Date:
Location:
"Democracy and the Class Struggle"
Speaker:
Adaner Usmani, Postdoctoral Fellow, International and Public Affairs, Brown University.
Contact:
Yueran Zhang
yueranzhang@g.harvard.edu
Chairs:
Orlando Patterson, Faculty Associate. John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.
Daniel Lord Smail, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
Ya-Wen Lei, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.
Abstract:
A variety of scholars have argued that capitalist development incubates political democracy, but there has long been disagreement over the mechanisms by which development matters. I argue that the dominant conflict-based models of democratization misunderstand why development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, I introduce the concept of disruptive capacity, which I employ to better explain how development shapes the democratic transition. I use an original dataset on national employment structures over much of the modern period to examine patterns of democratization in a panel of as many as 100 countries between 1870 and the present. I find strong evidence that the disruptive capacity of non-elites drives democratic gains, and I reproduce the well-known finding that landlord capacity stymies it. In counterfactual exercises I show that almost 60\% of the democracy gap between the developing and developed world can be explained by the fact that late development handicapped non-elites while prolonging the power of landlords.
