Retreat to Democracy: Business and Political Transition in Bolivia and Ecuador

Abstract

Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide us with a mixed picture of the role that business elites have played in the development and rupture of democracy. Their heroic moments are often followed by conservative retreats — and they have used democratic rhetoric to cloak a fear of the masses and popular participation.¹ Barrington Moore’s analysis of the American Civil War (1966, 11–155) depicts Northern industrialists and Western farmers in political coalition that had democratizing effects, namely, the termination of slavery. But by the end of the nineteenth century, as Walter Dean Burnham (1965) and Samuel Hays (1980) argue, business elites in the United States were partners in a ‘reform’ movement which restricted lower class political participation. In Europe, business behaviour also varied. The Liberal party in Britain forged a coalition in the nineteenth century around free trade and gradual democratization that included industrialists and segments of the working class (Gourevitch, 1986, 76–83). But later, as illustrated in the debates between David Abraham (1981) and Henry Turner (1985), business played a murky role in the development of the fascist coalition in Germany.