Capitalist Development and Democracy

The social origins of this book lie in seven years of close collegial and social interaction between 1978 and 1985 when the three co-authors all resided in Rhode Island. The precipitating event for this volume was a presentation to a seminar at the Center for the Comparative Study of Development at Brown University in 1984 by Dietrich Rueschemeyer. He argued the thesis that forms the core hypothesis of this book: the finding of cross-national quantitative studies that economic development and democracy are positively related was essentially correct, but not for the reasons given in those studies. Rather, industrialization transformed society in a fashion that empowered subordinate classes and made it difficult to politically exclude them. Seeing a close link to his own work on the political development of modern Europe, John Stephens proposed at the close of the seminar that they and Evelyne Huber Stephens co-author a comparative historical study that would explore the thesis further. All three of us had wrestled with the question of the social origins of democracy and dictatorship in earlier research and in courses we had taught year in and year out and had concluded that the existing theory and research in this area, though rich, was deficient in one way or another.