Of course, this may not be the final word. But the evidence seems fairly clear that if there is going to be any empirical support for a causal impact of prosperity on democracy, it will have to be much more slowly acting, perhaps taking longer than 50 years. We argued that such interactions might exist and reflect not modernization-type forces, but the joint co-evolution of prosperity and democracy starting at critical junctures. Bottom-line: a 10-year growth spurt will not bring democracy or create huge protests for more democratic politics in and of itself, be it in Brazil or Turkey. Second, not only in recent examples, but throughout history, democracy emerges and takes firmer root because of protests and demands from the previously disenfranchised or excluded —-or at least so we argued in our first book, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Though the middle class does play a role in the democratization process, it is often not the driver of the protests or even their main catalyst. Democracy arrived in high-growth authoritarian regimes such as South Korea and Taiwan not because of the wishes or the actions of the middle class, but because of the effective protests, in the face of repression and sometimes violence, organized by students and workers. In Britain, even the landmark First Reform Act of 1832, extending voting rights to the middle class, resulted not because of middle-class protests but because of the Captain Swing Riots organized all over the country by agricultural workers as we suggested in The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and a recent paper by Toke Aidt and Peter Jensen documents.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 20:49:16 +0000
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