1 Therborn has also produced a comparative study of Latin America that will not be considered here. See Therborn, Göran, “The Travail of Latin American Democracy,” New Left Review 113–14 (1979), 71–109.Google Scholar

2 Therborn, Göran, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (1977), 3–41.Google Scholar

3 Therborn, Göran, “Classes and States: Welfare State Developments, 1881–1981,” Studies in Political Economy 14 (1984), 7–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Therborn, Göran, “The Prospects of Labour and the Transformation of Advanced Capitalism,” New Left Review 145 (1984), 5–38.Google Scholar

5 Therborn, Göran, Why Some Peoples Are More Unemployed than Others (London: Verso, 1986).Google Scholar

6 Therborn, Göran, “Why Some Classes Are More Successful than Others,” New Left Review 138 (1983), 37–55.Google Scholar

7 Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage, 1984), 63–64.Google Scholar

8 Therborn, , “The Rule of Capital,” 4.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 10.

10 This includes: the political culture approach (see, for example, Almond, Gabriel, “Comparative Political Systems,” in Macridis, Roy C. and Brown, Bernard E., eds., Comparative Politics [5th ed.; Homewood, Ill.: The Dorsey Press, 1977], 79–92Google Scholar, systems analysis (see, for example Easton, David, “The Analysis of Political Systems,” in Macridis and Brown, eds., Comparative Politics, 93–106)Google Scholar and the structural functionalist approach (see, for example, Aberle, D. F. et al. , “The Functional Prerequisites of a Society,” in Macridis and Brown, eds., Comparative Politics, 67–78).Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Stein Rokkan's time-series data in his Citizens, Elections, Parties (New York: McKay, 1970).Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Sartori, Giovanni, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” in Macridis and Brown, eds., Comparative Politics, 34.Google Scholar

13 Therborn, , “The Rule of Capital,” 17Google Scholar. Until the late 1960s, in a number of southern states poll taxes, literacy requirements and intimidation kept many blacks from voting.

14 Tilly, , Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, 97.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 97–104.

16 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Tilly, , Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, 105–15Google Scholar, on Skocpol's universalizing comparisons.

17 Therborn seems to suggest a first stage constituting the achievement of white male bourgeois suffrage, the second its extension to cover the male working class and, in the later stages, the elimination of exclusions on the basis of race, gender and political persuasion.

18 Therborn, , “The Rule of Capital,” 19Google Scholar, and “Classes and States,” 9–11.Google Scholar

19 Skocpol reduces her number of cases by choosing to focus on social revolutions fairly narrowly defined as those in which there was an actual transformation of state and class structures (see Skocpol, , States and Social Revolutions, 5).Google Scholar

20 In this sense Therborn's studies are closer to what Charles Ragin refers to as a “variable-oriented,” rather than a “case-oriented” comparative method. That is, he is more concerned to produce generalizations about relationships among variables than with interpreting specific historical outcomes in particular cases (Ragin, Charles C., The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987]).Google Scholar

21 This is the essence of Tilly's criticism of universalizing comparisons. He is critical, for instance, of James Davies for not comparing the cases which confirmed his model of revolution with similar ones in which revolution failed to occur (Davies, James, When Men Revolt and Why [New York: Free Press, 1971]Google Scholar). He argues that Skocpol, in using universalizing comparisons, did not pay attention to particular details and did not get the history (for example, of the French revolution) quite right, and that it is always possible to identify one more circumstance that could be critical in explaining the social revolution that the three states she examined had in common (Tilly, , Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, 103–15).Google Scholar

22 Therborn, , “Classes and States,” 11–15.Google Scholar

23 Przeworski, Adam and Sprague, John, Paper Stones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chap. 3.Google Scholar

24 Therborn, , “The Rule of Capital,” 23.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 11.

26 Ibid., 12–13.

27 Ibid., 8.

28 Ibid., 6.

29 Therborn, , “Why Some Classes Are More Successful,” 45–46.Google Scholar

30 See, for example, Therborn, , “The Prospects of Labour,” 6, 18.Google Scholar

31 Therborn, Göran, Science, Class and Society (London: Verso, 1980), 71Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

32 Therborn argues that in four countries (Belgium, Britain, Canada and Norway) national mobilization “in the face of external threat” accelerated the achievement of male democracy, in five cases (Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and the US) it brought female enfranchisement closer, while in two countries (Denmark, the Netherlands) it was only of secondary significance (Therborn, , “The Rule of Capital,” 23).Google Scholar

33 The seven countries in which military defeat was key are Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, France (defeat of Napoleon III). In two of these countries (Finland, Sweden in 1918) it was the fall of a foreign regime (Wilhelmine Germany) which had an indirect effect on the process of democratization. In six other countries foreign wars had a secondary influence, while in the remaining four democratization was unrelated to foreign wars (ibid., 19–21).

34 Therborn argues that in Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland democracy was produced by internal developments alone. In Denmark, the Netherlands and the US, internal developments were of “overwhelming significance.” In France their importance was combined with that of external defeat. In Belgium, Britain, Canada and Norway, both internal developments and national mobilization were important (ibid., 23).

35 Therborn argues that nowhere was the working class strong enough on its own to achieve democracy, but that it achieved it in conjunction with foreign wars, the agrarian petite bourgeoisie or a section of the ruling class. The greater organizational capacity of the underclass meant that class-based exclusions were eliminated earlier than those based on sex and race (ibid.).

36 Ibid., 20.

37 Although class forces play a more prominent role, Therborn's approach is also not that different from, for example, the time series of a range of variables proposed by Stein Rokkan (Citizens, Elections, Parties).

38 He argues that a threat from the working-class movement perceived by the political rulers was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for welfare state initiatives (Therborn, , “Classes and States,” 12–13).Google Scholar

39 Ibid., 12.

40 For example, state institutions could be better seen as resulting from past class struggles and in this way better links could be established between class struggles and state institutions.

41 As Linda Gordon, for example, points out, it has not just been trade unions, but also women's groups that have played a key role in the development and shaping of the welfare state (Gordon, Linda, “The Welfare State: Towards a Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” in Miliband, Ralph and Panitch, Leo, eds., Socialist Register 1990 [London: Merlin Press, 1990]).Google Scholar

42 Therborn, , “Prospects of Labour,” 22.Google Scholar

43 Therborn admits that the “forces of the labour movement” have contributed to the historical advances of the class, but argues that these are irreducible to “political projects” (ibid., 25).

44 Ibid., 9.

45 This is in contrast to an emphasis on macro-economic planning, collective security and equality (ibid., 37–38).

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 33.

48 Ragin, , The Comparative Method, 70.Google Scholar

49 The latter approach is provided, for example, by Trotsky and de Tocqueville as described in Stinchcombe, Arthur's Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978)Google Scholar, chap. 2. Gramsci perhaps provides a classic example of such an analysis (Gramsci, Antonio, The Prison Notebooks [New York: International Publishers, 1971]).Google Scholar

50 Wolfe, Alan, The Limits of Legitimacy (New York: Free Press, 1977), 4–6.Google Scholar

51 Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Democracy and Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1987).Google Scholar

52 Therborn, , Why Some Peoples Are More Unemployed than Others, 26–27.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., 23–24.

54 Ibid. See especially section 3.

55 Therborn does not draw any general conclusions about policy mixes that are particularly likely to lead to high unemployment. He does, however, describe the various policies introduced in the high and medium unemployment countries. For example, he argues that in France the Mitterrand government failed to keep unemployment down because of its contradictory policies, including its lack of perseverence with expansionary policies, its concern to maintain the value of the franc, etc. (ibid., 141–43).

56 Ibid., 27–28.

57 Ibid., 125.

58 In this respect Barrington Moore, for example, is better able to combine an analysis of how such factors as the struggles of lords and peasants have interacted with the advance of commercial relations to explain how developments in one country have compared with those in others (Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy [Boston: Beacon Press, 1966]).Google Scholar

59 Tilly, , Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, chap. 5.Google Scholar

60 Therborn, , “Why Some Classes Are More Successful,” 55.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., 38.