Chinese Journal of European Studies

ARTICLES 

The institutional change in Europe in 1848 was one of the most significant events in the process of European modernization in the 19^th Century. Social changes were taking place rapidly in most European countries, but most of them ended up yielding rather limited advances. With the combination of class analysis and modernization theory and with the help of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and process tracing, this paper finds out that there are two paths in the wave of modernization in Europe in 1848. The first one is the path taken by the countries with a higher degree of economic development and beyond the control of the counter-revolutionary alliance, who promoted political modernization through bourgeois revolution. The second one is the path taken by the countries with strong national capacity and a low degree of interest solidification, who promoted the process of modernization through constitutional monarchy reform. In addition, through process tracing and longer-term analysis, it can be concluded that countries possessing a combination of the factors included in the above two paths have experienced a more stable and low-cost modernization transition.