Paths toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America

by Ruth Berins Collier

• ISBN13: 9780521643696
• ISBN10: 0521643694
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-09-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The question of whether democratization is an elite-led process from above or a popular triumph from below continues to be an area of contention among political scientists. Examining the experiences of countries which have provided the main empirical base for recent theorizing, namely, Western Europe and South America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and again in the 1970s and 1980s, this book delineates a more complex and varied set of patterns. The volume explores the politics of democratization through a comparative analysis that examines the role of labor in relation to elite strategies in both contemporary and historical perspectives. In her detailed analysis, Professor Collier also describes multiple patterns within each historical period, challenges conventional understandings of these events, and recaptures a role for unions and labor-based parties in contemporary processes of democratization.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables	x
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: Elite Conquest or Working-Class Triumph?	1	(32)
Elite-Led Reform in Early Democratization	33	(44)
Political Calculations and Socialist Parties	77	(33)
Labor Action in Recent Democratization	110	(56)
Comparing the Patterns: The Working Class and Democratization	166	(33)
Bibliography	199	(24)
Index	223