Democracy and the Class Struggle

Why do societies today distribute political power more equally than before? Most scholars believe that this transition is explained by the rise of capitalism but have long disagreed about why it mattered. The author argues that dominant models fail to capture why capitalist development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, the author introduces a model of the democratic transition that centers on the concept of disruptive capacity. He collects data on employment structures for much of the modern period to study democratization over the same period. In cross-national regressions, the author finds evidence that the disruptive capacity of nonelites drives democratic gains, and the finding that landlord capacity stymies it is reproduced. Counterfactual exercises show that slightly more than half of the democracy gap between the developing and developed world can be explained by the fact that late development bolstered landlords while handicapping nonelites.