Institutions and the Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the Twentieth Century

Extract

Institutions and the Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the Twentieth Century. By Michael Bernhard. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 310p. $29.95.

In this book Michael Bernhard asks two questions: Why do new democracies pick the institutions that they do? How do certain patterns of institutions affect the chances of democratic survival? And his theoretical framework, in its initial formulation, makes two claims. First, institutional choices are a product of powerful agents pursuing their narrow interest. If you know who is powerful and what they want, you will be able to predict the institutional outcomes. Second, the key to democratic survival, at least in the initial posttransition phase, is the breadth and strength of the original institution-forming coalition. A key conclusion of the study is that democracies are in trouble when the coalitions that brought about their institutional arrangements lose power too soon, as happened in prewar Poland and in Weimar Germany. And this can occur for a variety of reasons: New actors may be brought in, for example, or the salient issues may change.