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THE historical role of the bourgeoisie in creating and maintaining political democracy has been much disputed in the social science literature. On the one hand, liberal social scientists and most Marxist analysts writing on European historical development cast the bourgeoisie, the owners of the principal means of non-agricultural production in capitalist societies, in the role of the main agent promoting political democracy (however, see Therborn 1978). By contrast, class analytic social scientists writing on the Third World have assigned the bourgeoisie a far less heroic role. In O'Donnell's (1973, 1978) analysis of the rise of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Latin America, the bourgeoisie was a key partner, along with the military, in the eclipse of democracy in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
This question is not only important for the historic record and social science theory but also for the political question of the prospects for democracy in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World. There is no doubt that there is an affinity between capitalist development and democracy both diachronically, at least in the longue duree, and synchronically across countries at different levels of development. But if this long term development occurred despite the political efforts of the bourgeoisie and not because of them, then this has very different implications for the future of political democracy and the quality of democracy in Latin America and other regions of the Third World where bourgeois economic and political dominance is only weakly contested.
In this essay, we will examine the historic and contemporary role of the bourgeoisie in the development, demise, and stabilization of political democracy in Western Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Our necessarily brief sketch of the historic development, which largely recapitulates our previous work on this topic (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992), is an essential background to our analysis of the contemporary period. We argue that democracy was established in most countries in these regions despite the efforts of the bourgeoisie, because capitalist development strengthened the working and middle classes and weakened large landlords. The bourgeoisie generally sided with the anti-democratic forces particularly in the later stage of political development when the struggle for democracy turned from establishing parliamentary government to extending political rights to the masses.
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