The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870-1990

Major specialists on Europe, the Americas, and Japan explore why democracies succeeded and failed over the past hundred years. Each essay applies the perspective of the social historian - a focus on mentalities, social movements, and the relationship between states and societies - to explain why political participation has changed as it has. What emerges are new national portraits of the social origins of democracy, as well as new comparative explanations that take global processes and national peculiarities into account.