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.

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - PART 1: INDUSTRIALIZATION, URBANIZATION, AND NATION-BUILDING FROM THE 1870s TO THE GREAT DEPRESSION - The Origins of the Third Republic in France, 1860-1885; P.Nord - Uncertain Legitimacy: The Social and Political Restraints Underlying the Emergence of Democracy in Argentina, 1890-1930; D.James - Japan's First Experiment with Democracy, 1868-1940; R.J.Smethurst - The Social Construction of Democracy in Germany, 1871-1933; G.Eley - The Two Souls of American Democracy; R.Oestreicher - PART 2: CREATING SINGLE-PARTY DOMINANCE, 1930-1960 - From Bureaucratic Imperium to Guardian Democracy: The Shifting Social Bases of Japanese Political Power, 1930-1960; G.D.Allinson - Uncommon Democracy in Mexico: Middle Classes and the Military in the Consolidation of One-Party Rule, 1936-1946; D.E.Davis - PART 3: DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENTS, 1945-1990 - Race, Equity and Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights; E.Lewis - Black Political Mobilization in Brazil, 1975-1990; G.R.Andrews - Modes of Opposition Leading to Revolution in Eastern Europe; G.Stokes - PART 4: DEMOCRACY AND THE WELFARE STATE, 1930-1990 - The Welfare State and Democratic Practice in the United States since the Second World War; S.P.Hays - French Democracy and the Welfare State; H.Chapman - Industrialists, the State, and the Limits of Democratization in Brazil, 1930-1964; B.Weinstein - Constituting Political Bodies in the Adenauer Era; R.G.Moeller - PART 5: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES - Democracy is a Lake; C.Tilly - Index