A leading historical sociologist, Charles Tilly brings skills from both disciplines to this exercise in democratic analysis. The result provocatively illuminates democracy as it developed in Europe and advances challenging hypotheses for contemporary democratic theory and practice. Tilly applies carefully formulated categories and explanatory hypotheses to his subject in a way atypical of most historians while tempering the often inflexible approaches of sociological theory with an historian's sensitivity to nuance and complexity.

Democracy for Tilly exists to the extent that a government is responsive to a broadly inclusive citizenry that is not rift with state-sanctioned inequalities and where minority rights are protected. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Jr. and Tilly's earlier studies of France and England, the book argues that democratic advance invariably issues from contention, typically by public actors against the state. Examples are contests in France, most dramatically from 1789, which expanded citizenship and forced state responsiveness to more than nobles, priests and royal officials. Examples regarding Great Britain were movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century initiated in Ireland and spreading to the rest of the Isles to abolish discriminatory policies toward Catholics, which, Tilly maintains, crucially paved the way for the more general Reform Act of 1832.

The more fine-grained theory, applied to these countries and to the Low Lands, Iberia and Switzerland, describes the following process: contention within a region (e.g., between religious communities or on class lines), conquests, such as those of Napoleon, or colonization in the Americas and elsewhere involved and prompted “contentious claim making” among public actors, which then affected configurations of public politics, relations of equality or inequality, and “networks of trust.” The resulting changes either expanded or contracted democracy. Among the generalizations Tilly draws from this exercise, three stand out.

Regarding formal structures, democracy emerges, when it does, as an outcome of contention, rather than from the implementation of democratic constitutions and elections. At the level of popular culture, democracy is a by-product of contentious struggle, participants in which are motivated by group-specific goals rather than by embrace of a “democratic ideology,” that is, “widespread, self-conscious belief in democracy” (240). A third generalization arises from Tilly's tracking of a trade-off between government's ability to act free of constraint from local centres of power (regional, religious, ethnic, professional and so on) and the relative autonomy of such centres. Government capacity pushes in the direction of authoritarianism. Local power also threatens democracy by impeding people's identification as citizens and by involving economic or tradition-based power imbalances (chapter 2). A conclusion Tilly draws is that local democracy deters democratic advance at national levels.

This book has much to say to both sociologists and historians as well as to democratic theorists generally. One way to relate it to specifically political-scientific interests is to compare Tilly's approach with that of consolidation theorists. Consolidationism receives short shrift in the book, where it is characterized as a “sequence” orientation aiming to discover sufficient conditions for traversing democratic thresholds, while Tilly looks instead for clusters of necessary conditions for democratic expansion (11–12). However, in crucial respects Tilly's project is similar to that of consolidationists. Like them, he wishes to identify general conditions for “effective, durable democracy” (17), and in its last chapters the book offers advice directed at newly emerging democracies about how to secure a desirable level of democracy, measured by the Freedom House checklist of political rights and freedoms. Many of Tilly's recommendations resonate with consolidationist prescriptions: to break monopoly control of capital and means of coercion by such as “generals, tycoons, and priests”; to ensure that citizenship is extended and services are equitably provided; and to provide basic amenities and curtail internal and external predators (257–9).

Out of keeping with mainstream consolidationism are Tilly's views that democracy is always reversible and that countries held up as models of “really existing democracies,” such as Canada and the United States, fall short on all his measures of democracy (23). Also, Tilly's advice, deriving from the generalizations identified above, is contrary to most consolidationist thinking, namely, his admonition against “drafting constitutions, staging elections, and imposing the formal structures of western democracies” or the “creation of voluntary associations” of local-level civil society (257–8).

Leaving these differences for consolidationists to address, I conclude by flagging a broad similarity that Tilly and consolidation theory share with many other contemporary democratic theorists. Democracy by Tilly's definition is a “citizen-agent relation” (23) between government and the populace: the more contention prompts a government to broaden citizenship, consult, and protect minority rights, the more democratic the society. Democracy from this point of view is a benefit for the people, but it is not of or (except indirectly) by the people. As in his recent Social Movements 1768–2004 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004), Tilly regards collective action by non-governmental agents not as exercises in democracy but as activities that sometimes move government/citizen relations toward democracy.

The issue here is more than terminological. The contrasting notion of democracy as collective self-determination—in or out of formal governmental relations—is undeniably fraught with problems. It can lead one to associate democracy with the politically dangerous postulate of a general will and, as Tilly observes, social movement or other associational activities can support undemocratic government. The democratic advantages of adopting the broader concept (cognizant of these dangers) pertain to democratic empowerment and commitment. While local democracy may well have the parochial effects Tilly describes, it can also be a training ground in democracy, where people discover their abilities to engage in collective action with egalitarian decision making while beginning to learn skills in democratic politics first-hand.

Tilly's solution to the problem of securing commitment to democracy strong enough to withstand temptations to jettison it when convenient is through citizenship identification in a democratic state. His major misgiving about local democracy is that it inhibits such identification. However, broad citizenship identification is not always identification with democratic citizenship, as some experiences with national identification in recent history illustrate all too well. An alternative, or supplementary, solution is enhancing local democratic commitments to include placing a value on democracy generally, that is, articulating them with what Tilly calls a democratic ideology.

When drawing lessons for current democracy-building efforts from his historical surveys, Tilly, as already noted, warns against formal constitution making and encouragement of local democracy. However, he does not add an injunction against promoting democracy as a generally desirable mode of human comportment. I speculate that the reason for this is that, not withstanding the conclusions of his survey, Tilly recognizes the value of a “democratic ideology” for overcoming some of the problems for enhancing democracy he has described.

This leaves the question of whether, even if desirable, the linkage in popular political culture of local democratic efforts with democracy is generally realistic. Tilly intends his empirical study to cast doubt on this. My own intuition, drawn mainly from experiences in social movement and local political venues, is more optimistic. But then I am neither an historian nor a sociologist. In part for this reason I recommend this book to those with the appropriate training, so that they can evaluate its empirical claims. Agree or disagree, they, as other readers, will profit from the exercise.