Democracy amid economic orthodoxy: Trends in developing countries

The creation of stable democracies requires a resolution of both political and class problems. The political task involves the development of appropriate institutions so that democratic norms and practices take hold in a society. Dealing with the class conundrum, in turn, demands creating acceptable political arrangements that enable democratic equality to coexist with an economic system based on class inequalities. The simultaneous pursuit of these political and class goals is a delicate task of social engineering; it has never been easy. After all, the aim of establishing democracy is to give the mass citizenry some genuine access to power, while at the same time ensuring that this access does not go so far as to threaten the smooth functioning of a class economy. The twin tasks of expanding and limiting political participation were historically facilitated by proto-democratic traditions and by the slow and steady rise of hegemonic capitalism. Traditions of compromise politics enabled excluded groups to steadily press for an expansion of the political sphere. Conversely, as markets discipline firms, rising capitalism tamed these demands by setting boundaries on the evolution of such political institutions as labour unions, parties, parliaments, bureaucracies, judiciaries and constitutions. Political institutions thus came to act as filtering mechanisms between the state and society, filtering in some mass social demands as legitimate objects of political negotiation, and filtering out other demands as beyond the legitimate scope of the polity, especially those that may hurt capitalism. While the trial and error process of institutional development was seldom smooth, and often discontinuous, all well functioning capitalist democracies came to be endowed with political institutions capable of simultaneously expressing and regulating the impact of popular demands. By contrast, developing country democracies, especially new democracies, tend to be volatile because of poorly formed political institutions. Not only do institutions take time to develop, but the state-society configurations in these countries do not readily facilitate institution building: full adult suffrage has arrived in these countries before democracy and capitalism have become widely accepted, generating an outpouring of a wide variety of demands; developed capitalism is as much a political goal of the state, as it is an evolving economic system, openly implicating the state as less than a neutral agent of public good; and, at least over the last decade, international pressures and new middle class elites within these countries have colluded to pursue highly inegalitarian economic strategies in the name of market-rationality, further contributing