
Not everythinghappenedfirstin a greatpower.Nor arethe greatpowers always
usefully thoughtof as independentcases.
If we move beyond comparativehistory as conventionally conceived-as
the studyof similaritiesand differencesamongthe historicaltrajectoriesof different places-to the study of complexly interactivetransnationalsystems, it
would be an errorto assumethatinnovationsinvariablydiffuse from a creative
great power to weaker players who seek to curryfavor, who are intellectually
enchantedby powerfulmodels of success, or upon whom the powerfulcan impose theirinstitutionsby force. Of course,these pathsof diffusionfromstronger
to weakerstateshave been exemplified many times. No one would write a history of democracywithoutnoting the impactof the Frencharmiesin the 1790s
or the Americanarmiesin the 1940s. But the patternof innovationand diffusion may often be far more complex.
In this essay I will be looking at the times and places when innovationsin
democracywere pioneered.Democracy could be defined in 1690 as a "Form
of governmentin which the people have all authority,"3a definitionas succinct
as it is imprecise. In the subsequentage of democraticbreakthrough(and still
today) the challenge was (and is) the creationof concreteinstitutionsthatrealize such a notion. But what institutions?If we look over the historyof modem
democracy,we will find thatthose who called themselves democratsat the tail
end of the eighteenthcenturywere likely to be very suspiciousof parliaments,
downrighthostile to competitivepolitical parties,criticalof secret ballots, uninterested or even opposed to women's suffrage, and sometimes tolerant of
slavery.The claim thatsome institutionsand not othersare modes for realizing
democracyis a very powerfulone; but whatthose institutionsarehas been subject to considerablechange.
Any discussion of the loci of democraticbreakthroughsmust acknowledge
ambiguityandlimitedknowledge,the formercompoundingthe latter.Such ambiguity is inherentin any searchfor origins within an ongoing historicalflow,
in which thereare always precursorsand prototypes,as well as interestingoffshoots thatwent somewhereelse. In addition,we have abortedand interrupted
developments.France,for example, was early to enact universalmale suffrage,
but laterretractedit.
To keep the subject from overflowing even a long essay, some boundaries
need to be set. We focus on the nationalstate here, ratherthan subnationalor
supranationalinstitutions;however,we cannotaltogetherignorethe distinction
between local and national government,which are not always organizedthe
same way, to put it mildly.We can find instanceswhere significantdemocratic
practiceat the nationallevel coexists with widespreadvillage despotisms(as in
3 Antoine Furetiere,Dictionnaireuniversel(Geneva:SlatkineReprints,1970 [1690]), v. 1.

662
JOHN
MARKOFF
contemporaryIndia);we can find-particularly in the world before the eighteenthcentury-semidemocratic assembliesat the village level coexisting with
traditionalforms of sacralizedmonarchyand aristocraticrule4 at the national
level (a widespreadexperiencein many partsof the world).In federalsystems,
rights at state and nationallevels may differ-a significant matterin the democratichistoriesof Australia,the UnitedStatesandSwitzerland;they may differ among the states as well, as seen, for example, in the removalof genderrestrictionson voting in the United States.As for the temporalboundariesof this
essay, I take my startingpoint as the 1780s, for reasonsthatwill be made clear
below.5
One last ambiguityremains:the law may be a breakthrough,but what of actual practice?Wherethereis a substantialgulf betweenthe "legalcountry"and
the "realcountry,"to use a distinctionwell-knownin nineteenth-centuryFrance
and contemporaryLatinAmerica,it may be very misleadingto look at the date
of enactmentof some new law as the only indicatorof electoralprocedure,parliamentarypractice,or voting rights.The law is partof reality,but a researcher
could seriouslyerrto take it as the entirereality.6But thereis also just plain ignorance-much of the worldhistoryof democracyseems to me effectively unknown. If I've slighted a democraticinnovationhere or exaggeratedthe living
reality of an innovationthathad no actualitybeyond an unenforcedlaw there,
let the brickbatsfly. And where the history is shroudedin darkness,may some
hardyresearchershed some light.
In an essay discussing something whose meaning has historically been so
contested-and altered-as democracy,7I shouldmakeclearthatI planto look
at the initialbreakthroughsin the institutionalizationof democracyas thatterm
is rathergenerallydeployedin the late 1990s. Democracyis used, for now, primarily to mean a set of political proceduresin which the holders of power are
responsibleto electorates,either directly (by virtue of being elected) or indirectly (by virtue of being appointedby the elected); in which almost all adult
citizens can vote (while noncitizens,nonadults,and small numbersof criminal
4 Steven Muhlbergerand Phil Paine, "Democracy'sPlace in WorldHistory,"Journal of World
History 4, 1993, pp. 23-45; for much detail on France, see Henry Babeau, Les Assembldes
generales des communautesd'habitantsen France du XIIIesiecle a la Rdvolution(Paris:Rousseau,
1893) andAlbertBabeau,Le Villagesous l'Ancien Regime(Paris:Perrin,1915).
5 Importantearlierinnovationsin the developmentof representativeinstitutionsthatcould bargain on the taxpayers'behalf with those who controlledorganizedviolence will not be considered
here; nor will earlierinnovationsin the developmentof electoralpractices,secularrulership,state
controlof militaryforce, bureaucratic/administrative
capacitiesof governmentsto enforcepolicies,
and citizenshiprights.
6 Even the act of dating the law is not without its ambiguity.Laws may be enactedat one moment, subjectto some form of ratificationat a laterpoint, and formallygo into force at yet a third
moment;they may then be reinterpretedyears or decades later by courts, or modified by subsequentlegislative action;they may or may not be vigorouslyenforced;and whetherenforcedor not
may be more or less widely flouted. I have thereforetried to base my principalclaims about the
loci of democraticinnovationon broadpatterns,ratherthanon any single episode.
7 See JohnMarkoff,Wavesof Democracy:Social Movementsand Political Change (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996)

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
663
adult citizens do not necessarily have such rights); and in which people can
form partiesto contest elections, campaignsprovide some opportunityfor oppositions to address the electorate, and the official vote counts are not profoundly fraudulent(but in which it is not necessarily the case that all parties
have equal opportunitiesto make theircase, nor thatthe vote counts be totally
honest).
Although political scientists today are generallyreluctantto admit any featuresof social structureinto theirproceduraldefinitionof democracy8-so that
egalitarianand inegalitariansocieties are identically democraticif they both
adhereto such proceduresto the same degree-I would add one conditionthat
I believe is simply takenfor grantedby the many social scientistsof the 1990s,
but would not have been presumedby anyone in the 1790s. This is that residence and citizenship must broadlyoverlap.9Privatelyowned chattel slavery
and the existence of ruralmajoritiessubjectto seigneurialrights are not compatible with "democracy"as generally understoodin the 1990s, regardlessof
how dominantminoritiesor majoritiesgovernthemselvesandtheirdependents.
In other words, in currentnotions of democracylegally enforceablestructures
of servitude,dependence,or deferencethat subordinatelarge numbersof adult
persons do not exist.
Finally a plea for forbearance:so many specific practiceshave become part
of the historyof democracythatno one could documentthem all shortof a very
long book. The bases for exclusion frompoliticalrights,for example,have been
variedenough thatwhat follows is inevitablybut a selection. I pay no attention
here, for example, to exclusions based on religion.
For all the ambiguities,uncertaintiesandinevitableerrorsof dating,I believe
that the following survey shows a basic patternso persistentlythat more evidence and more refined concepts would be unlikely to alter it fundamentally:
for the past two centuriesthe greatinnovationsin the invention of democratic
institutionshave generallynot takenplace in the world's centersof wealth and
power.
The First Democrats
The late eighteenthcentury seems to be the moment when people on several

continentsbegan to speak of democracyas a form of political organizationto
be actively pursued or actively resisted. The word "democracy"had been
known by educatedEuropeans(andAmericans)for a long time before that,to
8 In the editors'
preface to their importantcollection on the democratizationsof the 1980s, for
example, we find LarryDiamond, JuanJ. Linz, and SeymourMartinLipset explaining:"Weuse
the term 'democracy'in this study to signify a political system, separateand apartfrom the economic and social system to which it is joined. Indeed, a distinctiveaspect of our approachis to insist thatissues of so-called economic and social democracybe separatedfrom the questionof governmentalstructure"(Democracy in Developing Countries. v. 4, Latin America [Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 1989], p. xvi.).
9 On this
point see CharlesTilly, "Democracyis a Lake,"in Roadsfrom Past to Future(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), p. 199.

664
JOHN
MARKOFF
be sure,as one of the basic types of political systems recognizedby the thinkers
of classical Greece. Indeed, the word was often used to denote an ancientpolitical system as a point of referencewhen discussing a living one10,as in the
observation of a late seventeenth-centurydictionary that "democracy only
flourishedin the republicsof Rome and Athens."1 At othertimes it was used
pejoratively,as a failed system whose invitation to mob violence was to be
avoided.12But it was in that late eighteenth-centurymoment that the form
"democrat"came into use, for thatwas when social movementsbegan to challenge existing social ordersin the nameof democracyandEuropeansandNorth
Americanssaw theircountriesdivided into two camps.13
The terms "democrat"and "aristocrat,"denotingthe partisansof these two
camps,beganto be widely used in revolutionarystrugglesin the Low Countries
duringthe 1780s'4 and were almost at once taken up elsewhere, as those engaged in politicalconflicts found the dichotomyserviceablein theirown struggles. Americanas well as French revolutionaryelites wrestled with the relationship of their own political ideas to democracy,sometimes explaining the
superiorityof a republicto a democracy,sometimes conflatingthe two15;the
Prussian government explained its participationin the dismembermentof
Polandin 1793 by the spreadto thatcountryof "Frenchdemocratism."'6
10 It was
occasionally appliedto existing political systems, particularlysome of the Swiss cantons, but also a numberof self-governing Germancities (Conze and Koselleck, Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe,pp. 845-47). For a superbdiscussion of one instance,see RandolphC. Head, Early ModernDemocracy in the Grisons: Social Orderand Political Language in a Swiss Mountain
Canton, 1470-1620 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1995).
l Furetiere,Dictionnaireuniversel.
12
Although Furetiereneeded no more than ten lines to define both "democracy"and "democratic"in his dictionaryof 1690, he found the space to informthe readerthat"theworst of all outbursts is a democraticone," and that "seditionsand turmoilhappenoften in Democracies"(Dictionnaireuniversel).
13 The following discussiondrawsheavily on OttoBrunner,WernerConze, andReinhartKoselleck, eds., GeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe:Historisches Lexikonzur politisch-sozialen Sprache in
Deutschland (Stuttgart:Klett Verlag, 1972-84), v. 1, pp. 821-99; RobertPalmer,"Notes on the
Use of the Word 'Democracy', 1789-1799," Political Science Quarterly68, 1953, pp. 203-26;
Pierre Rosanvallon,"The History of the WordDemocracy in France,"Journal of Democracy 6,
1995, pp. 140-54; Horst Dippel, "D6mocratie,Democrates,"in Rolf Reichardtand Eberhard
Schmitt, eds., Handbuchpolitisch-sozialer Grundbegriffein Frankreich1680-1920 (Munich:
Oldenbourg,1986), vol. 6, pp. 57-97; Jens A. Christophersen,The Meaning of "Democracy"as
Used in EuropeanIdeologiesfrom the French to the RussianRevolutions.An Historical Studyof
Political Language(Oslo: Universitetsforlaget,1968).
14 For a slightly earlierisolated use, see Conze and Koselleck, GeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe,
p. 854.
15 Madison held a "republic"better than a "democracy"in 1787 in Federalist No. 10, as did
Jacques-PierreBrissot in 1791. Robespierrein 1794 held that "thesetwo words are synonyms."
See Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Middletown,Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1961),
pp. 62-5; Brissot in Recueuil de quelques dcrits,principalementextraits du Patriote Francais,
reprintedin Aux origines de la Republique,1789-1792, v. 5: 1791, Naissance du parti rdpublicaine (Paris:EDHIS, 1991), pp. 3-7; Maximilien Robespierre,Oeuvres.v. 10, Discours, 17juillet 1793-27juillet 1794 (Paris:Presses Universitairesde France, 1967), p. 352.
16 KarolLutostariski,Les partages de la Pologne et la luttepour l'inddpendance(Paris:Payot,
1918), p. 113.

WHERE
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WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
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665
By the late 1790s, such usages were well-known and widespread.In 1797, a
future pope's Christmashomily claimed the compatibilityof democracy and
the Gospels.17But, althoughsuch termshad become widely current,it was far
easierto know whata "democrat"was-an anti-aristocrat-than what"democracy"was.18"Aristocrats"could be identifiedwith the defense of legally sanctioned structuresof birth-basedprivilege, a hierarchicalandcorporatesocial order, sacralizedmonarchyand an establishedchurch.But it was much harderto
specify the new institutionsthat democratswished to create; and many who
challenged hierarchical, corporate, royal, and sacred institutions distanced
themselves from the term "democracy."If aristocracywas identified with familiarinstitutions,the institutionsof democracywere to be invented.The power of the broadnotion of democracywas much greaterthan any consensus on
what precisely was being advocated.Democratshave debatedthe institutions
needed for democracyever since.
TWO HUNDRED
YEARS
OF DEMOCRATIZATION
The Writingof Constitutions

In their struggles against arbitraryacts of monarchicalauthority,eighteenthcentury opposition movements in Europe and North America often rallied
aroundthe notion of a constitution;constitutionalists,however, were themselves deeply dividedbetweentwo conceptionsof the constitutionalidea. Some
had in mind a combinationof fundamentallaws, customarypractices,understandingsof the divine plan, and common sense thatcould be invoked in criticism of arbitrarymonarchs and their tyrannicalministers:the restorationof
properrespect for a polity's traditionswas needed. Othersdid not clamor for
the restorationof the existing constitution,but for the draftingof new, explicit
rules for political life-rules thatwould have to be broughtinto existence. Setting these rules down in writtenform, throughthe attendantprocesses of debate, revision, adoption, and promulgation,became a powerful foundational
act. By making the fundamentallaws of the political orderthe outcome of deliberateactions by living people, the writingof a constitutionbecame a powerful statementsituating the fount of authorityin human wishes. Such written
statements,deliberatelysetting forth the organizationof governmentand the
powers of its principalcomponents, also had the potential, if effectively followed, to providebarriersto arbitraryauthority.
That constitution-writingwas in the air in the late eighteenth century is
shown by such prototypes as the document issued by Sweden's Gustav III,
which aimed for popularsupportagainstthe nobility througha formal clarifi17 Palmer,DemocraticRevolution,v. 1, 18.
p.
18 A dictionaryof 1792 defines "democrat"as "one of the revolutionarywords thathas had the
greatestsuccess. It means the subjectof a democraticgovernmentand someone who, by principle
and by fashion, is a partisanof democracy."See Max Frey, Les Transformationsdu vocabulaire
francaise a l'epoque de la Revolution(1789-1800) (Paris:PressesUniversitairesde France,1925),
p. 139.

666
JOHN MARKOFF
cation of the powers of monarchand parliament19;wartime constitutionsin

Britain'srebellingAmericancolonies20; andthe text proposedby Utrecht'sPatriots in 1784.21But it was the new United States that was celebratedas the
great pioneer in this regardwhen its Articles of Confederationwere replaced
by a more enduringconstitution(ratifiedin 1789), whose clear provisions for
amendment-immediately utilized to add on the Bill of Rights-further amplified the model of a fundamentaldocument,writtenand correctableby humanhands.This sense was all the morestrengthenedby the openingwords"We
the People,"which made a very differentclaim thana royal declaration,just as
a specifically empowered constitutionalconvention and a ratificationprocedurefurtherenhancedthe element of humandebate,reflection,and decision.22
The first European state to follow suit was Poland, whose constitution of
1791,23in announcingthatthe King ruled"by the grace of God and the will of
the nation,"24suggesteda divine as well as a humansourceof authority.25This
documentwas soon renderedinoperativeby the occupying armies of Russia,
19 Sweden's 1772 constitutionwas a
developmentin an alreadyestablishedtradition.In 1720
Sweden's parliamentadoptedthe first of severalfundamentaldocumentsthatdefined the structure
of centralauthority,writinga constitutionfor which Montesquieu,Rousseau,andMably professed
admiration.See MichaelRoberts,TheAge ofLiberty:Sweden,1719-1772 (Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press, 1986); H. Arnold Barton, Scandinavia in the RevolutionaryEra, 1760-1815
(Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress, 1986), and "GustavIII of Sweden and the Enlightenment",EighteenthCenturyStudies6, 1972-73, p. 8.
20 Wood, The Creationof theAmerican Republic,
pp. 127-61.
21 Simon
Schama, Patriots and Liberators:Revolutionin the Netherlands,1780-1813 (New
York:RandomHouse, 1977), 1776-1787 (New York:Norton, 1972), pp. 88-89.
22 A "convention"was a centuries-old
English termfor a meeting outside (and sometimes opposed to) established institutions;the phrase "nationalconvention"seems to be an Irish radical
coinage of 1783. See GordonS. Wood,TheCreationof theAmericanRepublic,pp. 310-12; Palmer,
TheAge of the DemocraticRevolution,vol., 1, p. 303; RobertB. McDowell, Irelandin the Age of
Imperialismand Revolution,1760-1830 (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1979), pp. 302-11.
23 The
May 3, 1791 documentsuggests revisabilityby sometimesusing the work "constitution"
to referto a collection of documentsbeyond itself, some alreadywritten,some yet to be. See Janusz
Duzinkiewicz, Fateful Transformation:The Four Years'Parliamentand the Constitutionof May
3, 1791. East EuropeanMonographsno. 367 (New York:ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1995), pp.
40-54.
24 Elsewhere,the May 3 documentstatesthat"all power in civil society shouldbe derivedfrom
the will of the people" (art.5). See New Constitutionof the Governmentof Poland Establishedby
the Revolutionof the Thirdof May 1791 (London:J. Debrett, 1791), pp. 3, 12. The same ambiguity is found in France'sDeclarationof the Rights of Man and Citizen, whose Article 3 has it that
"the principleof all sovereigntyresides essentially in the nation,"after having describeditself as
being declared"in the presenceand underthe auspices of the SupremeBeing" (Duverger,Constitutions et documentspolitiques, p.3). An importantecho of the Polish formulationis found in the
1824 constitutionof newly independentbut still monarchicalBrazil, in which Dom Pedro's authorityexists "by the grace of God and the unanimousacclamationof the peoples."The would-be
emperorof independentMexico in the 1820s reigned,so the official formulahadit, "bydivineprovidence and the congress of the nation."See Constituodopolitica do impdriodo Brasil (Rio de
Janeiro:Silva Porto, 1824), p. 3; TimothyE. Anna, TheMexicanEmpireof Iturbide(Lincoln,NE:
Universityof NebraskaPress, 1990), p. 76.
25 This ambiguitywas retainedin the manysubsequentconstitutionsthatbalancean explicit humanderivationof authoritywith a sacredsourceas well. See JohnMarkoffandDaniel Regan, "Religion, the StateandPoliticalLegitimacyin theWorld'sConstitutions,"pp. 161- 82 in ThomasRobbins and Roland Robertson, eds., Church-State Relations: Tensions and Transitions (New
Brunswick,NJ: TransactionBooks, 1987).

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
667
Prussiaand Austria.The Polish document,moreover,presentsitself as a royal

enactmenteven as it embodies claims of popularsovereignty.It may well be
that the new United States and the old Polish Republic were the pioneers, successful and unsuccessful,because the notionsof social contractso dearto those
who urgeda constitutionhad a particularlyvivid realityin bothplaces:the United States had well-developed representativemechanismsin its local meetings
and colonial assemblies; the Polish nobility not only exercised considerable
governing functions in the fifty-odd local parliaments,but literally drew up a
new social contract(the pacta conventa) with each king they chose by election.26It was not in the northwestEuropeancore that constitutionswere first
written, but on the western and eastern fringes27(although the French soon
pushed the notion of popular sovereignty further still by having a national
plebiscite on theirconstitutionof 1793).28
In Europe,revolutionaryFranceassumeda majorrole in diffusing constitutionalism furtherafield, not only by markingits own changes of regime with
new constitutions(in 1791, 1793, 1795, 1799, 1802 and 1804) but by inspiring
and compelling similar documentsto be adoptedin the satellite states that its
armiesoverranin the 1790s andbeyond,29sometimesthusreinforcingalreadypresentconstitutionwriting propensities.Other states, trying to resist French
dominance,followed suit. Haiti markedits independencefrom Frenchrule by
enactingits own constitutionin 1805, becoming the second New Worldstateto
do so.30Pressedby Frenchforces, the besieged remnantsof a Spanishgovernment convened an assembly thatissued a constitutionin 1812, partlymodeled
on the Frenchconstitutionsof 1793 and 1795. The Cadiz Constitutionbecame
an importantmodel for the predominantlyrepublicansentimentsof the leadership in the newly independentcountriesof SpanishAmerica duringthe early
nineteenthcentury,who markedthe founding of their own independentstates
with constitutionaltexts.31
26 The literatureon the U.S. constitutionis vast beyond citation;for one work, see GordonS.
Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993). On Polish institutions see Norman Davies, God's Playground: A HistoTr of Poland (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1982), vol. 1.

27 If we stretchour time frameback a bit, we would tip this picturetowardsthe northeastwith
Sweden's constitutionof 1772.
28 Ren6 Baticle, "Le plebiscite sur la Constitutionde 1793",Revolutionfrancaise 57, 1909, pp.
496-524; 58, 1910, pp. 5-30, 117-55, 193-237, 327-41, 385-410.
29 Duverger, Constitutionset documents
politiques; H.B. Hill, "L'influencefranqaisesur les
constitutionsde l'Europe(1795-1799)", La Revolution francaise, 1936-37, pp. 352-63; 154-66.
On revolutionaryDutchconstitutionalismin the 1780s, see WayneP.te Brake,Regentsand Rebels:
The Revolutionary World of an Eighteenth-Century, Dutch City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
30 David Nicholls, FromDessalines to Duvalier (London:Macmillan, 1988), p. 36.
31 With two western

hemisphericprecedentsbehindthem, two SpanishAmericanconstitutions
of 1811 precededthe Spanishdocument(Colombia,Venezuela).The Cadiz constitutionwas a significant model, not just in SpanishAmerica, but in Italy and Norway. See WilliamW. Pierson and
Federico G. Gil, Governmentsof Latin America (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1957), pp. 107-33;
Timothy E. Anna, Spain and the Loss of America (Lincoln, NE: University of NebraskaPress,
1983); Isabel Arriazu,CristinaDiz-Lois, CristinaTorra,and WarrenM. Diem, Estudios sobre las
cortes de Cddiz(Pamplona:EditorialG6mez, 1967);JorgeMarioGarciaLaguardia,CarlosMelen-

668
JOHN MARKOFF
By the time the conservativeforces had triumphedin Europe,the model of

constitution-makinghad been firmly implanted in two hemispheres. The
French defeat sparkeda wave of constitutionwriting in the Germanstates.32
Even the restoredFrenchmonarchyitself issued a constitutionin 1814, granted, so its royal preambletells us, in recognition "of the wishes of our subjects."33
Competitive Electoral Parties
Political groupings for the purpose of contesting elections or pursuing legislative objectives were known wherever there were elected bodies of one sort or
another. Even where such groupings were fairly stable-hardly always the
case-and hence tended to develop collective identities, as in the case of
Britain's Whigs and Tories or Sweden's Caps and Hats34, a sense of illegitimacy hung about such their activities.35 Those inclined to the cause of popular
sovereignty often regarded such coalitions as wholly illegitimate, representing
the purely private interest of individual powerholders, of a network of friends
and relations36, or of some other group that differed from and was very likely
antagonistic to the interests of the whole. The very term "party" was largely
used invidiously, for example, during the French Revolution, when the claim
that someone identified with some part of the people was a step short of an accusation of treason. Organized campaigning was scorned, and even declaring
one's own candidacy disapproved.37 British electoral practice was often seen
as a model of corruption, not of order nor of democracy.38 Aspirants to office
dez Chaverri,and MarinaVolio, La Constituci6nde Cddizy su influenciaen Amdrica(San Jose:
CAPEL, 1987);JuanFerrando,La Constituci6nde Espaniolade 1812 en los comienzosdel "Risorgimento"(Rome:InstitutoJuridicoEspafiol, 1959); Antonio Annino, "Pratichecreole e liberalismo
nella crisi dello spazio urbanocoloniale. Il 29 novembre1812 a Cittadel Messico,"QuaderniStorici, Nuova Serie 69 (December) 1988, pp. 727-63; ManuelFerrerMufoz, La Constituci6nde Ca'diz
y su aplicaci6n en la Nueva Espana (Mexico: UniversidadNacionalAut6nomade Mexico, 1993);
T.K. Derry,A Historyof ModernNorway, 1814-1972 (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1973), p. 9.
32 James J.
Sheehan,GermanHistory, 1770-1866 (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1989), pp. 41125; Thomas Nipperdey,Germanyfrom Napoleon to Bismarck,1800-1866 (Princeton:Princeton
UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 237-43.
33 "Charteconstitutionellede 4 juin 1814",in Duverger,Constitutionset documentspolitiques,
p. 80.
34 Michael Roberts,Swedishand English Parliamentarismin the EighteenthCentury(Belfast:
The Queen's University, 1973), pp. 24-6.
35 On
eighteenth-centurythinkingaboutpartiesin Britain,see RichardHofstadter,The Idea of
a PartySystem:TheRise of LegitimateOppositionin the UnitedStates, 1780-1840 (Berkeley,CA:
Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1969), pp. 1-39; for a broadsampleof eighteenth-centurywritings,
see J. A. W. Gunn, ed., Factions No More: Attitudesto Party in Governmentand Oppositionin
Eighteenth-CenturyEngland (London:FrankCass, 1972).
36 The designation "Familia"for the faction around the Czartoryskisin eighteenth century
Poland'sparliamentarypolitics is symptomatic.
37 Since such condemnationof electioneeringwas particularlyintense in revolutionaryFrance,
the studyof hiddencandidacyin thatcountryis correspondinglyparticularlyrevealing.See Patrice
Gueniffey, Le nombre et la raison: La Rdvolutionfrancaise et les dlections (Paris: Editions de
l'Ecole des HautesEtudesen Sciences Sociales, 1993), pp. 323-52.
38 Crook, Elections in the French Revolution,pp. 69-70; Gueniffey,Le nombreet la raison,
pp. 315-21.

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
669
might in fact be workingfor theirelection behindthe scenes, giving substance

to the sense of widespreadelectoralcabals.
With the developmentof partiesinhibited-as some gentlemenfound electioneering shameful and some democratsfound election-contestingcoalitions
redolentof aristocraticconspiracy39-the hope of a unitarypopularwill was
enhanced.Democracycould be equatedwith unanimity.Partylegitimation,by
contrast,opened the way to a more pluralisticconceptionof democracy.40
The priorityof unityhad been expressed,for example,by LordBolingbroke,
when he suggested in 1738 that a "patriotking" would unify his people: "instead of puttinghimself at the head of one partyin orderto govern his people,
he will put himself at the head of his people in orderto govern, or more properly to subdue, all parties."41James Madison, arguingin 1787 that one of the
virtues of a properconstitutionwas its capacity "to breakand control the violence of faction,"commented"thatthe public good is disregardedby the conflicts of rival parties."42Indeed, a good deal of Madison's collaborationwith
HamiltonandJay on TheFederalistwas devotedto demonstratingthatthe new
constitutionwould avert such dangers.
The core issue is not the existence, nor even the tactics, of concertedefforts
to attractvoters to office-seekers who were in coalitions based on kinship,
friendship,mutualself-interest,or policy; the more difficulthistoricalproblem
is the shift in legitimacy of such activities. The air of disreputethathung over
election-contesting organizationswould have been particularlysalient when
The Federalist addressedthese concerns, for the revolutionaryperiod in the
United States saw the proliferationand developmentof caucuses, conventions,
and coalitions (and their condemnationas cabals) on a wide scale, as election
campaignsproliferated.And the new countrysaw the formationof a majoroppositionalgroupingin the form of the Republicans.43Yet an element of opprobriumwas attachedto all this activity.44
It is hardto be sure where and when the idea of a partybegan to change, and
39 Some of this moralcondemnation
may representthe lingeringinfluence of the medieval tradition of elections within the Church,when open office-seeking was taboo, because it was associated with the serious sin of simony, or traffickingin ecclesiastical office (L6o Moulin, La Viequotidienne des religieux et religieuses au Moyen Age, xe-xve siecle [Paris:Hachette, 1978], p. 196).
In Canto 19 of Inferno,Dante wedged simoniacsupsidedown in holes with theirfeet on fire. Twentieth-centurycanonlaw continuesto barelectioneering(J. Creusen,Religieuxet religieusesd 'apres
le droit eccldsiastique [Paris: L'Edition Universelle, 1950], p. 53).
40 For much insight into unitary conceptions see Jane M. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary
Democracy(New York:Basic Books, 1980).
41 Henry Saint-John,Viscount Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke
(London: Cass,
1967), v. 2, p. 402.
42
James Madison, "FederalistNo. 10," in The Federalist, Jacob E. Cooke, ed. (Middletown,
CT:WesleyanUniversityPress, 1961), pp. 56-57.
43 There is an enormousliteratureon
the early history of partiesin the United States. Two importantstatementsare:Hofstadter,TheIdea of a PartySystem;and StanleyElkins andEric McKitrick, TheAge of Federalism (New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1993), pp. 257-302.
44
Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thir-
teen States, 1776-1789 (Westport,Conn: GreenwoodPress, 1982), pp. 57-89.

670
JOHN MARKOFF
it undoubtedlycannot be identified with a single moment or a single place.

Some scholarshipsuggests the early nineteenth-centuryUnited States as one
importantlocation.The old critiqueof "faction"was retainedfor the personalistic coalitions that were clusteredaroundfamily or held togetherby greed; a
"party"was increasinglylikely to be an impersonalbody united aroundcommon principle.45By the 1820s, adherentsof New YorkState's DemocraticRepublicanswere openly proclaimingtheir loyalty to the party,and were championing the very idea of partyas an antidoteto the new forms of tyrannythat a
republiccould nurture:"Whenpartydistinctionsare no longerknown and recognized, our freedomwill be in jeopardy,as 'the calm of despotism'will then
be visible." No longer was the partylabel to be denied:"Wearepartymen, attached to partysystems."46
By the middle of the nineteenthcentury,those who called themselves democratsin Europehad generallyacceptedthe notion of partyas a properform
of organization,ratherthan as the corruptionof some ideal. Although the left
in France'sRevolutionof 1848, for example, looked back in many ways to the
Revolution of 1789 for models, it also accepted the partylabel.47The history
of ideas of partyin France-and elsewherein Europe-between 1789 and 1848
remainsto be written.48
Conflation of Democracy with Representative Institutions
This was an Americaninnovation.Thomas Paine recognized the significance

of such conflationalmost instantly,characterizingthe new U.S. political model as "representationingraftedupon democracy."49In the 1780s, many writers
thoughtof representativeinstitutionsas somethingquite distinct from democracy. James Madison distinguished"republics"like the thirteennewly independent states from "puredemocracy"precisely because they had a "scheme
45 Wallace, "ChangingConcepts of Party."
46 Quoted in
Wallace, "ChangingConcepts of Party,"p. 487. Similar notions were expressed
earlierin Sweden (Roberts,Swedishand English Parliamentarisin,p. 26).
47
See, for example, RonaldAminzade,Ballots and Barricades:Class Formationand Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871 (Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress, 1993). The term "parties" continuedto retainenough of its pejorativesense thatLouis Napoleon Bonaparteclaimed to
identify with the whole nationby being above party.Rathermore recently,after a close victory in
Poland's bitterpresidentialelection in 1995, the victor resigned from the DemocraticPartyof the
Left in orderto be a presidentoutside the partysystem (New YorkTimes,November26, 1995, I, p.
6). Indeed,condemnationof partiesand partysystems has been a strikingpartof the political culture of post-communistdemocratization,as witness anti-partystances by such diverse figures as
Poland's Lech Walesa, the Czech Republic'sVaclav Havel, and Russia's Boris Yeltsin. For suggestive observationssee Linz and Stepan,Problemsof Democratic Transitionand Consolidation:
SouthernEurope, South America, and Post-CommunistEurope (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins
UniversityPress, 1996), p. 247.
48 In Jean Dubois's dictionarywe find that around 1870 there was a wide range in use of the
term"party,"from the pejorativethroughthe neutralto the honorific.See Le Vocabulairepolitique
et social en France de 1869 a 1872 (Paris:Larousse, 1962), pp. 366-67.
49 ThomasPaine, Rightsof Man, in PhilipS. Foner,ed., TheCompleteWritingsof ThomasPaine
(New York:CitadelPress, 1969), v. 1, p. 371.

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
671
of representation."50
Common Europeannotions of representationenvisaged
some mechanism,not necessarily electoral, by which delegates presentedthe
views of the ruled to the ruler.Democracy,in contrast,was often perceived as
the directinvolvement of citizens in decision-making5, which even an enthusiast like Rousseauthoughtinappropriateto a largeterritorialstate.Rousseau's
scorn for elected representationwas notable:"The people of Englandregards
itself as free, but it is gravely mistaken. It is free only duringthe election of
membersof Parliament.As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakesit, and
it is nothing.The use it makes of the shortmoments of libertyit enjoys merits
losing them."52Few thoughtBritain'sparliamenthad much to do with democracy afterthe upheavalsof the mid-seventeenthcenturygave way to a restored
monarchy.Indeed,as late as the debateson the ReformBill of 1832, the champions of limited suffrageexpansioncould deny the slanderousaccusationthat
they were democrats.53
Those who held themselves to be democratsduringthe FrenchRevolution
sometimes avowed a suspicion that representativeswere but a step from becoming new aristocrats.54Indeed, favorable and unfavorableinvocations of
"democracy"tendedto occur in the context of criticizingelected revolutionary
officials for their autonomy from popularcontrol. Sieyes, for example, condemned the "ignorance"of those who held "therepresentativesystem incompatiblewith democracy."55But in 1795 Holland'smobilizeddemocratsin Rotterdaminsisted that "Representatives"are no more than "the executors of our
Will since we have alienatedno partof our sovereignty."56Although negative
views of democracywere a commonplaceby the time the Americanconstitu50
James Madison, in Federalist No. 10 (in Cooke, ed., The Federalist, p. 62). See also Robert
W. Shoemaker."'Democracy'and 'Republic'as Understoodin Late EighteenthCenturyAmerica",
AmericanSpeech41. 1966, pp. 83-95.
5
Acknowledging the common view that democracywas a formulafor continuedviolent revolt, D'Argenson in 1765 made the uncommonsuggestion of a democraticroad to orderthrough
popularly elected authorities,anticipatingthe later conflation of democracy and representation
(Rosanvallon,"Historyof the Word'Democracy',"p. 143).
52
Jean-JacquesRousseau,Du Cottrat social, Book III,ch. 15 (Paris:AubierMontaigne,1943),
p. 340. Montesquieudiffered with Rousseauon much, but also saw elected representativesas incompatiblewith "democracy":"Thesuffrageby lot is naturalto democracy;as thatby choice is to
aristocracy"(The Spiritof the Laws [New York:Hafner, 1949], v.1, p. I1).
53 The radicalHenryHunt'saccountof the ministerialreformers'responseto attacks the conby
servativeSir RobertPeel: "WhenSir RobertPeel chargedthem [the ministers]with going to make
a democraticalHouse of Commons ... they said 'No, we are going to keep power out of the hands
of the rabble'"(quoted in Michael Brock, The Great ReformAct [London:HutchisonUniversity
Library,1973], p. 187.
54 On the developmentof moreparticipatorynotions of democracyandtheirconflicts with
representation,see R.B. Rose, The Makingof the Sans-Culottes:DemocraticIdeas and Institutionsin
Paris, 1789-92 (Manchester:ManchesterUniversityPress, 1983); KareT0nneson,"LaDemocratie Directe sous la R6volutionFrancaise",in Colin Lucas, ed., The FrenchRevolutionand the Creation of ModernPolitical Culture,vol. 2: The Political Cultureof the FrenchRevolution(Oxford:
PergamonPress, 1988), pp. 295-307.
55 Quoted in Rosanvallon,"The
History of the Word 'Democracy',"p. 148
56
Quoted in Simon Schama,Patriots and Liberators,p. 226.

672
JOHN MARKOFF
tion was ratified,manyAmericansfelt thatthey had createda new kind of government,and some were using the word "democracy"to describeit.57
Accountability of all Powerholders to an Electorate
This very powerful idea was profoundlyadvancedin the new United States,
whose constitutionof 1789 rejected a hereditarymonarchy,a hereditaryaristocracy,and an establishedchurch.No one was to be presidentor sit in Congress by right; other powerholderswould either be elected, or appointedby
those who wereelected. In France,electoralprocesseswereenlargedby the new
revolutionaryregime. Officials from village councilmento nationallegislators
(but not the king) were to be elected, as were magistrates,public prosecutors,
National Guardofficers, Catholicbishops, and even army sergeants(a plan to
add schoolteacherswas never implemented).58Althoughthe scope of electoral
institutionskept changing,by 1792 the unelectedking was gone. The radicalism of makingall powerholdersresponsibleto those down below was, however, attenuatedby the propensityto indirectelections in boththe U.S. andFrench
cases.59The history of democracyin most of nineteenth-centurywestern Europe was markedby the coexistence of elected parliamentsandhereditarymonarchs, who battled over their respective powers. The unhappyhistory of the
French constitutionof 1791, for example, ended with its abrogationand the
king's trialby parliamentand execution.
There is a long traditionof partialprecursorsin Europeanhistory, such as
city-states governed by councils60 and elected monarchssuch as the Polish
king, the emperor,or the pope; andmuchexperiencewith electoralprinciples61
in variousforms of corporategovernance(includingmonasticorders,villages,
guilds and other forms of association as well).62At the nationallevel, howev57 Wood, Creationof the AmericanRepublic,pp. 593-96.
58 Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformationsof the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s
(New York:Norton, 1994), pp. 60-64.
59 The initial U.S. design had senatorselected by state legislaturesand presidentsby an electoralcollege; the Frenchtendedto have a varietyof multistageelections from the Estates-General
throughthe Directory.
60 Daniel Waley, The Italian City.-Republics(New York: McGraw Hill, 1969), pp. 60-65;
Moulin, "Les origines religieuses des techniqueselectoraleset d6liberativesmodernes,"RevueInternationaled'Histoire Politique et Constitutionelle(nouvelle s6rie) 3-4, 1953-54, pp. 106-48.
61 Towncouncils often hadecclesiastics who sat ex officio; manybodies practicingelectio were
engaged in acts of collective acclamation,ratherthan in choosing among alternatives.See Pierre
Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris:Gallimard,
1992), pp. 30-34. On the otherhand,notions of division and majorityrule arealso not hardto find
in the Europeanpast, as in the Genoese statutesof 1143 or the apparenttwelfth-centuryIcelandic
decision-makingby majority(Moulin, "Techniqueselectorales,"p.112; SigurdurLindal, "Early
DemocraticTraditionsin the Nordic Countries,"in ErikAllardtet al., Nordic Democracy [Copenhagen:Det Danske Selskab, 1981], p. 18).
62 Moulin, Religieux et religieuses, pp. 191-208 and "Les origines religieuses des techniques
6lectorales."Babeau,Le village sous l'AncienRegime,pp. 62-64. Emile Coornaert,Les Corporations en France avant 1789 (Paris:Gallimard,1941), p. 214. Electoralprocedurescould be well
enoughestablishedthatchargesof election irregularitiesmightfigure in internalguild disputes;for
an interestingexample, see Daniel Heimmermann,"'The Blackest of Treasons': Strife Among

WHERE AND WHEN WAS DEMOCRACY INVENTED?
673
er, such mechanisms were invariablyjoined with notions of hereditaryright.

Even the Polish nobility who elected the king were an almost closed (although
very large) hereditarygrouping. Thus Europeansocial contracttheory often
stressedthe notion of a contractbetween the monarchand the representatives
of the people, andsaw as a fundamentalpoliticalquestionthe extractionof power-limiting concessions from that monarch.The question of checks and balances for Montesquieu,for example, was how to offset monarchicalpower by
otherpower.In the exhilaratingdiscussion aboutnew institutionsto be created
thataccompaniedthe Americancolonies' defeat of the Britisharmy,the participants realized that their social contractwould be quite otherwise: a contract
among the people that created centralized power.63 How to avoid the recreationof eithermonarchicalor aristocratictyrannies,ratherthanhavingmonarchs and aristocratseach as counterweightsto the other,became a centralissue for applied political theorists on the western side of the Atlantic, which
made the Americanexperienceseem quite irrelevantto many democratsacross
the ocean.
As nineteenth-centuryEuropeansattemptedto reconcile monarchicaland
aristocraticinstitutionswith the newly powerful idea of democraticlegitimation opened up by revolutionaryFrance,they began a long history of struggle
between legislaturesthathad some degreeof democraticlegitimationand some
recognized power, and those whose power derived from birth, tradition,and
God. The republicanismof Franceand its satelliteswas crushedexternally,but
only afterit hadbeen pushedasideby Napoleon'snew monarchicalorder.Many
nineteenth-centuryEuropeancountrieshad some sort of parliament,but monarchsoften retainedthe power to name and dismiss ministers,drawup budgets,
and ordertheir armies into combat;in many places, elected chambersshared
power with "upper"chamberscomposed of hereditaryor monarchicallyappointed members.
In oppositionto claims of tradition,Jeffersonheld thatgovernmentwas exclusively at the service of living humanbeings, since "thedead have no rights.
They are nothing;and nothingcannotown something... This corporealglobe,
and everythingupon it, belong to its presentcorporealinhabitantsduringtheir
generation."64
MastersInside the LeatherGuilds of Eighteenth-CenturyBordeaux",paperpresentedto the meetings of the Society for FrenchHistoricalStudies,Lexington,Kentucky,1997. Thatleadershipcould
derive from the consent of the led, ratherthanbe bestowed by higherauthority,would have been a
likely experienceof the crews of piratevessels in the early modernAtlanticworld. Piratecrews not
only elected theircaptains,but were familiarwith countervailingpower (in the forms of the quartermasterand ship's council) and contractualrelationsof individualand collectivity (in the form of
writtenship's articles specifying sharesof booty and rates of compensationfor on-the-jobinjury).
See MarcusRediker,Betweenthe Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: MerchantSeamen,Pirates and the
Anglo-AmericanMaritimeWorld,1700-1750 (New York:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1987), pp.
261-66.
63 For a
very rich treatment,see GordonWood, The Creationof the AmericanRepublic.
64
Thomas Jefferson,"Letterto Samuel Kercheval"(12 July 1816) in The Writingsof Thomas
Jefferson (Washington,D.C.: Thomas JeffersonMemorialAssociation, 1903), v. 15, pp. 42-43.

674
JOHN
MARKOFF
The first groupof countriesto follow the UnitedStatesandFrancein the radical breakfromhereditaryauthoritywere the newly independentstatesof Spanish America.Although these new states are often denigratedfor "merely"aping the NorthAmericanexample, it surely matteredon the world stage thatthe
republicaninitiative-as of, say, 1840-was representedin a whole group of
countries,not a largelyisolated United States.65The Europeof the Congressof
Viennawas not following thatexample at all.
Secret Ballot
Variousvoting mechanismshadlong been known66,but secrecywas not always

favoredby eighteenth-centuryadvocatesof popularsovereignty.67In the view
of some, the vote was only appropriatefor those of independentconscience; a
truecitizen proudlyvoted in public.As the GirondinLouvetput it: "Decreethat
we shall not write;decree that each shall speak up firmly 'I am so-and-so and
I name so-and-so.' That's the ballot worthy of free men."68Others held that
written ballots lent themselves to fraudulentvote counts.69But still others
claimed thatpublic voting made elections into acts of hierarchiesor collectivities, ratherthan a summationof individualwills. For some, this was a recommendation:in some versions of this view those down below would defer to the
voting choices of theirbetters;in otherversions,communitieswould makecollective choices.70Montesquieuheld open voting essential to maintainthe rule
65 The
easy demonstrationthat Latin America'sdemocraticinstitutionswere characterizedby
clientilism, corruption,fraudand violence is hardlyever put in a comparativecontext in which actual electoralpracticesin nineteenthcenturyNorthAmericaor Europe-not supposedideals-are
taken as the benchmark.Such comparativestudies are long overdue. It may be the case that during, the 1820s and 1830s, for example, clientilistic voting was more characteristicof Brazil than
Bavaria, violence more likely to accompany attemptsto exercise rights that existed on paper in
Chile thanKentucky,and fraudulentvote counts more characteristicof VenezuelathanVenice but
it is far from obvious. Consider,for example, Alain Garrigou'sdiscussion of nineteenth-century
Frenchvoting in Le Voteet la vertu: Commentles francais sont devenus dlecteurs(Paris:Presses
de la FondationNationaledes Sciences Politiques, 1992).
66 Secret ballots were used in some medievalecclesiastical elections, which suggests the possibility of the preservationof electoraltechniquesfrom antiquity(Moulin,"Techniqueselectorales,"
p. 144).
67 Alexis de Tocquevillecontendedin 1835 that secret ballots were unimportantfor American
democratssince "therehas been too little dangerin a manmakinghis vote publicto createany great
desire to conceal it" (cited in Bourkeand DeBats, "IdentifiableVoting,"p. 261).
68 Quoted in Gueniffey,Le nombreet la raison, p. 310.
69 For some examples from colonial NorthAmerica, see RobertJ. Dinkin, Votingin Provincial
America:A Studyof Elections in the ThirteenColonies, 1689-1776 (Westport,Conn.:Greenwood
Press, 1977), p. 135.
70 The following works treatthese issues in the English context:Paul F. Bourke and DonaldA.
America:TowardA Comparisonof Britainand
DeBats, "IdentifiableVotingin Nineteenth-Century
the United States before the Secret Ballot,"Perspectivesin AmericanHistory 11, 1977-1978, pp.
259-88; David C. Moore, The Politics of Deference:A Studyof the Mid-NineteenthCenturyEnglish Political System(Hassocks:HarvesterPress, 1976);T.J.Nossiter,Influence,Opinionand Political Idioms in ReformedEngland: Case Studiesfrom the North-east, 1832-1874 (New York:
Harperand Row, 1974). For French revolutionarydebates and shifting practices, see Gueniffey,
pp. 281-316.

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
675
of enlightenedelites over dangerousplebeians:"by renderingthe suffragesecret in the Roman republic, all was lost; it was no longer possible to direct a
populace that sought its own destruction."71Whetherthose who thought of
themselves as democratsfavored open or secret voting was in parta question
of the changing general notions of "democracy,"and in parta question of immediatecircumstances.In Oregon,for example,the politicalelite seems to have
maintainedopen voting duringthe AmericanCivil War,in orderto stifle potentialdisloyalty to the Union.72Illinois, to take anotherinstance,adoptedoral
voting in 1818, ended it in 1819, reinstitutedit in 1821, ended it again in 1823,
opted for it yet again in 1829, and terminatedit in 1848.73
One of the reasonswhy a writtenballot mightbe associatedwith aristocracy,
ratherthandemocracy,was the absence of organizedpartiesand the generalillegitimacy of open election-contestingactions. Frenchrevolutionaries,for example, had no legitimateelection-contestingorganizationsand no election bureaucracyto draw up lists of candidates:voters could not pick colored ballots,
or check off symbols or names on preparedsheets of paper,but were expected
to offer a namealoudor in writing.Undersuchcircumstancesa mandatorywritten ballot, secretor otherwise,would exclude the illiterateand would largelybe
desiredor condemnedfor thatreason.Frenchdemocratsoften arguedthatpreservingopen voice voting was an essentialweapon againstaristocracy.74
In France,moreover,the revolutionaries'electoral traditionbegan with the
convening of assemblies to draw up lists of grievances, as well as to elect
deputiesto higherbodies in a multistepprocess. This imparteda collective flavor to voting thatwas retainedthroughthe entirerevolutionaryperiod.The constitutionof 1793, for example-the earliest moment in the history of modern
democracyof legislated universalmanhoodsuffrage-calls for voting to take
place in primaryassemblies that elect delegates to higher bodies; at those primary assemblies, citizens were to choose between oral and writtenvoting.75
The historicalrangeof electoralprocedurescould vary enormouslyin openness/closedness: in nineteenth-centuryEngland,votes were writtendown and
later published; in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, voting was often public and
oral; in the twentieth-centurySoviet Union, a voter had the option of a secret
ballot, but to choose to enter the voting booth was tantamountto a confession
of dissidence76;in many times and places, written ballots were identifiable
7'
Montesquieu,The Spiritof the Lawvs,v. 1, p. 12.
72 Bourke and DeBats, "Identifiable

Voting,"p. 273
73 Bourkeand DeBats, "IdentifiableVoting,"p. 270
74 Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution;

Gueniffey, Le nonbre et la raison.
75
33.
Duverger, Constitutions, p.
Alex Pravda,"Electionsin the CommunistPartyStates,"in Guy Hermet,RichardRose, and

Alain Rouquie, Elections WithoutChoice (New York:Wiley, 1978), p. 177. The dominantWhigs
of Massachusettsin 1853 crucially modified a two year old law requiringballots to be placed in
envelopes, by makingthe requestfor such an envelope a voter's option (Wigmore,AustralianBallot, p. 26).
76

676
JOHN
MARKOFF
(easily distinguishable,for example, if differentlycolored paper represented

differentcandidatesor if political partiesdistributedtheir own ballots).77The
task of tracingthe history of voting forms is complicatedby the possibility of
non-uniformprocedures,not to mention the frequentgap between legislative
enactmentsand discrepantpractices.Although France'sconstitutionof 1848,
for example, requireda secret ballot, the effective achievementof secrecy in
thatcountryshouldbe datedfrom 1913, when voting booths were mandated.78
No country effectively and uniformly required the secret ballot before
Britain'sAustraliancolonies, and more specifically Victoria and South Australia( 1856).79Recently-establishedVictoriahadlittle in the way of established
electoral tradition,and much in the way of social turbulence.The secret ballot
idea may have been carriedto Australiaby immigrantswith experienceof it in
some of Britain'sdistricts.80A more importantsource was probablytransported Britishworkersin the towns and gold fields, who had carriedwith them the
program of the Chartist movement (including secret balloting). Australia's
identity as the model for this practicewas firm enough that in debates on voting mechanismsin England,the United States, and LatinAmerica,the use of a
publicly-providedballot thatwas markedin secretbecame known as the "Australianballot."81 In the 1870s and 1880s, several Europeancountriesfollowed
suit.82A wave of U.S. locations followed startingwith Louisville, Kentuckyin
1888.83Indiana,Montana,andMassachusettsrequiredit statewidein 1888 and
1889; it spreadconsiderablyin the next decade.84
In spite of the Australianlabel, however, a numberof otherplaces had laws
77 At one point in colonial RhodeIsland,for example, writtenballotswere signed on the reverse
side (Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America, p. 137).
78 "Constitution du 4 novembre 1848" in Duverger, Constitutions et documents
politiques,
p. 92; Olivier Duhamel,Aux Urnes, Citoyens(Paris:Editionsdu Mai, 1993).
79 See J.F.H. Wright, Mirror of the Nation's Mind: Australia's Electoral Experiments (Sydney:
Hale and Ironmonger,1980), p. 24 et seq.; Lionel E. Fredman,TheAustralianBallot: TheStory of

an AmericanReform(East Lansing:Michigan State University Press, 1968), pp. 3-11; the background is discussed in I.D. McNaughton,"ColonialLiberalism, 1851-1892," in G. Greenwood,
ed., Australia: A Social and Political History (London: Angus and Robertson, 1955), pp. 98-144.
A leading opponentof the innovationheld it "notonly unconstitutional,but un-English"and added

"no Englishmanwould desire to do that secretly which ought to be done fairly and openly" (quoted in Wright,Mirror,p. 27).
80 For a possible instance, see John H. Wigmore, The Australian Ballot System (Boston: Soule,
1889), p. 2.
81 Althoughmost of the countryadoptedthe secretballot for legislative elections between 1856
and 1859, its use in local elections was a slightly laterdevelopment.WesternAustraliawaited until 1879, which seems to makeNew Zealandthe firstplace actuallyto institutionalizesecrecy at the
national level (1870). Spencer D. Albright, The American Ballot (Washington,DC: American
Council on Public Affairs, 1942); The Modern Encyclopedia of Australia and New Zealand (Syd-
ney: Horwitz-Graham,1964), p. 129.

82 Britain acted in 1872, Belgium in 1877, Luxembourgin 1879 (Albright,AmericanBallot,
p. 24).
83 Kentuckymaintainedoral voting in ruralareasuntil 1891 (Bourkeand DeBats, "Identifiable
Voting",p. 270 n. 2).
84
Albright, American Ballot, pp. 26-27.

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
677
on the books at an earlierdate. In Colombia, secret ballots have been the formal rule since the constitutionof 1853, althoughscholarsquestion the extent
of enforcementof these provisions, particularlysince political partiesdistributed their own ballots until 1988.85
Extension of Suffrage: The Propertyless86
This is a difficult matterto assess, because many countrieshave both national

andlocal elections to consider;in some countries,like the UnitedStatesorAustralia,state or provincialelections must be consideredas well. It is also sometimes difficult to distinguishbetween the voting rules in law and actualpractice, particularlyin ruralregionsfarfromthe scrutinyof the centralgovernment
andurbanjournalists.Finally,systems of multistageelections may have greater
restrictionsat higher stages.
The French constitutionof 1793 seems to be the first attemptto eliminate
propertyor wealth qualificationsat the nationallevel. It supersededthe constitution of 1791, which had establisheda minimal tax paymentfor participants
in primaryelectoral assemblies (but a higher payment for second-stage electors).87The constitutionof 1793, however, never went into effect (althoughit
was ratifiedby a referendumwith broadsuffrage).By the early nineteenthcentury many of the states of the new United States had eliminatedsuch requirements for white men. By 1825 all but three states had universal suffrage for
white men.88Switzerland'sProtestantcantonsliberalizedmale suffragein the
1830s by reducing-but not necessarilyeliminating-tax thresholds(although
sometimestherewere otherrestrictions).89In Geneva,the requiredtax payment
85
See "Colombia"in DieterNohlen, ed., EnciclopediaElectoralLatinoamericanay del Caribe
(San Jose, Costa Rica: InstitutoInteramericanode Derechos Humanos, 1993), p. 139; Jonathan
HartlynandArturoValenzuela,"Democracyin LatinAmerica Since 1930,"in Leslie Bethell, ed.,
The CambridgeHistory of LatinAmerica (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), v. 6,
part2, pp. 129- 30. David Bushnell finds thatthe elections of the 1850s were sometimescontrolled
by local bosses, but largely accordedwith the official rules ("VoterParticipationin the Colombian
Election of 1856," HispanicAmericanHistorical Review51, 1971, pp. 238-49).
86 The
precise mechanismfor such exclusions was often the setting of a minimumtax rate. I
omit here a separatetreatmentof literacy exclusions, althoughthey have been very importantin
some countries.UnderEcuador's 1929 constitution,for example, "citizens"had to readand write,
thereby excluding sixty four percentof adults from voting rights. See Rafael QuinteroL6pez, El
mito del populismo en el Ecuador:Andlisis de los fundamentosdel Estado ecuatoriano moderno
(1895-1934) (Quito:UniversidadCentraldel Ecuador,1983), p. 226.
87
Duverger,Constitutions,pp. 8-9, 32-33. The tension inherentin combininggrassrootsparticipationin collective assemblies with the delegationof effective decision-makingto a higherlevel is characteristicof the difficult relationship between direct democracy and representation
throughoutthe entirerevolutionaryperiod in France.See Gueniffey,Le nombreet la raison.
88 GordonWood, The Radicalismof the AmericanRevolution,pp. 294-95. The pioneers,Vermont and New Hampshire,eliminatedpecuniaryrequirementsbefore 1800 (LauraJ. Scalia, America's JeffersonianExperiment:RemakingState Constitutions,1820-1850 [DeKalb, IL: Northern
Illinois UniversityPress, 1999]).
89 ValentinGitermann,Geschichte der Schweiz (Thayngen:Augustin-Verlag,1941), pp. 44748. For a contemporarysurvey of cantonalvariationin democraticpracticeas of 1843 (the author
distinguishessix types of cantonalgovernment),see A.-E. Cherbuliez,De la ddmocratieen Suisse

678
JOHN
MARKOFF
was reducedin 1819, againin 1832 and 1834, and eliminatedin 1842. At those
moments,one can see the erosion of the tax thresholdfrom the most restrictive
sixty-threeflorins set in the post-Bonaparteconstitutionof 1814, to twentyfive, fifteen, seven, and finally zero, although the 1842 constitution still excluded those recently on public assistance. In 1847 yet anotherconstitution
droppedthis final restriction.90Following the defeatof its conservativecantons
in a civil warin 18479 -a triggerof the revolutionarywave of 1848-Switzerland's new constitutionbecame the first in Europeto eliminate such requirements at the nationallevel.92France'srevolutionaryconstitutionof 1848 eliminatedpropertyqualificationsfor men a few weeks afterthe Swiss constitution
was adopted,but a more restrictiveset of rules was soon reintroduced,before
France'sSecond Republicwas shut down by its elected president.93
There are also some precocious cases in Latin America. An 1812 election
held in Mexico City seems to have had very wide suffragein practice,because
officials did not enforce the legal restrictions.94In principle,the Cadiz Constitutionof 1812-under which colonial elections wereheld-provided wide suffrage for non-Blackmen.95In defiance of the standardimage of LatinAmericans looking to Europefor models of democraticprogress,we find a Mexican
liberallooking to Europefor models of how to restrictpopularparticipationin
electoral politics.96For conservativeforces in independentSpanishAmerica,
the Europeshapedby the Congressof Viennawas a sourceof guidanceon how
to put a cat back into a bag.
An 1821 post-independencelaw in BuenosAires provinceprovidedfor "universal"suffragefor free men97;but servants,day laborers,and illiterateswere
(Paris:Cherbuliez,1843), v. 2. Cantonalconstitutionsfrom the 1830s and 1840s arefound in Ludwig Snell, Handbuchdes SchweizerischenStaatsrechts(Zurich:Drell, 1844), v. 2.
90 William E. Rappard,L'Avesementde la democratie modernea Geneve (Geneva: Jullien,
1942), pp. 83, 143, 191-92, 214, 316, 410-11. By contrast,Zuricheliminatedthe tax threshhold
in 1831 (Rappard,L'Individuet l'dtat dans l'dvolutionconstitutionellede la Suisse [Zurich:Editions Polygraphiques,1936], p. 195).
91 JoachimRemak,A VeryCivil War:The Swiss SonderbundWarof 1847 (Boulder,CO: Westview Press, 1993).
92 Article 63 of the 1848 constitutionenfranchisedthose "notexcluded from the right of active
citizenshipby the legislationof the cantonin which he has his domicile."This would seem to leave
open the possibilityof cantonalrestrictions.(See "Constitutionfederalede la confederationsuisse
de la Suisse [Boudry:Edidu 12 septembre1848,"in WilliamE. Rappard,La Constitutionfededdrale
tions de la Baconiere, 1948], p. 431). In light of post-1848 exclusionaryprovisions in some cantons, scholars differ in their assessments of Swiss democracyat mid-century.See, for example,
DietrichRueschemeyer,Evelyne HuberStephens,and John D. Stephens, CapitalistDevelopment
and Democracy(Cambridge:Polity Press, 1992), p. 85; GoranTherborn,"TheRule of Capitaland
the Rise of Democracy,"New Left Reviewno. 103, 1977, p. 16.
93 RaymondHuard,Le Suffrageuniversel en France (1848-1946) (Paris:Aubier, 1991); Duverger,Constitutions,p.92.
94 RichardWarren,"The Will of the Nation: Political Participationin Mexico, 1808-1836,"
paperpresentedat the meetings of the LatinAmericanStudiesAssociation, Los Angeles, 1992.
95 Excluded were those of Africandescent, the unemployed,and domestic servants.
96 TorcuatoS. Di Tella, National Popular Politics in Early IndependentMexico, 1820-1847
(Albuquerque:Universityof New Mexico Press, 1996), pp. 97-98.
97 This seems to be
following a precedentset in an election of 1812, accordingto TulioHalperfn-

WHERE
AND WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
679
excluded five years later.98In the militarizedclimate thatemergedfrom the independence wars, a substantialnumberof voters were government soldiers,
leading the opposition to complain of the grantof "the suffrageand the lance
to the proletarian."One might wonderaboutthe climate of intimidationfueled
by such armedvoters, but the government'scandidatesdid sometimes lose at
the polls. In shortorder,however,the electoral system was utilized for plebiscitarianlegitimationby JuanManuel de Rosas.99
Therewas no "Argentine"governmentto speakof at this point, althoughdevelopments in Buenos Aires and other provinceshad considerablemutualimpact. The frontierprovince of Entre Rios had provided voting rights for free
adultmales even earlier(1820), althoughit adoptedsome restrictionstwo years
later.The provinceof Corrientesadoptedsimilarrightsin 1821. NorthernSalta
provincealso enfranchisedfree adultmales in 1823, andUruguayfollowed suit
in 1825 (in indirectelections), but abandonedbroadsuffragetwo years later.0?
Brazil's constitutionof 1824 providedfor such broadparticipationat the base
of a multistageprocess, despite its explicit and implicit exclusions, that even
underthe more restrictiverevised law of 1846 conservativeBrazilianscould
lament "universalsuffrage."'0'
Extension of Suffrage: Women
At the outsetof the moderneraof democratization,women were not completely

deprivedof the vote. The absence of codified suffragerules may have permitted small numbersof women to seek the vote, and election officials to permit
them;corporatenotions of representationentitledfemale fiefholdersand members of convents to be representedin France'sEstates-Generalof 1789 through
male surrogates,while the widows of urbanguild mastersand female heads of
ruralhouseholds could attendtown and village assemblies in person. In early
post-independenceAmerica a small numberof women could also vote. Even
where laws permittedwomen's voting, if only by silence, informaldefinitions
of women's roles seem to have effectively kept participationlow.'02 The sysDonghi, Politics, Economics and Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period (Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversityPress, 1975), p. 361.

98 See David Bushnell, Reformand Reactionin the Platine Provinces,1810-1852 (Gainesville,
FL: Universityof FloridaPress, 1983), pp. 22-23.
99 Halperin-Donghi,Politics, Economics,and Society,pp. 360-64.
100
Bushnell, Reformand Reaction,pp. 34, 36-37, 43, 134-36.
10 RichardGraham'sexemplarystudyshows thatin 1870, when the 1846 law was still in force,
more thanhalf of free adult men had the right to vote. Since the languageof the 1824 constitution
suggests an electorateat least as large, it seems probablethat in the 1820s Brazil had a more generous suffragefor free males thanalmost anywherein Europe.See RichardGraham,Patronageand
Politics in NineteenthCentury,Brazil (Stanford:StanfordUniversityPress, 1990), pp. 101-09.
102 In the elections for the Estates-General,for example, those women entitled to participate
(such as widows of membersof urbanguilds) only very rarelyactuallydid so. See Michel Naudin,
"Les elections aux 6tats-generauxpour la ville de Nimes," Annales historiquesde la Revolution
francaise 56, 1984, pp. 497-98; the official rules for the Estates-Generalcan be found in Jacques
Cadart,Le Regimeelectoral des etats gednrauxde 1789 et ses origines (1302-1614) (Paris:Sirey,
1952).

680
JOHN
MARKOFF
andthe craftingof new statecontematizingworkof Frenchrevolutionaries103

stitutionsin the U.S. meantthatthe modem democraticera virtuallybegan by
completing and systematizingthe disfranchisementof women.104
New Zealand was the first country to secure women's voting rights in national elections (in 1893).105 Australiafollowed suit in 1902 (althoughwomen
could not vote in all elections in all states until 1908). Perhapsthe shortageof
women in these two frontiersocieties and the desire to attractwomen immigrants from Europe played a role in this decision, especially for those who
sought to infuse these male-dominatedlands with the civilized values that
women were felt to embody. This hypothesis is buttressedby a state-by-state
look at the achievementof voting rights by women in the United States. The
first places where women voted on an equal footing with men were the western territoriesof Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870), followed by the western
states of Colorado(1893) and Idaho(1896).
Whatever the precise engine that achieved suffrage for women, it was a
process that moved from economically and politically marginalareasto more
powerfulcenters.The pioneeringplaces in the Pacific-in the world, in factwere part of the British Empire, and hardly sovereign states; the first places
within the U.S. were, at the time, territories,and not even full-fledged states.In
North America, anotherBritish dominion, Canada,preceded the the United
States at the nationallevel.106 In Britainitself, women householderswere enfranchisedand gained the vote in local parliamentaryelections in 1881 in yet
anothertiny piece of empire-the Isle of Man.107The earliestlargeterritoryin
103 In the nationalreferendumon the Frenchconstitutionof 1793 the votes of women (andchildren) were countedin a few places, even thoughthe constitutionon which they voted did not recognize female (or childhood)suffrage.Perhapssome election officials took very seriously the notion that priorto the sovereign people's consent to a constitution,no authorityhad any legitimate
rightto restrictpoliticalaction. See Baticle, "Leplebiscite sur la Constitutionde 1793,"Revolution
francaise 57, 1909, pp. 511-12.
104 For some instancesof woman's voting in seventeenth-century
English elections, see Derek
Hirst, The Representativeof the People? Votesand Votingin England under the Early Stuarts
(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1975), pp. 18-19.On prerevolutionaryvillages in Burgundy, see RobertM. Schwartz,"Beyondthe ParishPump:The Politicizationof the Peasantryof
Burgundy,1750-1850," in Michael Hanagan,Leslie Page Moch, andWaynete Brake,eds., Challenging Authority:The Historical Studyof ContentiousPolitics (Minneapolis:Universityof Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 120-35. The Americansituationis treatedin Dinkin, Votingin Provincial
America,pp. 29-30. For some nineteenth-centuryinstancesof women voting or attemptingto vote
in LatinAmerica,combattedby moreexplicitly exclusionarylegislation, see Luis Vitale, La Mitad
invisible de la historia latinoamericana. El protaganismo social de la mujer (Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana/Planeta,1987), pp. 107-10.
105 Patricia Grimshaw, Women'sSuffrage in New Zealand (Auckland:Auckland University
Press, 1972). But in 1838 tiny PitcairnIsland, settled by the mutinouscrew of H.M.S. Bountyand
theirTahitiancompanions,adopteda constitutionclearly specifying that theirmagistratebe elected by "everynative born on the island, male or female." See WalterBrodie, Pitcairn'sIsland and
the Islandersin 1850 (London:Whitaker& Co., 1851), p. 84.
106 CarolineDaley and Melanie Nolan, eds., Suffrageand Beyond:InternationalFeministPerspectives (New York:New YorkUniversityPress, 1994), p. 350.
107 Melissa A. Butler and
Jacqueline Templeton, "The Isle of Man and the First Vote for

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
68I
Europeto follow the Pacific island-nationswas Finland,which in 1906 was still

a partof the Russian Empire.Finlandwas not followed by the economic, political and militarycenters of Europeanpower, but by its neighbors,Norway
and Denmark,in 1913 and 1915.108
In LatinAmerica,it was not the wealthiestor most powerfulstates,nor those
whose political and intellectualelites were most profoundlyconnected to Europe, that first recognized women's voting rights, but Ecuadorin 1929109(although the constitutionof 1946 made voting "obligatoryfor men and optional
for women":a distinctionradicallyaffecting actualparticipationuntil the constitutionof 1967 made voting "obligatoryfor men and women"10).
Extension of Suffrage: Racial or Ethnic Categories
This is an extremely difficult matterto assess, and I will not attempta synthesis here. Racially defined groups may be excluded from genuine participation
by terroras well as by law, as Tocquevillealreadynotedin the early nineteenthI
centuryUnited States. ' Citizenshiprightsmay be more securefor a dominant
in
as
constitutionof post-Communistcentraland easternEuropein
staatsvolk,
the 1990s."2 In the 1990s as well, there are millions of temporary,semipermanent,andpermanentresidentswith limitedrightsin WesternEuropeandthe
United States. For the United States, we would have to considerthe disenfranchisement of free blacks, northernand southern,priorto the Civil War'13; the
ReconstructionAmendments;the renewed deprivationof rights by local law
and violence; and the post-WorldWarTwo civil rights struggle,including the
VotingRightsAct of 1965. Australiahas a correspondinghistoryof limitations
on aboriginalrights 14, andSouthAfricathe progressivedisenfranchisementof
Women," Womenand Politics 4, 1984, pp. 33-47. English women began acquiringthe vote for
various local offices in 1869; see PatriciaHollis, Ladies Elect: Womenin English Local Government, 1865-1914 (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1987), pp. 7-10.
108 Daley and Nolan, Suffrageand Beyond,p. 349.
109 Constitucidn
politica de la Repuiblicadel Ecuador (Quito: Talleres Graficos Nacionales,
1929), arts. 13, 18. Ketty Romo Leroux argues that Ecuador'sconstitutionof 1897 actually deserves credit for "suppressingthe genderrestriction,"implicitly allowing literatewomen to vote,
as the State Council laterruled(La mujer:Dura luchapor la igualdad [Guayaquil:Universidadde
Guayaquil,1983], pp. 196-97).
110 Federico Trabucco,Constitucionesde la Reptiblicadel Ecuador (Quito:UniversidadCentral-Editorial Universitaria,1975), pp. 409, 472. Even withoutthis very significantqualification,
the 1929 constitutiononly enfranchisedthe literate,which excluded more women thanmen (Constituci6npolitica [ 1929], art. 13; Quintero,El mito del populismoen el Ecuador,pp. 239-49).
"J "Inalmost all the stateswhere slaveryhas been abolished,the Negroes have been given electoral rights, but they would come forwardto vote at the risk of their lives." Tocqueville seems to
understatethe legal barriersthat the extralegal threatcomplemented.See Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America (GardenCity, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 343; Leon F. Litwack, North
of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
RobertM. Hayden,"ConstitutionalNationalismin the FormerlyYugoslavRepublics,"Slavic Review 51, 1992, pp. 654-73.

3
1 Litwack, Northof Slavery;IraBerlin, Slaves WithoutMasters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York:PantheonBooks, 1974), pp. 90-91, 190-91.
114 The indigenous
peoples of Australiagot the franchisein 1962, but were not underthe same
112

682
JOHN MARKOFF
those non-whiteswho at one point had voting rights. 15In this context the enfranchisementof New Zealand'sMaorisin 1867 is noteworthy.16The history
of voting rights for the original inhabitantsof the United States is unusually
complex, with differences among states and tribes in the natureof barriersto
voting. Some stateconstitutions,for example,requiredvotersto be "civilized,"
which was understoodto exclude Indians unless they were members of the
"FiveCivilized Tribes."'17 A fullertreatmentof this subjectwould have to consider such topics as the inclusion and exclusion of Indiansand Blacks in postindependence Latin America, and post-emancipationpractices in Europe's
Caribbeancolonies. 18
Personal Independence
The image of the individualcitizenexercisingindependentjudgmentin castinga

vote is not compatiblewithties of personaldependence.19 At the onsetof the deruralmajoritiesin muchof Europewere subject,to varymocraticbreakthrough,
ing degrees,to the inheritedclaimsof lords;in the westernhemispherelargenumbers were slaves.120The generalhistoriesof both emancipationsare fairlyclear.
Several small WesternEuropeanstates developed plans in the eighteenth
century for permittingpeasantsto buy their freedom from seigneurialrights:
Baden, Denmark,Savoy. Savoy became the model for the initial Frenchrevolutionary legislation of 1789. Rebellious French peasants pushed the new
regime to go muchfurther,andby 1793 seigneurialrightswere abolishedwithout indemnity-a policy carriedfar afield by advancingFrencharmies.Other
statesdevelopedtheirown plansto immunizetheircountriesagainstthe French
contagion. Rural emancipations multiplied during the nineteenth century,
especially underthreatof peasantinsurrectionin the revolutionaryclimate of
the early 1830s and, even more so in 1848-49. 21
compulsoryvoting law as whites until 1984. See Ian McAllister,"Australiaand New Zealand,"in
SeymourMartinLipset, ed., Encyclopediaof Democracy(Washington,D.C.: CongressionalQuarterly, 1995), v. 1, p. 100.
115 HermannGiliomee, "The Non-Racial Franchise and Afrikanerand Coloured Identities,
1910-1994," AfricanAffairs94, 1995, pp. 199-225.
116 Maorisvoted in special electoraldistrictsuntil 1975, when they got the option of registering
in the same districtsas whites. See McAllister,"Australiaand New Zealand,"p. 101.
117 Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920
(Lincoln,NE: Universityof NebraskaPress, 1984), pp. 231-34.

118For example, see Mavis ChristineCampbell,TheDynamicsof Changein a Slave Society:A
Sociopolitical Historyof the Free Coloredsof Jamaica, 1800-1865 (London:AssociatedPresses,
1976).
119 Thus many systems of restrictedsuffrageexcluded domestic servants.Lack of personalindependencewas an importanttheoreticalrationalefor exclusions of wage laborers,the poor, illiterates,the mentally incompetent,incarceratedcriminals,militarypersonnel,clergy, lesser nobles,
andwomen, all of which have been practicedsomewhere;it is still the rationalefor excludingchildreneverywhere.
120 For a recentcomparativetreatment,see ArthurL. Stinchcombe,Sugar IslanidSlaveryin the
Age of Enlightenment:The Political Economyof the CaribbeaniWorld(Princeton:PrincetonUniversity Press, 1995).
121 JeromeBlum, The End
of the Old Orderin Rural Europe (Princeton:PrincetonUniversity

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
683
If the Frencharmedforces gave a criticalboost to ruralemancipationson the

Europeancontinent,the BritishNavy played a significant,but different,role in
the abolitionof slavery in the Westernhemisphere.Slave resistance,including
flight and rebellion, had long troubledcolonial slavery when the antislavery
mobilizations in Britain itself led to terminationof the British slave trade in
1807 22, following-and to some extent encouragedby-Denmark's pioneering abolitionof 1803 (thatcarriedout an edict of 1792).123
Some of the newly independentU.S. states were developing free-soil constitutions124, but the nationalconstitutionacceptedslavery;the tradein slaves
was prohibitedas of 1808. RevolutionaryFrance,balancingthe interestsof the
Caribbeanplantocracyandthe merchant-slaversof theAtlanticportson the one
hand,and the increasinglymobilized nonwhitesandnonfreeon the other,abolished slaveryaftersome hesitationin 1794, but laterrescindedit in 1802. More
enduringly,the Haitianrevolutionand the subsequentdefeat of Frenchforces
bent on re-enslavement-along with British and Spanishforces attemptingto
seize Haiti-showed the power and threatof slaves freeing themselves. In the
SpanishAmericanrevolutionsof the early nineteenthcentury,the rebel Creole
elite andthe Spanishboth bid for slave supportwith promisesof emancipation.
Many slaves were freed in the course of the independencewars, establishing
momentum for the subsequent piecemeal ending of slavery in the Spanish
American republics.'25Chile pioneered this movement in 1811 with a "free
womb" law, followed by the first complete abolition in SpanishAmerica in
1823.126 British colonial slavery was ended by several enactments between
1834 and 1838.127 Withabolitionachievedin the BritishCaribbean,the British
attemptedto organizeinternationalaction againstthe slave tradeandemployed
theirNavy to help curtailit, hoping to relieve any competitivedisadvantageof
theirown slaveless colonies. 28 (The navies of otherEuropeanpowers particiPress, 1978); Max BruchetL'abolitiondes droits seigneuriauxen Savoie (1761-1793) (Annecy:
Herisson Freres, 1908); John Markoff,TheAbolition of Feudalism:Peasants, Lordsand Legislators in the FrenchRevolution(UniversityPark,PA: Penn State UniversityPress, 1996).
122 While the 1807 act prohibitedimportationof slaves fromAfrica, Britishcolonies could still
buy slaves from each otheruntil 1825 (Blackburn,Overthrowof Colonial Slavery,p. 435).
123 Svend E. Green-Pedersen,"TheEconomic ConsiderationsBehind the DanishAbolition of
the Negro Slave Trade,"in HenryA. Gemeryand Jan S. Hogendorn,The UncommonMarket:Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade(New york:Academic Press, 1979), pp.
399-418. Like subsequentabolitions, the Danish law did not fully control realities:some slavers
got permissionto operatepastthe law's deadlineandotherscontinuedto operateillegally. See Isaac
Dookhan.A History of the VirginIslands of the UnitedStates (Kingston:Canoe Press, 1994), pp.
134-37.
124 The initiator was Vermont in 1777, followed by Massachusetts in 1780. See Seymour
Drescher,"Abolitionism,"in SeymourMartinLipset, ed., Encyclopediaof Democracy (Washington, DC: CongressionalQuarterly,1995), v. 1, p. 6.
125 Robin Blackburn,The Overthrowof Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London:Verso,1988),
pp. 331-79, 509-10.
126 Blackburn,The Overthrowof Colonial Slavery,pp. 354, 358-59.
127
Blackburn,The Overthrowof Colonial Slavery,pp. 419-72.
128 Since British policy often also aimed at good relationswith the majorslave powers, whose
sense of sovereigntywas easily violated by unilateralanti-slavetradeaction, the mix of interstate

684
JOHN
MARKOFF
pated in varying degrees.) Despite its early, aborted emancipation,France

didn't follow suit in its colonies until the revolutionof 1848. The Dutch were
later still, and the most dynamic,independentstate in the Westernhemisphere
only emancipatedits slaves by proclamationin the courseof a bloody civil war,
completed by post-war constitutionalamendments.Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto
Rico were the last westernhemisphericholdouts.
OBSERVATIONS
If this sketch of breakthroughmoments in democracyis reasonablyaccurate,

then severalobservationscan be made.Let us note firstof all thatcountriesthat
were innovative in some ways may have been less innovative or even downrightlaggardin others.Switzerland,which was earlyto eliminatepropertyqualification for voting, was late in the enfranchisementof women.129The United
States was innovativein a numberof ways, yet had a significantminoritywithout securevoting rightsin a largepartof its territoryinto the 1960s. One might
say the same of Australia,early in ballot secrecy and woman's rights, but late
to enfranchiseits aboriginalpopulation.Polandwas an importantinnovatorin
constitutionalismin the 1790s, but had little in the way of democracyfor most
of its subsequenthistory,and was not even an independentstate for much of
thattime. Francewas early in several short-livedinnovations,and was a major
diffuserof innovationin the 1790s, but lagged behindotherEuropeancountries
in adopting an effective secret ballot (1913), and was even more laggard in
women's suffrage(1944). England,well aheadof the democraticbreakthroughs
of the late eighteenthcentury,nourishedconceptionsof popularsovereigntyin
the seventeenthcentury.It was also well-knownfor its electoralpolitics-with
very restrictedsuffrage-from well before the startingpoint of this study130;
but it was quite late to adaptan equal franchisefor all voters.131 Some of Arcooperationandconflict was complex. See David Brion Davis, Slaveryand HumanProgress (New
York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1984), pp. 231-58; David Eltis, EconomicGrowthand the Ending
of the TransatlanticSlave Trade(New York:Oxford University Press, 1987); E. Phillip LeVeen,
British Slave TradeSuppressionPolicies, 1821-1865: Impactand Implication(New York:Arno
Press, 1977); Serge Daget, "BritishRepressionof the Illegal FrenchSlave Trade,"in Gemery and
Hogendorn,The UncommonMarket,pp. 419-42; W. E. F. Ward,TheRoyalNavy and the Slavers:
The Suppressionof the AtlanticSlave Trade(London:PantheonBooks, 1970); ChristopherLloyd,
TheNavy and the Slave Trade:The Suppressionof the AfricanSlave Tradein the NineteenthCentury(London:Longmans,Green, 1949);Leslie Bethell, TheAbolitionof the BrazilianSlave Trade:
Brazil, Britain and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity
Press, 1970); Raymond Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Croom Helm,
1987).
129 Enfranchisedat the nationallevel in 1971, Swiss women still could not vote in one reluctant
canton'selections untilthe Swiss SupremeCourtoverturnedits proceduresin 1990 (Remak,A Very
Civil War,p. 201 n. 4).
130 EdmundS. Morgan,Inventingthe People: TheRise of Popular Sovereigntyin Englandand
America(New York:Norton, 1988).
131 Universitygraduatesand those with businesses got a second vote until 1948. See ThomasT.
MackieandRichardRose, TheInternationalAlmanacof ElectoralHistory(Washington,DC: CongressionalQuarterly,1991), p. 439.

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
685
gentina'sprovincesintermittentlytriedout property-freevoting rightsfor white

men in the first half of the nineteenthcentury,but these same provinces sometimes imposed restrictionson free Blacks. Colombia's constitutionsnever restrictedBlack voters(at least on paper),butmaintainedpropertyor wealthqualifications until 1853.132 Colombia managed to be both early and late in
enfranchisingwomen: the soon-reversedenfranchisementin Velez province
was extremely early (1853), but on the nationallevel Colombianwomen were
the next to last in Latin America to get the vote.133The importantconceptual
point is that democratizationis not a single thing, but a collection of many
things born in differentplaces. The juxtapositionof institutionshas made the
historyof democracylook morelike a frequentlyshakenkaleidoscopethanlike
an effort to realize a single blueprint.Recall, for example, EdmundMorgan's
argumentthatin the U.S. a slave state like Virginiacould be a fount of democratic rhetoricaroundconceptionsof white male citizenship.134
Second, manyof the places thathave figuredin our storyareeitherEuropean
countriesor English-speakingsettlercolonies. But LatinAmericanplaces have
also appearedwith some frequency,although most often as short-lived ventures, or as instances in which the effective implementationof the laws was
questionable.And Latin America is hardly a paragon of regime continuity.
Nonetheless, it seems worthwhileto reopenthe dossier on thatregion's democratichistory,for at least the first half of the nineteenthcentury.
A thirdratherstrikingobservationis thatevery innovationtreatedhere was
initiatedby the late nineteenthcentury,althoughsome were not fully incorporatedinto a redefinedvision of democracyuntil the twentieth.It is not obvious
whethertherehave been any redefinitionalinnovationsin our own time. Internationalmonitoringof elections has become common in the late twentiethcentury, but only in the Third World;effective campaign finance laws are now
widespread,but hardly (yet?) universal. Perhapsthere are other innovations,
slowly diffusing, thatthis survey has missed-or perhapsdemocraticcreativity has become exhausted.135
Fourth,it is evident from this study that there have been differentroutes of
diffusion, endless chains of precursorsand predecessors,and there is much to
debate and explore in tracingthese links. Poland's elective monarchy,an importantelement in thatcountry'sprecociousconstitutionalism,may have been
132
David Bushnell, "El sufragioen la Argentinay en Colombiahasta 1853,"Revistade Historia del Derecho 19, 1968, pp. 16, 19.
133 Bushnell, The
Makingof Modern Colombia,pp. 216-17.
134 Edmund
Morgan,American Slavery,American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York:Norton, 1975).
135 Adam Przeworskilamentsthat"we've had
very little institutionalinnovationduringthe past
two hundredyears"("DemocratizationRevisited,"Items51 [1], 1997, p. 11).Surelywe need more
attentionto the study of innovation.Why have some innovationscome to be universallyaccepted
as elements of democracy (like women's suffrageor ballot secrecy), while others are widely but
not universallyadopted(like mandatoryvoting or proportionalrepresentation)?

686
JOHN MARKOFF
a copy of the Holy RomanImperialmodel, or it may have been influencedby

CentralAsian nomadicmethodsof leadershipchoice. Australia'ssecret ballot
may originate from transportedEnglish radical workersor from a reforming
elite. The precocious inventionof women's suffrageon tiny PitcairnIsland in
1838 comes from whatmysteriousmix of the maritimeworkersstrandedin the
Pacific, the Tahitiansstrandedwith them, and a Britishnaval captain?Was this
developmenta dead end, only coincidentallyrelatedto laterdevelopments,or
did it make a contributionto the subsequentinnovationsin New Zealandand
Australia?
The fifth and most importantobservationis a spatial, not a temporalone.
Most of the innovationsin democratizationover the pasttwo centurieswere pioneeredin countriesotherthanthe greatpowers of the day. Belgium, Holland,
Switzerland,Poland,New Zealand,FinlandandAustraliahave turnedup in our
story.The United States also was a majorinnovatorin constitution-writing,in
political partyformationand legitimation,in the eliminationof propertyqualifications, in fusing representationand democracy.And some of its states were
world leaders in enfranchisingwomen, following only Pitcairnand Velez. In
general,however,the most innovativemomentsin U.S. historyoccurredwhen
it was a collection of towns and farmsscatteredamong forests on the edge of a
vast prairie.
And the paradigmaticmodernizers,the centralcases in the social scientific
literature,Britainand France?England'sinnovationsin the middle of the seventeenthcenturyescaped our study'stemporalbounds(as did the entireearlier
historyof representativeinstitutions).But we may well ask whetherthe particular lacunaeof this essay also served to efface some of that country'sinnovative characterfrom the late eighteenthcenturyonward.Britainseems to have
been early to develop some of the modernvehicles for the formation,mobilization, and expression of the views of citizens, without which the history of
democracy would be vacuous. While the state of comparativeknowledge of
such things makes it impossible to write a comparativehistory of innovations
in social activism, it is conceivable that such a comparison would suggest
Britishpriorityin certainareas.Britainmay well be a majorpioneerin modern,
disorderlypolitics, in the forms and modalitiesby which ordinarypeople have
challenged powerholders.136And Britain'sdense newspapernetworkwas an
early step in the developmentof the communicationsnetworkswhich educated those outside governingcircles aboutthe actions, divisions and agendasof
those on high, while informingthose on high aboutthe actions, divisions and
agendasof those down below.137 Indeed,CharlesTilly suggestsBritainas a sig136 The
impressiveevidence assembledby CharlesTilly shows very importantelements of innovation in collective action in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-centuryEngland.In orderto
trackpatternsof innovationanddiffusionacrossfrontiers,thatworknow needs to be complemented
by parallel studies of Irelandand anglophone North America. See Tilly, Popular Contentionin
GreatBritain, 1758-1834 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1995).
137
Francedid not even have a daily until 1777; the approachto news of its first such papermay

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
687
nificant innovatornot just in the forms of popularcontention,but in its "parliamentarization"-in the degree to which the British parliamentwas the object of mobilization,and popularmobilizationwas a context for parliamentary
politics.138 Between the 1790s and the Reformof 1832, electoralcontests, parliamentaryvoting, and grass-rootsmobilizationsboth lawful anddisruptivebecame intertwined.So Britain may have been a major innovatorin cementing
connections among popular mobilizations and representativeparliamentary
bodies. In short, it may be that this essay short-changesimportantarenas of
Britishinnovation. 39But since the 1780s, andin the particulararenaswe were
able to track here, it was in colonies and ex-colonies like Australia, New
Zealandand the United States (not to mentionPitcairnIsland),and not primarily in the English imperialcore, where English speakersbroke new groundin
actualpractice.
As for France,it seems to have had a mysteriousgenius for short-liveddemocratic innovation:for example, near-universal(if unequal)adultmale participation was proclaimedin 1789, and rescindedin 1791; the manhoodsuffrage
of the constitutionof 1793 was never actualized;the new move to a suffrage
without propertyqualifications in 1848 was restrictedin 1850. Or consider
France'searly, but rescinded, abolition of slavery. On the other hand, France
played a majorrole as a relay centerin the democraticwave of the 1790s, both
enrichingand spreadingconstitutionalism,antiseigneurialism,and the very label of "democrat."Indeed,Frenchrevolutionaryenergies,rhetoric,and armies,
were of vital significance in diffusing new social models; the Frenchrevolutionaries,moreover,enrichedconstitutionalismwith a popularratificatoryreferendumnot employedby theirAmericanandPolishprecursors,radicalizedantiseigneurialism by moving beyond the indemnification of their Savoyard
model, and profoundlyenhanced the prestige of democracy by showing that
AustrianandPrussianarmiescould be beatenby democraticforces, ratherthan
speedily succumbingas in the Low Countriesin the late 1780s (or defeating
one aristocraticpower with significant supportfrom aristocraticallies, as had
the Americans).But the point here is thatAmerica(andto some extent Poland)
be suggestedby its non-coverage,a dozen years later,of the takingof the Bastille. See JeremyPopkin, RevolutionaryNews: ThePress in France, 1789-1799 (Durham,NC: Duke UniversityPress,
1990), pp. 19, 126. See also Jack R. Censer,The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment(London: Routledge, 1994), and JeremyBlack, The English Press in the EighteenthCentury(London:
Croom Helm, 1987).
3s Charles
of PopularContentionin Great Britain, 1758-1834,"
Tilly, "Parliamentarization
Theotryand Society 26, 1997, pp. 245-73.
139 Were we to extend the discussion backwardsin
time, it is not only the parliamentarismof
the British that would need furthertreatment.Dutch and Swiss republicantraditionswould need
more emphasis, as would Scandinavianlandholderassemblies and the political traditionsof other
countriesas well. A very insightfultreatmentof the role of popularmobilizationsin shapingEuropean political institutionsin the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturiesis Wayne P. te Brake's Shaping History: OrdinaryPeople in EuropeanPolitics, 1500-1800 (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1998).

688
JOHN
MARKOFF
providedthe Frenchwith constitutionalmodels, Savoy furnishedthe prototype

for Frenchantiseigneuriallegislation, andthe Low Countriesinjectedthe powerful identityof "democrats"into Frenchdiscourse.
The inescapableconclusion:more often thannot, the dynamiccentersof political creativityin the global historyof democratizationhave been lesser players on the world stage. On the otherhand,they have not been amongthe weakest and poorest nations of the world either.To be sure, the greatpowers have
played a considerablerole in the majortransnationalwaves of democratization,
by militaryimposition,by serving as objects of emulation,by providingmaterial support.'40It is a great theoreticalchallenge to integratethe history of innovationwith the patternof these majorwaves andthe temporallyclusteredcycles of followership,which do seem in significantdegreepushedby the wealthy
and powerful,both throughdeliberatepolicy and as models for emulation.
AN EXPLANATORY
HYPOTHESIS
We might well attemptto explain each instance of a breakthroughtowards

democracyindividually.We could, for example, try to explain Poland'sprecocious constitutionalismas the conjunctionof a powerful and idiosyncraticrepublicantradition,a sense of backwardnessamong its Enlightenment-oriented
elites, and the briefly favorabledistractionof autocraticRussia by its Turkish
war.We might attemptto explain the pioneeringrole of Australiain ballot secrecy by discussing elite concessions to a worker's movement infused with
Chartistnotions which had been carriedto the Pacific by transportedEnglish
radicals.A whole libraryhas been writtenon the U.S. innovations.Indeed,since
differentelements of democratizationhave been pioneeredin differentplaces,
a full and adequate explanation requires the capacity to account for such
specifics.
But althoughit is necessary to root each innovationin its specific time and
place, the generalpatternsuggests some generalprocess at work as well. I want
to offer a speculativeinterpretationin terms of the interestsand capacities of
elites. My simple hypothesis:in wealthy andpowerfulcountries,elites have little motive to seek majorreforms.Indeed, when faced with serious challenges
in the externalarena,elites may well seek to have the costs of declining possibilities borne by their own lower classes, and to do so in the name of the old
traditionthat made the countrygreat. On the other hand, in much poorerand
weakercountriesthe possibilityof radicallyalteringthe nation'sposition is not
very enticing, and the means for majorpolitical reorganizationare scarce. It is
in the middle range of countriesthatelites-seeing the chance of marchingto
140
Markoff, Waves of Democracy; The Great Wave of Democracy in Historical Perspective

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Institute for European Studies, 1995); Samuel P. Huntington, The
Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

WHERE
AND
WHEN
WAS DEMOCRACY
INVENTED?
689
the front of the world stage, fearing the descent into the abyss-are most exposed to a diversity of pushes and pulls, where they have the hope of change
and the resources to bring it about.
These are the places where a great leap into the new is most likely. It is here,
in this middle tier, that elites are most active and effective in institutionalizing
new forms of political and social organization. The ideas of new forms may be
born anywhere, but it is most likely that the marriage of hope and desperation
will bear fruit in this middle tier of countries. Among the poorest and weakest
there is not enough hope, among the richest and most powerful, not enough desperation.
In directing attention to elites, however, it is important to remember that a
good deal (but not all) of what those elites are reacting to is pressure, sometimes including threats, from below.141 The driving force for democratization
has often originated among those who challenged the elites: no history of democratization can neglect the marches, petition drives, strikes, insurrections,
and other forms these challenges assumed. But even when there is a significant
impulse from below, innovative breakthroughs may be easier in lesser powers.
English Chartists may have demanded the secret ballot, but part of the Australian elite made this cause its own under pressure from Australia's workers,
who may well have been strongly influenced by the transported Chartists
among them. The U.S. women's movement was a world pioneer, but national
success in the suffrage campaign lagged considerably behind the early successes achieved far away after the American Women's Christian Temperance
Union replicated itself in New Zealand and Australia. 42
CONCLUSION
The history of democracy is profoundly polycentric, and an exclusive or even

disproportionate focus on the world's centers of wealth and power will miss
much. The history of democracy also shows that democracy is a moving target,
not a static structure. Democracy is a juxtaposition of institutions and practices
with quite different histories. In considering the current democratizing moment
in world history, therefore, or future such moments (should there be any to consider), we would do well to think about more than the degree to which "they"
are more or less successfully emulating "our" institutions, however interesting
and important such processes are. We need to consider the possibility that there
that will
may be still further innovations in what democracy is-innovations
redefine it for the historians of the future. The historical record hardly suggests
with any precision the places where those innovations might be pioneered (or
141 Markoff, Wavesof Democracy.
142 John Markoff,"FromCenterto
Peripheryand Back Again: The Geographyof Democratic

Innovation,"in Michael Hanagan and Charles Tilly, eds., Extending Citizenship,Reconfiguring
States (Lanham,MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 229-46.

690
JOHN
MARKOFF
are being pioneered?).But it does suggest thatit is unlikely such changes will
originatein the currentcentersof world wealthandpower.In this sense today's
struggles for democracyin the Czech Republic, Chile, South Africa, and Taiwan arenot merelyperipheralmattersbest left to theirscholarlyspecialists,but
potentiallyat the center of the historyof the future.


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Where and When Was Democracy Invented?

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Where and When Was Democracy

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The late eighteenthcentury seems to be the moment when people on several

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The Writingof Constitutions

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cation of the powers of monarchand parliament19;wartime constitutionsin

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Prussiaand Austria.The Polish document,moreover,presentsitself as a royal

sity Press, 1982), vol. 1.

31 With two western

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By the time the conservativeforces had triumphedin Europe,the model of

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might in fact be workingfor theirelection behindthe scenes, giving substance

teen States, 1776-1789 (Westport,Conn: GreenwoodPress, 1982), pp. 57-89.

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it undoubtedlycannot be identified with a single moment or a single place.

This was an Americaninnovation.Thomas Paine recognized the significance

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WHERE AND WHEN WAS DEMOCRACY INVENTED?

er, such mechanisms were invariablyjoined with notions of hereditaryright.

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Variousvoting mechanismshadlong been known66,but secrecywas not always

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Montesquieu,The Spiritof the Lawvs,v. 1, p. 12.

72 Bourke and DeBats, "Identifiable

73 Bourkeand DeBats, "IdentifiableVoting,"p. 270

74 Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution;

Alex Pravda,"Electionsin the CommunistPartyStates,"in Guy Hermet,RichardRose, and

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(easily distinguishable,for example, if differentlycolored paper represented

p. 92; Olivier Duhamel,Aux Urnes, Citoyens(Paris:Editionsdu Mai, 1993).

Hale and Ironmonger,1980), p. 24 et seq.; Lionel E. Fredman,TheAustralianBallot: TheStory of

A leading opponentof the innovationheld it "notonly unconstitutional,but un-English"and added

ney: Horwitz-Graham,1964), p. 129.

Albright, American Ballot, pp. 26-27.

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This is a difficult matterto assess, because many countrieshave both national

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At the outsetof the moderneraof democratization,women were not completely

CambridgeUniversityPress, 1975), p. 361.

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andthe craftingof new statecontematizingworkof Frenchrevolutionaries103

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Europeto follow the Pacific island-nationswas Finland,which in 1906 was still

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

RobertM. Hayden,"ConstitutionalNationalismin the FormerlyYugoslavRepublics,"Slavic Review 51, 1992, pp. 654-73.

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The image of the individualcitizenexercisingindependentjudgmentin castinga

(Lincoln,NE: Universityof NebraskaPress, 1984), pp. 231-34.

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If the Frencharmedforces gave a criticalboost to ruralemancipationson the

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