Chapter 1 from book manuscript Democracy on Retreat: Crisis, State-Society Relations, and the Recurrence of Autocracy in the Interwar Years Agnes Cornell Assistant Professor, PhD Department of Political Science, Aarhus University Bartholins Allé 7 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark E-mail:
[email protected] Jørgen Møller Professor, PhD Department of Political Science, Aarhus University Bartholins Allé 7 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark E-mail:
[email protected] Svend-Erik Skaaning Professor, PhD Department of Political Science, Aarhus University Bartholins Allé 7 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark E-mail:
[email protected] 1 Chapter 1: Patterns of Democratic Breakdown Revisited: A Crisp Perspective Introduction Since the advent of modern democracy there has only been one large-scale democratic rollback if we measure this as an absolute fall in the tally of democracies (Møller & Skaaning 2013: Chapter 5). This rollback took place in a hugely interesting context, namely the interwar period. It is therefore unsurprising that the issue of democratic breakdown and survival in the interwar period has been subjected to a number of comparative studies (see Berg-Schlosser & Mitchell 2003; Bermeo 2003; Capoccia 2005; Gusy 2008; Karvonen 1993; Luebbert 1991; Overy 1994; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). However, these comparative studies have been hamstrung by the poor quality of cross-national data on regime change. Possible the best illustration of this is the fact that scholars disagree vehemently about which countries were democratic during the interwar period – and, ipso facto, about the number of instances of democratic breakdown and democratic survival. This can be illustrated by comparing the extant attempts to score interwar spells of democracy based on categorical differences between democratic survival and breakdown.