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The State and Democratization: The United States in

Comparative Perspective

FRANCISCO E. GONZÁLEZ and DESMOND KING

British Journal of Political Science / Volume 34 / Issue 02 / April 2004, pp 193 - 210
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123404000018, Published online: 01 March 2004

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007123404000018

How to cite this article:

FRANCISCO E. GONZÁLEZ and DESMOND KING (2004). The State and Democratization: The
United States in Comparative Perspective. British Journal of Political Science, 34, pp 193-210
doi:10.1017/S0007123404000018

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B.J.Pol.S. 34, 193–210 Copyright  2004 Cambridge University Press
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123404000018 Printed in the United Kingdom

The State and Democratization: The United States

in Comparative Perspective
FRANCISCO E. GONZÁLEZ AND DESMOND KING*

In this article we defend the importance of the concept of ‘stateness’ in scholarly understanding of political
democratization. We argue that because processes of political democratization in different spatio-temporal
settings often share important similarities they are therefore comparable. We investigate this proposition by
comparing the process of American political democratization with those of other liberal democracies, old and
new. We review extant accounts of the historical process of American democratization – including those
addressing American exceptionalism, class structures, multiple traditions, social movements, and international
pressures – before presenting an alternative comparative account based on the idea of stateness. Attention to
stateness problems defined along legal, bureaucratic and ideological dimensions and derived from both the
classic Weberian perspective on the state and the more recent ‘third wave’ of democratization theory help to
place the long American experience of democratization in comparative perspective. This finding illuminates
some of the common political challenges in the construction of liberal democracies, old and new.

Processes of modern political democratization (from the American War of Independence

and the French Revolution to the dawn of the twenty-first century) have shared important
similarities, particularly with respect to the construction of modern states. Without the
jurisdiction, presence and authority of the state, liberal democracy cannot exist in large,
mass populated territories. The degrees of ‘stateness’ in modern polities have thus created
comparable political constraints and opportunities for the construction of liberal
democracies, past and present, advanced and young alike.
If this proposition is plausible, then processes of political democratization that have thus
far not been thought of as equivalent or comparable could be interrogated, to assess
different degrees of ‘stateness’, and the scope of our comparative politics thus widened.
We apply this idea to the study of American politics in particular, which remains, in
general, treated as an exceptional case. The conventional narrative about American
democracy, presented for instance in S. M. Lipset’s influential book, The First New Nation,
claims that the United States differs from other countries because of its geography, its
abundance of resources and its expanding frontier.1 According to Louis Hartz, these facts
gave life to the distinctive brand of American liberalism.2 This ‘American exceptionalism’
thesis distinguishes US political development from the experience of other Western-like
types, particularly those that originated in European traditions. It means that despite its
European origins, the United States developed into something different and unique,
something distinctively ‘American’ in that it was strongly republican and federal, with a

* Nuffield College, University of Oxford. For comments on previous versions of this article the authors would
like to thank Laurence Whitehead, the anonymous reviewers and, especially, the Journal’s Editor, Sarah Birch.
1
Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963); and see Lipset’s American
Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996).
2
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Basic, 1955).
194 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

dominant ideology according to which a ‘new man’ was created through a melting pot
process of assimilation.
In contrast, we maintain that the process of American democratization can be fruitfully
compared through the idea of ‘stateness’ with that of old and new democracies. The
analytic value of comparing the US democratization process with those of other countries
stems from the ‘most different systems’ design in comparative politics.3 The main
objective of this type of research design is to find relationships among variables that endure
even when transported across very different spatio-temporal settings.4 This design works
by establishing the persistence of relationships in different political and social contexts:
such persistence throws up underlying factors and generalized relationships of importance.
Given most dissimilar spatio-temporal settings, ‘stateness’ (disaggregated into the
sub-systems of legality, bureaucracy and ideology) created similar problems and
challenges to democratization in old, advanced (that is, the United States) as well as in new
(post-1974, so-called ‘third-wave’) democracies.
Our task is then to assess how a concept from a major comparative politics literature
– the concept of ‘stateness’5 – can shed new light and understanding on the long and
protracted process of American democratization. Put formally, our independent variable
is stateness. We disaggregate this concept, following the Weberian model of the modern
state, into three sub-units of analysis – legality, bureaucracy and ideology. Unit of analysis
disaggregation is necessary in ‘most different systems’ research designs to determine how
robust any relationship among variables may be. Our dependent variable is the continuum
between restricted and full liberal democracy. We therefore try to assess comparatively
the effect that stateness and legality, stateness and bureaucracy, and stateness and ideology
had on the long process of American democratization.
Our yardstick for the identification of ‘restricted’ and ‘full’ liberal democracy is Robert
A. Dahl’s standard procedural definition of democratic institutions as polyarchy: a political
regime characterized by free and open elections, with low barriers to participation, genuine
political competition and wide protection of civil liberties.6 Thus defined, democracy is
a type of political regime that can be identified by the presence/absence of a number of
political institutions and practices in a given territory.
From this perspective, the United States remained a restricted democracy for most of
its independent political history,7 lacking in several basic democratic procedures such as

3
Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley, 1970),
pp. 31–46; B. Guy Peters, Comparative Politics: Theory and Methods (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 28–41.
4
Peters, Comparative Politics, p. 41. And see Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987), pp. 39–44.
5
See, for example, Dankwart A. Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1967); J. P. Nettl, ‘The State as a Conceptual Variable’, World Politics,
20 (1968), 559–92; Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1968); Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1975); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of
France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer
and Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Juan J. Linz
and Alfred C. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996); Guillermo O’Donnell, Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and
Democratization (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).
6
Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).
7
Goran Therborn dates the advent of full democracy in the United States circa 1970, the latest of advanced
industrial democracies: ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’, New Left Review, 103 (1977), 3–41;
 The State and Democratization 195

free elections. Free and fair participation and contestation, particularly for African
Americans, as well as the protection of civil rights, were not guaranteed in the United States
until the passage and implementation of the (1964) Civil Rights and the (1965) Voting
Rights Acts. Their implementation made the United States a full liberal democracy.
This interpretation is at odds with the conventional narrative of American democracy,
whose proponents place the United States as the first country in modern history to shake
off colonial rule and build a liberal democracy.8 Other comparative social scientists have
also adhered to this standard view. For example, the Polity Project has been widely used
since the 1970s in assessments of the degree of democracy and autocracy in the political
structures of modern countries. The data cover the time period 1800–2000.9 In its latest
format, the Polity Project IV, which considers regime changes in most countries of the
world between 1946 and 2000, the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’ is uncritically
rehearsed and reinforced. The United States is the only First World country excluded from
the sample, implying that the attainment of American democracy – the country’s process
of political democratization – was trouble free during this period.10 In fact, the opposite
can be argued: despite the United States’ early start as an independent, modern nation state,
basic stateness problems contributed to the prevalence of restricted democracy, and the
achievement of full liberal democracy comparatively later than most West European and
Commonwealth liberal democracies.

DEMOCRATIZATION AND ‘STATENESS’ PROBLEMS IN THE UNITED STATES

Our yardstick to identify restricted and full liberal democracy follows Dahl. What about
our conception of democratization? In contrast to Dahl’s polyarchy, which is a type of
political regime, democratization is a continuous process of reforms and modifications of
the institutions and practices in a given political regime, from fewer to more degrees of
free and fair contestation and participation. Democratic norms and values as well as
democratic institutions and practices are permanently open to revision – to include new
aspirations, to exclude out-dated practices, to embrace new standards of freedom, of justice
and of equality.11 To make the analogy with Ernest Renan’s well-known phrase, it is a
process that unfolds through ‘a daily plebiscite’12 in the sense that the breadth and depth
of democratization in a specific polity is not decided once and for all. It is cast and recast
as political leadership, political organizations and public opinion change. How deeply
democratization permeates a polity is something which is not decided definitively but
changes over time.
How does this idea of democratization fit in with our concern? Our analysis of the
process of democratization in the United States vis-à-vis evidence from other democratiz-
ing countries around the world, past and present, does not mean that America underwent
(F’note continued)
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne H. Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy
(Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 122; Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance
in Thirty Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 52; and Dennis C. Mueller,
Constitutional Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
8
Lipset, First New Nation. This view is retained in Lipset’s American Exceptionalism.
9
Ted Robert Gurr, Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, http://weber.ucsd.edu/ ⬃ kgledits/Polity.html.
10
See Polity Project IV, Country Reports 2000, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/report.htm.
11
For the best account of the democracy/democratization dichotomy, see Laurence Whitehead, Democratiza-
tion: Theory and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 1.
12
Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882).
196 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

a transition from authoritarianism to democracy – comparable, for example, to regime

transitions in third-wave countries. Rather, given that the process of democratization (in
any country) is long term, gradually changing and open ended, some of the key challenges
for older and established as well as for new democracies are similar. It is in this sense that
the comparison of the processes of political democratization in the United States and in
other old and new democracies is plausible and useful.
We concentrate on scholars’ interest in ways in which ‘stateness’ problems have
challenged and thwarted the development of liberal democracies around the world.13
Deriving from a Weberian perspective, such stateness problems are concentrated in legal
institutions, bureaucracies and the official ideologies that legitimize the authority of a given
state.14 We argue that the relative lateness of full democratization in the United States was
partly due to stateness problems emanating from these three factors. Our comparative
analysis suggests that such stateness problems thwarted the establishment and develop-
ment of liberal democracy in the United States in a way not dissimilar to their effects in
other old and new democracies.
Stateness matters because without its basic constitutive elements a given territory cannot
be ruled as a liberal democratic regime. First, legal institutions are a constitutive part of
modern states. They comprise the set of social relations ordered by general rules and
backed up with a centralized coercive guarantee over a given territory. Without equal
application of citizen rights one of the underlying principles of a liberal democratic regime,
namely, equal and fair treatment under the law, disappears. Secondly, bureaucracies are
another constitutive part of modern states. They create a properly working state apparatus
capable of enforcing the general rules (the legality that emanates from legal institutions)
throughout the territory over which the state claims jurisdiction.15 Without the presence
of the state machinery throughout a given jurisdiction liberal democracy succumbs to
partial and incomplete enforcement of supposedly general rules enshrined in the state’s
legality. Lastly, another constitutive element of modern states is ideological. It includes
the discourse and official practices that legitimize the rule of state institutions in a given
territory.16 The ideological factor can strengthen or weaken the state’s legitimate exercise
of power and authority, depending on the congruence or contradictions between such state
rhetoric and political and social outcomes.
How are these constitutive dimensions of the modern state connected to the protracted
process of American democratization? First, from the perspective of the legal order one
of the defining conditions of liberal democracy is that all individuals must be empowered
to enjoy the same rights and obligations of citizenship.17 If the citizens of a state are unable
to exercise the same bundle of rights then the exercise of democracy will be restricted rather
than universal. We argue that the stateness problem of legal authority facilitated the
13
Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 4–8; Linz and
Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, pp. 16–37; Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘On the State, Democratization,
and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries’, World
Development, 21 (August, 1993), 1355–69, reprinted in O’Donnell, Counterpoints; Adam Przeworski et al.,
Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 19–39.
14
O’Donnell, Counterpoints, pp. 133–57.
15
Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1947). Echoes of this
debate can be found anticipated in the political development literature: see in particular Leonard Binder, ed., Crises
and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).
16
O’Donnell, Counterpoints, p. 136.
17
Przeworski et al., Sustainable Democracy, p. 34; Dominique Schnapper, Community of Citizens (New
Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1998).
 The State and Democratization 197

resistance and survival of restricted democracy in the United States for almost a century
after the Reconstruction period.
Secondly, from the perspective of public bureaucracies a state devoid of executive
capacity cannot uphold the rule of law in a political order claiming to be a liberal
democracy.18 Added to this constraint is the problem of state officials’ abuse of power and
violations of the rule of law. For example, the problem of state officials’ violations of the
rule of law challenged not only the process of American democratization, but also
third-wave democracies.19 Applied to the analysis of American democratization, we argue
that the relative bureaucratic weakness and limited presence of the American federal
government permitted local violations of the rights of citizenship incompatible with full
liberal democracy. Without the strengthening of the federal government since the New
Deal, the American state apparatus would have lacked the elemental resources to guarantee
and enforce the exercise of the same bundle of rights and obligations by all American
citizens throughout the country’s territory.
Thirdly, from the perspective of ideologies the state justifies its rule by claiming that
its decisions will be oriented in terms of some conception of the public good and the good
life.20 Conceptions of the public good and the good life – which historically have been
embodied in such principles as liberal democracy or Marxist socialism – have provided
the basis for the legitimacy of modern nation-states’ rule over their respective populations.
Legitimacy can be, and indeed has been, questioned in many cases – when a state’s
population has disagreed with the state’s conception of the public good and the good life,
or when the state’s actions have transgressed its declared conceptions of such goods.
Legitimacy crises have led, in many instances, to the re-shaping of states through processes
that have ranged from gradual reforms of the state to regime transitions and social
revolutions. In the case of states, such as the United States, whose legitimacy has rested
on the principles of liberal democracy, mounting ideological contradictions between such
foundational principles and their political and social practices have historically produced
important pressures for democratization. The American Civil War and the civil rights
movement were thus instances of the historical re-shaping of the American state –
particularly its legal and bureaucratic dimensions – through political conflict derived from
the incompatibility of American foundational political principles – individual freedom,
equality before the law – with the unequal and exclusionary features of American
democracy in practice for almost two centuries of independent history.
To what extent is our analysis based on the concept of stateness compatible with the main
scholarly explanations of the historical process of American democratization? Where does
it differ from each and why? To answer these questions we now turn to a brief account
of extant scholarly approaches. We then present an extended discussion of how stateness
problems cast the process of American democratization.

BRINGING STATENESS INTO EXISTING EXPLANATIONS OF AMERICAN

DEMOCRATIZATION

Many ideas have been advanced to explain why the United States remained a restricted,
18
Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, pp. 10, 14.
19
Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds, The Self-Restraining State: Power and
Accountability in New Democracies (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999), pp. 1–10.
20
O’Donnell, Counterpoints, p. 137.
198 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

exclusionary democracy for so long. The thesis of ‘American exceptionalism’ (associated

with Lipset, Hartz and other authors) distinguishes US political development from the
experience of other Western-like types. In part thanks to the strong republican and federal
character of the American polity, and also to its idiosyncratic brands of libertarian and
egalitarian ideologies, the United States was truly exceptional. From our perspective, based
on ‘stateness’ problems, the idea of the original strength of republicanism and federalism
in the institutional design of the United States is important but needs to be examined
comparatively since other countries confronted similar stateness challenges. This emphasis
qualifies the view of American exceptionalism according to which the process of US
democratization was a unique and special case.
Several authors have attacked the notion of American exceptionalism by showing how
a comparative macro-sociological approach based on class analysis can fit American
political development. Barrington Moore argued that the different socio-economic
structures of the North and the South – free industrial labour versus plantation slavery –
intensified political conflicts that culminated in the American Civil War (1861–65). This
war constituted, according to Moore, ‘the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what
one may legitimately call urban or bourgeois capitalist democracy.’21 From this perspective
American political development is not exceptional. Rather, it is comparable to
circumstances in England (in 1688) and France (in 1789), when ‘bourgeois revolutions’
predated the American Civil War. More recently Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens
use Moore’s approach to explore the relationship between capitalist development and
democracy in, among many countries, the United States. They use a comparative historical
model based on class configurations, the relative autonomy of the state and international
pressures to account for the social and economic roots of formal democracy and its
evolution into substantive democracy.22 Applied to the United States, they contend that
the North and the West achieved full democracy from the Jacksonian period onwards,
while the South remained a restricted democracy from its colonial origins until the late
1960s.23
Moore and Rueschemeyer et al.’s work has the merit of employing a general framework
that includes structural categories such as social class to observe long-term, historical
developments. It has thus been able to connect the analysis of American political
development with that of European countries. In so doing it has avoided the solipsism of
the ‘American exceptionalism’ thesis. As we will see below, Rueschemeyer et al.’s and
our stateness approach are complementary in their shared focus on state autonomy and
international forces as shapers of political democratization. But we dissent from Barrington
Moore’s and Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens’s emphasis on class. Any research
strategy based on class analysis underestimates the centrality of other sociological
cleavages in American politics. Of particular relevance here are the racial and ethnic
divisions in the United States.24 In contrast, our perspective highlights the constraints and
opportunities that stateness problems in the legal, bureaucratic and ideological dimensions

21
Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of
the Modern World (London: Penguin, 1991 [1966]), p. 112.
22
Rueschemeyer et al., Capitalist Development and Democracy, p. 5.
23
Rueschemeyer et al., Capitalist Development and Democracy, p. 122.
24
Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics (New York: New Press, 1997); Ian F. Haney López, White by Law
(New York: New York University Press, 1996); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels (New York: Free Press, 1994);
Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); and Barbara J.
Fields, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’, New Left Review, 181 (1990) 95–118.
 The State and Democratization 199

posed for different actors and groups – some class-based, but many others based on
different social cleavages – throughout the protracted process of American democratiza-
tion.
A recent important response to the American exceptionalism and the class approaches
is the idea of ‘multiple traditions’.25 According to this view the US political culture is not
the pre-eminent example of modern liberal democracy as influential authors such as de
Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz claimed. Illiberal, inegalitarian ideologies have shaped the
participants and the issues of American politics as deeply as liberal democratic ones. As
the political scientist Rogers Smith has written,
For over 80% of US history, its laws declared most of the world’s population to be ineligible
for full American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. For
at least two-thirds of American history, the majority of the domestic adult population was also
ineligible for full citizenship for the same reasons. Contrary to Tocquevillian views of
American civic identity, it did not matter how ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’, or ‘republican’ those
persons’ beliefs were. The Tocquevillian story is thus deceptive because it is too narrow. It
is centered on relationships among a minority of Americans (white men, largely of northern
European ancestry).26
This is a view shared by other scholars.27
Advocates of ‘multiple traditions’ stress how co-existing political ideologies struggle
to achieve dominance. The multiple traditions approach, and our interest in state ideology,
complement each other by stressing ideational influences in political history. This
emphasis helps to avoid the solipsistic explanation based on exceptionalism and the
over-general one based on class. However, our explanation separates from the multiple
traditions’ explanation in the latter’s absence of a well-defined agency promoting or
thwarting these competing ideologies. The absence of agency makes it difficult to account
for basic policy changes, that is, the critical moments when one or several of these
ideologies have gained the upper hand, and their advocates have thus implemented
important political reforms. We address this lacuna by examining the relative weakness
and late development of the American state, which created constraints and opportunities
for actors and groups to vie for their preferred legal-political orders, and the extent to which
such orders were at variance with full liberal democracy (conceived in Dahlian terms).
Another approach that prizes agency as an explanation, and is complementary with our
focus on stateness, is the analysis of social movements.
Several authors have studied political opportunities, mobilizing structures and framing
processes to try to account for social movements’ emergence and development, in
particular the civil rights movement in the United States.28 Explanations based on political
mobilization are essential to any narrative of democratization because they try to make
sense of how agency effects reforms in favour of political democracy. These movements
and their leaders have been powerful forces behind democratic reformism in numerous
countries. For example, Tarrow argues that opportunities for successful protest may open
25
Rogers M. Smith, ‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America’, American
Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 549–66.
26
Smith, ‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz’, p. 549.
27
Orlando Patterson, ‘Liberty Against the Democratic State: On the Historical and Contemporary Sources of
American Distrust’, in Mark E. Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), p. 160.
28
Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1984); Dennis Chong,
Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
200 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

and provide resources for even weak or disorganized groups to engage in collective
action.29 In the United States the Department of Justice began to issue amicus curiae briefs
favouring the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in
civil rights litigation in the final years of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration,
and continued to do so more rigorously in the 1950s and 1960s. It submitted an amicus
brief to the US Supreme Court when the Justices were deciding on the Brown (1954) school
board case, which was eventually decided in favour of desegregation. This Justice
Department role provided important opportunities that helped to strengthen the burgeoning
civil rights movement. The sociologist Douglas McAdam has demonstrated how the
American civil rights movement was able, through the strategic framing efforts of Martin
Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to shape media coverage,
win the support of bystander publics, constrain movement opponents and influence state
authorities that underpin the agency behind them.30
Any attempt to make sense of the lateness of US democratization has to have as one
of its major components the civil rights movement from the 1940s to the 1970s. Social
movements and the protracted battle for full liberal democracy in the United States thus
complement our approach by highlighting the way ideological contradictions mobilized
opponent political forces: the North versus the South in the Civil War, civil rights groups
versus local, state and federal authorities in the 1960s. As a result of such political
confrontations the American state was reformed – particularly its legal and bureaucratic
dimensions – time and again until by the late 1960s the country became a full liberal
democracy. Our approach parts company with the social movements’ emphasis on
domestic-based explanations of American democratization. The relationship of the United
States with international forces needs to figure in a serious account of American
democratization.
Some political scientists have demonstrated how the prospects for democratization are
enhanced by wars. The two world wars prompted the mobilization of whole countries’
populations for the war effort.31 Mass mobilization proved a stepping stone to more
widespread inclusion in these countries both for ethnic minorities and for women. But the
United States also found itself in an awkward position after the end of the First World War.
The country faced what we term the ‘Wilsonian contradiction’: on the one hand, the
country’s government preached liberal democracy in the international arena (a position
formulated in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points plan for the global order after
the First World War). On the other hand, that same government domestically acquiesced
and upheld a segregationist, political order (Wilson watched over the introduction of
segregation in the federal government in Washington).32
This ideological contradiction intensified with the advent of the Cold War. The United
States became the superpower behind the support of liberal democracy in the world against
the communist Soviet Union and its allies. The contradictions were obvious: the champion

29
Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
30
Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
31
Therborn, ‘The Rule of Capital’; Kenneth A. Bollen, ‘Political Democracy and the Timing of Development’,
American Sociological Review, 44 (1979), 572–87; Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
32
Jonathan Rosenberg, ‘For Democracy, Not Hypocrisy: World War and Race Relations in the United States,
1914–1919’, International History Review, 21 (1999), 592–625; Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: Black
Americans and the US Federal Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
 The State and Democratization 201

of liberal democracy in the world upheld an exclusionary, racially segregated order back
home. This inconsistency was potentially a structural weakness for the West’s fight against
communism. The Soviet bloc could attract allies, particularly among the community of
recently decolonized states, to its cause by highlighting American inconsistency.
Potentially more lethal, communists could exploit this internal contradiction in the United
States itself. International pressure on the United States to reform civil rights played an
important role in the history of the late democratization of the United States. Of course,
an exclusive focus on the international arena is doomed to be incomplete. Both domestic
and international forces played important roles in the unfolding drama, and thus need to
be included in a full account of American democratization. Our approach based on
stateness complements this perspective by showing how international constraints and
opportunities created pressures for reform of the American state. By the late 1960s such
reforms guaranteed the exercise of full liberal democracy across the country’s entire
territory.
These competing explanations are not mutually exclusive. None can claim to explain
satisfactorily on its own the relative lateness of full democracy in the United States. They
offer different perspectives about the same phenomenon, and usually work better in
combination than separately. We contend that this combination needs to incorporate the
idea of ‘stateness’, which scholars of the third wave of democratization have made central
to explaining recent processes of political democratization.

L E G A L I T Y, B U R E A U C R A C Y, I D E O L O G Y A N D A M E R I C A N D E M O C R A T I Z A T I O N

The basic parameters that frame our comparisons are Dahl’s criteria of polyarchy: free and
fair contestation and participation and wide protection of civil rights. These parameters
establish the continuum between restricted and full liberal democracy. The former is
present in settings where free and fair contestation and participation and/or wide protection
of civil rights are, to varying degrees, absent. The latter type is present when the parameters
are fully met in practice. By looking at the extent to which stateness problems hindered
the establishment of full liberal democracy in the United States, we identify the persistence
of key underlying factors and generalized relationships in the construction of old and
recent, advanced and new democracies. The stateness problems derived from the American
state’s legal, bureaucratic and ideological dimensions did not operate in isolation.
Historically, such stateness problems and pressures operated synchronically, and
interacted with each other. But for analytical purposes in the next sections of this article,
each of the three stateness dimensions is explored individually.

STATENESS AND LEGALITY

Legal rights and their enforcement is a fundamental dimension of stateness. Rights lay the
foundation for democracy. Their absence sets future obstacles to transcend. For instance,
because citizenship was defined in a restricted way in eighteenth-century America at
Philadelphia, later struggles about inclusion were inevitable. The 1787 Constitution only
gave rights to white, propertied males, excluding Native Americans, African Americans,
poor whites and women.
Looked at from our perspective based on stateness, federalism’s foundational status in
the political development of the United States (and in particular in the process of the
country’s political democratization) played a key role in determining the pace and
202 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

unevenness of ‘legal’ liberal democracy. By this, we mean the comparatively long time
that it took the United States to be able to demonstrate that universal equality before the
law was a reality throughout its territory, a pre-condition for the exercise of polyarchy, or
empirical liberal democracy, as practised after the Great War (1914–18) in other Western
liberal democracies.
How did federalism’s foundational status, nested in the legal backbone of the American
polity, affect the timing and duration of its democratization process? According to Robert
Dahl, federalism entails ‘a system in which some matters are exclusively within the
competence of certain local units – cantons, states, provinces – and are constitutionally
beyond the scope of the national government; and where certain other matters are
constitutionally outside the scope of the authority of the smaller units.’33 This type of
constitutional arrangement thus allows for a degree of difference and unevenness in terms
of the relationship between governments and populations of the different units of a federal
polity. Federalism can thus create problems for citizenship in liberal democracies because
of its competing jurisdictions and divided allegiances.34 In the United States and other old
democracies, the legal and political unevenness thus created helped to constrain the shift
to full democracy.
The adoption of federalism in the United States has been interpreted as a common pool
problem (including inadequate national defence and the absence of a stable currency).
Anti-federalists defeated the proponents of a central state three times, on the grounds of
high risk aversion to potential central state abuse. The outcome was a compromise. The
federal compromise granted more power to the centre, but also placed strong limits on its
capacity to exercise power vis-à-vis the constituent units.35
Looked at from the sphere of stateness and legality, the key point is that individual states
of the US federation were left in charge of all legislation not reserved by the Constitution
to the federal level. Thus, despite the creation of a national constitution, the supreme law
of the land, and of authorities empowered to adjudicate and execute it, ample room was
left for the enactment of disparate, and in some cases mutually opposing legislation by the
federation’s individual states. Nowhere was this more controversial and eventually lethal
than in the case of states’ autonomy to legislate slavery. Indeed, Congress was unable to
impose a federal guideline on this issue after the House of Representatives rejected, by
twenty-nine to twenty-five votes, a bill in 1790 to tackle either slavery or the slave trade.
This vote revealed that members of Congress were fully aware that the issue of slavery
was incompatible with the spirit of the Constitution, and must have realized that their vote
postponed rather than erased the issue.36 The Constitution also left the power over the
organization and rules of elections in the hands of states’ legislatures. The effective growth
of the franchise in the United States was thus uneven, particularly after the period of
Reconstruction, when despite passage of the XIIIth, XIVth and XVth amendments, African
Americans remained politically excluded in some states by literacy requirements, poll
taxes, property qualifications and white primaries.37
33
Robert A. Dahl, ‘Federalism in the Democratic Process’, in Robert A. Dahl, Democracy, Liberty and Equality
(Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986), p. 114.
34
Sujit Choudhry, ‘Citizenship and Federations: Some Preliminary Reflections’, in Kalypso Nicolaidis and
Robert Howse, eds, The Federal Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 377–402.
35
Rui de Figueiredo and Barry Weingast, ‘Constructing Self-Enforcing Federalism in the Early United States
and Modern Russia’, http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/rui/sef.rss.1.08.pdf.
36
Joseph Ellis, Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
37
J. M. Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974); V. O.
Key Jr, Southern Politics (New York: Vintage, 1949); B. Grofman and C. Davidson, eds, Controversies in Minority
Voting (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992).
 The State and Democratization 203

American federalism facilitated the maintenance of an uneven, restricted democracy for

almost two centuries of independent history. This is not to imply that the adoption of
federalism and the separation of powers engendered restricted democracy per se. Rather,
strong federalism provided opportunities to some local elites to organize and control the
exercise of basic civil and political rights in an exclusionary, authoritarian manner that was
incompatible with liberal democracy. Given the fact that the 1787 Constitution did not
guarantee the protection of basic civil and political rights, such states’ elites were able to
get away with the implementation of a restrictive political order: the 1857 Supreme Court
decision against the slave Dred Scott showed the power of this restrictionist order. Dred
Scott v. Sanford overturned Congress’s prohibition of slavery and denied the legal rights
of former slaves as citizens.38 Although the Civil War ended slavery, restricted democracy
persisted because the Supreme Court failed, from 1896 to 1954, to find racial segregation
unconstitutional.
The US process of democratization was not alone in suffering this type of stateness
problem. Other older, advanced liberal democracies characterized by centrifugal
federalism such as Switzerland were also subjected to the prevalence of uneven democracy.
The constitutional amendment that allowed Swiss females to vote was not adopted until
1971. Even it did not fully settle the issue of women’s enfranchisement because, as in the
United States, the Constitution still permitted cantons to determine their own voting rules
for local elections and for one house of the Swiss parliament. It was not until 1990 that
all cantons allowed universal voting and Switzerland became a full liberal democracy.39
Legal problems help put ‘American exceptionalism’ in a broader perspective that finds
important comparable challenges, including the definition of citizenship and strength of
federalism, in the construction of liberal democratic regimes.

STATENESS AND BUREAUCRACY

What about stateness problems derived from the bureaucratic dimension of the state?
Historically, the American federal state did not possess a bureaucracy that could uphold
and enforce the political order issued by the executive, a capacity only developed from the
early decades of the twentieth century. According to Weir and Skocpol, ‘in the nineteenth
century, the United States had a “state of courts and parties”. This form of political
organization flourished in the absence of both public bureaucracy and programmatic
political parties, and its legacies limited the capacities of the federal government [up until]
the 1930’s.’40 What Skowronek has identified as a weak national state facilitated the
development of a system in which state governments and courts enjoyed greater salience
than found elsewhere: for instance, the US Supreme Court’s decision, in 1896, to uphold
segregated race relations faced no opposition from the central state.41
The absence of an effective central authority that could evenly enforce a federally based
rule of law interacted with competing local sources of power and authority. O’Donnell has
suggested that under these circumstances,
38
D. E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
39
See, for example, Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture and the Struggle
for Woman Suffrage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
40
Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, ‘State Structures and the Possibilities for Keynesian Responses to the
Great Depression in Sweden, Britain and the United States’, in Evans et al. Bringing the State Back In, pp. 134–5.
41
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
204 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

[an] ineffective state coexist(s) with autonomous, also territorially based, spheres of power.
[A] State becomes ostensibly unable to enact effective regulations of social life across [its]
territory and [its] stratification system. Provinces or districts peripheral to the national center
create (or reinforce) systems of local power which tend to reach extremes of violent,
personalistic rule open to all sorts of violent and arbitrary practices.42
Southern states in the United States were thus able to impose their own preferred segregated
race relations (though such patterns were never confined to the South). Through their
representation in Congress they were able to ensure that federal legislation did not disrupt
this order. This sectional influence affected social welfare measures enacted in the 1930s.
Certain occupations were excluded from the federal pension system (social security)
because they were filled predominantly by African Americans; and states gained the
right to set their own levels of unemployment benefit, a right exercised to impose
discrimination.43
It was not until President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the decades after the
Second World War that the federal government established a strong presence throughout
the national territory.44 From the perspective of the bureaucratic dimension of the state,
this was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for a federally based and enforced
liberal democratic rule of law to emerge. The legal and the bureaucratic dimensions of the
state interacted in a way conducive to the eventual establishment of a full liberal democracy
in the United States. Without a strong federal government presence throughout the
American territory, the legal prescriptions that established the guarantee of universal civil
and political rights (such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act)
were unenforcible.
The stateness problem of bureaucratic capacity often assumed a subtle form. The mere
presence of the federal state throughout American territory did not translate automatically
into the enforcement of a liberal democratic order. As King has shown, in many cases what
federal interventions there were served to reinforce (or even to introduce), rather than to
challenge, the segregationist order.45 He gives the example of how the US Bureau of
Prisons assiduously monitored segregation in federal prisons.
Thus some of the state’s agents’ practices could, and indeed did, hinder the establishment
and development of full liberal democracy in the United States. This problem is common
in ‘third-wave’ democracies. One of the greatest challenges for many of these new
democracies has been the establishment of mechanisms that allow for the control of state
agents and the impartial enforcement of the rule of law.46 The uneven enforcement of the
rule of law is a problem that the American state still confronts. In some metropolitan areas
minorities from different ethnic and racial backgrounds are particularly exposed to abuses
of power and unequal treatment from police forces and other state agents, for instance,
because of racial profiling (something President Bill Clinton criticized at the end of his
presidency). The riots in Los Angeles in 1991 – prompted by a court’s failure to convict

42
O’Donnell, Counterpoints, p. 138.
43
Robert Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jill
Quadagno, The Color of Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
44
B. D. Karl, The Uneasy State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and L. Ruchames, Race, Jobs
and Politics (New York: Harper, 1953).
45
Desmond King, ‘A Strong or Weak State? Race and the US Federal Government in the 1920’s’, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 21 (1998), 21–47.
46
Schedler, Diamond and Plattner, eds, The Self-Restraining State, pp. 1–10.
 The State and Democratization 205

the white policemen who kicked and clubbed an African American, Rodney King, to
unconsciousness – was an instance of the persistence of this problem.
Examples from the third wave help us frame the bureaucratically-derived stateness
problems that the United States confronted. Anthony Marx has demonstrated the analytical
purchase of comparing the development of the modern state in Brazil, South Africa and
the United States.47 The Brazilian state has historically failed to develop the capacity
bureaucratically to deliver policy throughout its territory. This stateness problem has
persisted since the demise of military rule and the return of democracy in 1985.48 The
Brazilian federal government has not yet developed the capacity to be present throughout
its immense territory.49 In many cases police forces and the legal system are virtually not
present when it comes to the detection and prosecution of rural violence against the poorer
sections of society. In such instances the poor have lacked access to the law, and local
violence has been exercised against them to preserve an unequal socio-economic and
political order.50
Neither the United States nor Brazil has been able entirely to solve the problem of state
impunity and uneven enforcement of the rule of law. The problem is clearly an extreme
one in Brazil, but it has also been sporadically identified in the United States, particularly
in multi-ethnic, multi-racial metropolitan areas. The United States is less exceptional than
sometimes presumed. In both Brazil and the United States the poorer and weaker members
of society have usually been the victims of state impunity. And in both countries the poorer
and weaker members of society have traditionally been people of colour.51

STATENESS AND IDEOLOGY

Throughout the nineteenth century the problem of American political development was
not simply that it faced basic legal and bureaucratic ‘stateness’ problems. The ideological
contradictions embedded in the contrast between the American state’s raison d’être and
the exclusionary political, social and economic practices that characterized American life
were equally important. The conflict over slavery struck at the heart of the American polity.
It was clearly an issue that produced a mounting ideological contradiction between the
proclaimed definition of the American state – embodied in ‘We the People of the United
States, in Order to form a more perfect Union … and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity’ – and its practice. In some of the federation’s individual units
there were masters and slaves, while in others there were only equal, free citizens.
A state-centric explanation permits the integration of the legal and bureaucratic
dimensions of the state – the state’s structural components – with the pressures created by
its ideological dimension. Ideological contradictions between the promises and the reality
of liberal democracy in the United States created important political pressures, embodied
in the fallout of Northern and Southern political elites, popular mobilization, and
47
Anthony W. Marx, ‘Race-Making and the Nation-State’, World Politics, 48 (1996), 180–208.
48
O’Donnell, Counterpoints; Alfred Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and
Consolidation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
49
Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).
50
Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 199–210.
51
Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995);
D. S. Massey and N. A. Denton, American Apartheid (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
206 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

eventually war. The resulting reform of the American state re-cast democracy. Legally,
the XIIIth (1865), XIVth (1868), and XVth (1870) Amendments guaranteed, in principle,
black freedom, equal protection of the laws, and males’ right to vote. However, the
post-Reconstruction order institutionalized racial segregation in the South and rendered
it de facto in much of the North.52 Despite the Civil War, the United States remained a
restricted democracy.
To view post-Civil War American democracy as limited by the problem of ideological
inconsistency places us at odds with the conventional narrative of American political
development. In both Lipset’s work, and more recently in Rueschemeyer et al.’s, the way
to account for the exclusionary anomalies of American democracy until the late 1960s is
by thinking about the United States as a polity composed of two political sub-systems.
Accordingly, the sub-system in the North and in the West was a full liberal democracy from
the Jacksonian period, while the sub-system in the South remained an exclusionary,
restricted democracy until the late 1960s.53 Our explanation maintains that this was not
the case. Given the problems of stateness that we have highlighted in the spheres of legality
(for example, both the Southern and Northern sub-units were framed by one federal
judiciary, which ruled and legitimated its decisions on the national level) and bureaucracy
(there was a deficit of national state penetration throughout the American federation, which
only developed well into the first half of the twentieth century),54 there was only one
political system in the United States, subjected to permanent tensions and contradictions,
historically resolved by casting and re-casting the American state.55 Furthermore,
segregation was always a universal phenomenon in the United States before the 1960s and
not localized to the South. From the 1910s the shutters of segregation tightened
domestically, particularly during Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. None of
Wilson’s Republican successors in the White House (Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge
and Herbert Hoover) exerted themselves to address racial inequality: indeed, segregated
race relations spread deeper and wider in the federal government, underlining that the
segregationist order was not peculiarly Southern.56 It maintained the ideological
contradiction of the US state, by violating equal rights.
The exercise of the state’s legal authority tended to uphold racist provisions in the
constitution – as for instance in the US Supreme Court’s judgements in the 1920s on
whiteness as a criterion for the right to naturalize57 – or to enforce the constrained rights
protected in the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. The twin problems of bureaucratic and legal
weakness were illustrated by the failure of Congress (until the 1940s) to enact anti-lynching
laws. In 1922 alone, there were sixty-one lynchings and twenty-eight in 1923; perpetrators
were rarely punished. In the 1920s African Americans had hoped for some support on

52
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
53
Lipset, First New Nation, pp. 379–83; Rueschemeyer et al., Capitalist Development, p. 122.
54
For early attempts to tackle the problem of ‘state penetration’, see Binder, Crises and Sequences in Political
Development.
55
A view which finds scholarly support in Anthony W. Marx, ‘Race-Making and the Nation-State’, Making
Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
56
Nancy Weiss, ‘The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation’, Political Science
Quarterly, 84 (1969), 61–79; Desmond King ‘The Racial Bureaucracy: African Americans and the Federal
Government in the Era of Segregated Race Relations’, Governance, 12 (1999), 345–78; King, Separate and
Unequal; and Margaret C. Rung, Servants of the State: Managing Diversity and Democracy in the Federal
Workforce 1933–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).
57
Haney López, White By Law.
 The State and Democratization 207

anti-lynching from the Republican party. President Warren Harding’s failure specifically
to recommend passage of an anti-lynching bill was indicative of a general Republican
indifference towards the circumstances of African Americans. Such a measure was
scuppered in Congress on the grounds that federal agencies lacked the constitutional
authority to implement the XIVth Amendment as this would bypass local enforcement
powers. This was not an isolated case. For example, Congress first delayed and then
significantly diluted presidential civil rights bills from the late 1940s until 1964.
The US state’s ideological inconsistency between proclaimed equality and practical
segregation was salient internationally. By placing the United States in a leadership role
and defining liberal democracy in terms of US institutions, President Woodrow Wilson
rendered domestic American politics open to external scrutiny. Unremarkably many
observers drew attention to the contradiction between the international espousal of
democracy and the domestic practice of segregation. Speaking to Congress in April 1917
to announce US participation in the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson identified
the core purpose of Americanism abroad as he conceived it, and as it was to be asserted
throughout the twentieth century. He declared: ‘the world must be made safe for
democracy … we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest in our
hearts, – for democracy, for the rights and liberties of small nations.’58
Wilson’s rhetoric not only spelt out the conception of the global order of free and
democratic states that became a cornerstone of the Western world’s struggle against
undemocratic political systems based upon fascism or communism. Combined with
Wilson’s domestic support of segregation, his global vision had necessarily to conflict with
the proposition that, in his words, citizens had the right, as a consequence of submitting
to a state’s authority, ‘to have a voice in their own governments’, a problematic statement
in respect to the United States’ own practices. Mimicking Wilson’s programme, the
NAACP published its own Fourteen Points for domestic equality. African-American
veterans of the First World War returned to a hostile America suspicious of their demands
for racial equality. This hostility postponed rather than terminated Black American
demands for civil rights. These experiences shaped how many African Americans
responded to the Second World War: where W. E. B. DuBois supported fighting for
Wilson’s model of liberal democracy in 1917, by 1941 a new generation of leaders, such
as writer Richard Wright and actor Paul Robeson, could see few reasons to support a war
against racism and fascism while segregation and inequality persisted at home. The
inconsistency illustrates the ideological problem presented to the American state by the
partiality of its democracy and its failure to thwart institutionalized racism.
This contradiction intensified after the Second World War. The creation of the United
Nations signalled the pursuit of an international society that supported the values of
freedom, tolerance and equality inherent to democratic practice. However, the United
States, host nation of these new international institutions, still practised legal segregation.
This paradox became increasingly untenable to the US government.59 As the NAACP
leader Walter White wrote in 1945,

58
Saul K. Padover, ed., Wilson’s Ideals (Washington, D.C.: The American Council on Public Affairs, 1942),
p. 112.
59
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Philp A. Klinkner
with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Penny M. Von Eschen,
Race Against Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Azza Salama Layton, International Politics
and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
208 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

World War II has given to the Negro a sense of kinship with other colored – also oppressed
– peoples of the world. Where he has not thought through or informed himself on the racial
angles of colonial policy and master-race theories, he senses that the struggle of the Negro in
the United States is part and parcel of the struggle against imperialism and exploitation in India,
China, Burma, Africa, the Philippines, Malaya, the West Indies, and South America.

Such sentiments fed directly into the developing civil rights movement mobilized in the
1950s and 1960s.60
The Cold War conflict with communism heightened the ideological inconsistency of
domestic US policy.61 The ideological justification of the American state was always its
status as ‘the land of the free’ expressed in a ‘one nation’ rhetoric. This ideology was
obviously problematic for the American political elites in respect to the anomaly of
segregation. For instance, speaking in the Senate in 1948 to support a federal anti-lynching
bill, Congressman Emmanuel Celler reported an exchange with South African delegates
to the United Nations:

I remonstrated with them as to their treatment of Indians in the Province of Natal. They have
all sorts of repressive measures against those Indians. The Indians in the Province of Natal are
treated not only as inferior but treated almost like animals. The answer I received was, ‘What
are you squawking about? What about lynching in your own States?’ Then he very significantly
stated, ‘Before you take the mote out of my eye look to the beam in your own’.62

There was wide coverage of US race relations in newspapers around the world, including
Western Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and particularly the communist-controlled
Soviet bloc that exploited domestic injustices as propaganda against democratic
capitalism. The Emmett Till lynching in 1955 received detailed coverage overseas, as did
the 1954 Brown court decision ruling segregation unconstitutional. The attempt to
desegregate schools and the crisis provoked at Little Rock in 1957 received daily reporting:
when nine African American children were denied entry to a white school despite judicial
orders to admit them, the state governor failed to use his powers to enforce desegregation.
Resolving the crisis became a benchmark of American democracy. The Little Rock crisis
became a staple of anti-American Soviet propaganda.63 President Dwight Eisenhower’s
slowness to respond and reluctance to employ federal authority to desegregate schools
damaged the United States’ international image. Aside from the blemish of racial
segregation the American state also had to face the protests against the war in Vietnam.
This foreign component exacerbated the ideological contradictions faced domestically.
American involvement in Vietnam showed the world’s protector of freedom and
democracy sending their young men (disproportionately conscripted from the African-
American population) to die for an unpopular cause.64 It helped generate a climate of social
convulsion that might have led to a legitimacy crisis of the American state had the Johnson
administration not already pushed for the passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Acts
60
John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Vincent
Harding, Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, ‘We Changed the World’, in Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis,
eds, To Make Our World Anew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
61
John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
62
US House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee No. 4 ‘Antilynching’, Hearings,
80th Congress 2nd Session, 4 February 1948 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 36.
63
Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, p. 121.
64
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
 The State and Democratization 209

in Congress and reform of the discriminatory immigration regime. As historian Mary

Dudziak concludes, during these years of the Cold War ‘the need for reform in order to
make credible the government’s argument about race and democracy’ was ‘one element’
in the pressure to make the United States democratic.65 But this was an extremely important
element observable in several dimensions. For example, the reform of the US immigration
regime – based between 1924 and 1965 on a system of national origins which discriminated
against some nationalities and excluded the descendants of involuntary immigrants – was
driven in part by foreign criticism.66 Immigration reformers in 1965, including President
Lyndon Johnson, tied the need for reform to civil rights. This theme runs through the
voluminous testimony taken before the House of Representatives’ Committee on the
Judiciary. Johnson’s Secretary of Labour, Willard Wirtz, explained this conection between
the abolition of national origins and the concurrent transformation of civil rights, telling
Congress that such discrimination had ‘no place in a free and democratic society.’67
Secretary of State Dean Rusk made similar points.
Within the State Department demands from the NAACP and other groups to include
African Americans among the diplomatic and senior departmental posts were intricately
connected to the civil rights struggle and external reproach of the US practices. In the forty
year period, 1949–88, only nineteen Black Americans rose through the ranks of the Foreign
Service to the rank of ambassador. As one diplomat who found himself confined to a round
of limited postings told State’s personnel department: ‘you’re not only discriminating
against us [African Americans] in the Service, but you’re exporting discrimination abroad
in the Foreign Service.’68 The Justice Department was more alert to these international
pressures. Its amicus curiae briefs, supporting desegregation, cited the international
damage caused by American racism legitimated in the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine.
Politicians and reformers both learned a key lesson of international coverage of race
politics in the United States: where the federal government and executive were seen to
counter – or attempting to counter – domestic racism, foreign responses, including
responses from black states, were favourable, praising America’s ideology of inclusion.

CONCLUSION

In this article we have argued that the processes of modern political democratization since
the so-called ‘bourgeois revolutions’ of the eighteenth century have had significant
similarities in otherwise different spatio-temporal settings, and are therefore comparable.
We analysed this perspective by drawing on the process of democratization in old and new
liberal democracies to examine comparatively the long American experience of political
democratization. In particular, we focused on how the legal, bureaucratic and ideological
dimensions of ‘stateness’ at times constrained and on other occasions enhanced American
democratization. Based on a ‘most different systems’ research design, our inquiry’s
objective was to confront relationships among variables (stateness problems) in dissimilar
65
Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, p. 14. See also Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Politics;
Klinkner and Smith, Unsteady March; and Von Eschen, Empire Strikes Back.
66
Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 199–256.
67
Statement by the Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz before Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationality,
House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, 23 July 1964, p. 2.
68
Quoted in Michael L. Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department 1945–1969
(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 25.
210 G O N Z Á L E Z A N D K I N G

settings (the United States versus other old and new countries that have undergone
processes of democratization), and assess their persistence or dissolution. Our comparative
study underlines basic stateness obstacles that the United States confronted in its long,
protracted process of moving from restricted to full liberal democracy.
Looking at the sub-unit of analysis nested in legality allowed us to emphasize the
persistence of common stateness challenges in the construction of liberal democratic
regimes across time and space. Our comparative perspective found comparable challenges
including the definition of citizenship and the strength of federalism in otherwise very
different settings (the United States and Switzerland). Stateness problems nested in legality
thus contributed to the persistence of restricted democracy in the United States until the
passage and implementation of the (1964) Civil Rights and the (1965) Voting Rights Acts.
Their implementation made the United States a full liberal democracy. Similarly, it was
not until all the Swiss cantons allowed universal suffrage in 1990 that Switzerland became
a full liberal democracy.
The sub-unit of analysis based on bureaucracy underscored the importance – seen again
in old and new liberal democracies – of state presence throughout its territory and of state
self-restraint (based on state agents always abiding by the rule of law). Thus, the United
States and Brazil have confronted stateness problems nested in bureaucracy which
contributed to the prevalence of restricted liberal democracy for long periods of both
countries’ independent political histories.
The last sub-unit of analysis shed light into similar challenges to state elites of old and
new liberal democracies posed by ideology, a factor that can strengthen or weaken the
state’s claim to exercise power and authority. In the United States, a nation-state whose
foundational legitimacy has rested on the principles of liberal democracy, foundational
ideological contradictions between such principles and their actual political and social
shortcomings created important pressures for democratization. Both domestic as well as
external pressures nested in such ideological contradictions, which went in crescendo
particularly since the end of the Second World War, propitiated the political agency
capable of reforming the state’s structures (nested in the sub-units of legality and
bureaucracy). Out of these reforms in the 1960s the United States shed its restricted features
on the road to polyarchy.