Class Structure and Democratization

Abstract

In previous works, the senior author of this chapter and his co-authors have analysed the development of democracy within the framework of a theory which posits that the development and breakdown of democracy is the product of the interaction of three clusters of power: the balance of class power, the balance of power between the state and civil society, and transnational structures of power (Stephens 1989; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992; Huber, Rueschemeyer and Stephens 1998; Huber and Stephens forthcoming). Our analyses covered over forty countries, including all the countries of Western Europe which became democratic by the interwar period. We excluded, however, the countries of Eastern Europe which arose out of the ashes of the three great empires covering the region. Several of the countries in this region, Finland, Estonia and Czechoslovakia, fit our criteria for inclusion. Towards the end of the chapter of Capitalist Development and Democracy which covers the West European cases, we briefly speculate how the inclusion of more of the East European cases, including those that did not become fully democratic, might have changed our analysis of European development. In this chapter, we turn to that task.