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Anna Ross, On Unsettled Democratization: History and Political Science in Conversation, German History, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2018, Pages 432–437, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghy016
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This summer, two books both exploring democratization came across my desk. The first was Daniel Ziblatt’s Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy in Europe, a sophisticated piece of political science that contrasts conservative party development in Britain and Germany over the period 1848 to 1950. The second book was James Retallack’s tome, Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860–1918. Retallack’s magnificent study explores what seems to be, on first appearances, a very different influence on democratization to the conservative parties analysed by Ziblatt. Rather than focusing on parties, Retallack sees election battles—encompassing both election campaigns and debates over suffrage laws—as the best site for understanding the course of regime transformation. And it is not just any election battles that Retallack focuses on, but elections in ‘Red Saxony’, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) enjoyed widespread support in the years before the First World War. Upon reading both monographs, it quickly became clear that the first and most basic recommendation of this review is that historians of modern Germany will delight in reading these works. But I want to suggest something more here: that it is worth reading these books together because in conversation, they force us to think about democratization in exciting ways that transcend disciplinary boundaries.
