Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy

There's a reason that the conservative parties in democracies-that-were-not-formerly-colonies are largely royalists, so it's intriguing to ask what made them come along with the whole democracy thing to begin with. tl;dr when they (conservative and landed elements of society) have a robust political party and see themselves being able to compete in a democracy and/or preserve their privileges through countermajoritarian institutions, they go along, and when they don't, they blow the whole thing up. Chilling implications for today. I did skip the chapters on the Germans, though