This study elaborates a central aspect of Juan Linz's (1978) Crisis, Breakdown, and Re-equilibration: a focus on choices made by democratic incumbents facing extremist challengers aiming to install nondemocratic rule. To put it in Linzian terms, Giovanni Capoccia seeks to develop Linz's “mentality” on that subject into a more systematic statement. Linz claimed that these leaders' choices are crucial, and he illustrated with examples; Capoccia rightly proposes that such a claim deserves monographic treatment in its own right. His effort is illuminating on several counts but falls short of full persuasiveness on others.

Linz, Alfred Stepan, and others argue that democratic incumbents have played decisive roles in “crafting” regime outcomes when democracies encounter strain: Vigorous resistance to would-be authoritarian leaders and their messages can, they argue, retain public support for inclusive politics. In contrast, their indecisiveness and short-term electoral opportunism can spur a democracy's breakdown. This emphasis on leadership and contingency proved to be a highly influential response to social-structural regime research associated with—among others—Seymour Martin Lipset, Barrington Moore, David and Ruth Collier, and John Stephens, Evelyn Huber, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. But like many other accounts claiming agency and indeterminacy, and unlike their structuralist rivals, these claims were undertheorized and lacked rigorous testing against evidence, often (but not exclusively) because of selection on the dependent variable.

Capoccia argues that careful comparisons can generate more elaborate inductive theorizing of this kind and better support it empirically. He calls for consideration of interwar West European countries in which democracy was jeopardized by significant extremist movements but nonetheless survived. These include three cases he treats at length (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Finland) and one he does not (France). He argues that these regimes survived because democratic incumbents responded robustly and wisely to serious antidemocratic threats. In particular, heads of state and/or senior party leaders pursued one of several strategies: repression of extremists (including bans on parties and party militias, states of emergency, and questionably legal denials of access to state-run media), cooptation or extremists (in coalitions or through policy concessions), or a mixture of the two. There is, he concludes, no single “recipe” for success: Accommodation predominated in Belgium, repression in Finland, and a combination in Czechoslovakia. He also warns that the repressive strategy navigates a fine line between legitimately protecting democracy and menacing it from above.

This core argument serves at least two very useful purposes. It develops what remained only partially formed claims in Linz's hands, resulting in a much more textured idea of the options available to besieged democrats. And it inspires Capoccia's investigation of several badly understudied cases, producing interesting empirics for wider consideration and use. Moreover, this is all written accessibly and at times dramatically, befitting the high-stakes nature of the topic.

If this study has a flaw, it concerns research design. Whereas Linz and Stepan's (1978) The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes famously treated only democracies that collapsed, Capoccia systematically treats only ones that survive. He periodically uses interwar Italy and Germany as foils, but discussion of them is not detailed enough to permit something badly needed: systematic comparison of the behavior of leaders in democracies that did and did not survive. At one point (p. 194), Capoccia offers readers a table classifying the pattern of intervention in politics by heads of state in his three cases, as well as Germany and Italy. But he does not rigorously do the same for the full range of actors and possible strategies that form the core of his discussion of Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Finland. This is especially important given the very wide range of these strategies and their highly qualitative nature. For example, it is exceedingly difficult to measure the relative severity of specific antiextremist laws, the relative strictness of their enforcement, and the degree of determination that lay behind public campaigns against authoritarian ideologies. This ensures that it is equally difficult to judge whether incumbents really did, in fact, pursue a more ambitious strategy of accommodation in Czechoslovakia than in Germany or Italy, without more systematic, side-by-side comparison of strategies in both successes and failures.

This undermines the definitiveness of the conclusions reached. In the absence of more rigorous coding and comparison, Capoccia's core argument—that democratic leaders' strategies were causally very important—remains vulnerable to structuralist claims that various contextual factors instead determined either which choices leaders made or whether their choices had the desired effects. The sidelining of most contextual factors in this study leaves unclear exactly how much influence should ultimately be attributed to the inherent features of leaders' strategies. For example, when Capoccia emphasizes the importance in Belgium of “public appeals to win back to the democratic cause those voters who had gone over” to extremist parties (p. 137), how can one judge whether such appeals were better crafted in Belgium than in Weimar or whether, instead, some contextual factor (e.g., political culture or structures of social conflict) determined that such appeals were simply likely to find a more receptive audience in one country than in the other. In other words, does Capoccia use strategies to explain why some democracies survived where others did not, or is he instead labeling strategies pursued in surviving democracies as successful and those pursued in breakdowns as failures?

Given current scholarly fashions, the arguments that leaders' choices matter and that contingent events shape even large-scale outcomes are eminently plausible. This study admirably seeks to lend greater comprehensiveness to these claims as they apply to regime outcomes. And the historical evidence it generates serves to retrieve intriguing data on lesser-known cases. For both reasons, Defending Democracy is likely to spark fruitful discussion.