Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside

This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy. It demonstrates how the implementation of even very painful free-market economic reforms in Chile and Mexico have helped to consolidate democratic politics without engendering a backlash against either reform or democratization. This national-level compatibility between free markets and democracy, however, is founded on their rural incompatibility. In the countryside, free-market reforms socially isolate peasants to such a degree that they become unable to organize independently, and are vulnerable to the pressures of local economic elites. This helps to create an electoral coalition behind free-market reforms that is critically based in some of the market's biggest victims: the peasantry. The book concludes that the comparatively stable free-market democracy in Latin America hinges critically on its defects in the countryside; conservative, free-market elites may consent to open politics only if they have a rural electoral redoubt. Democracy's stability in Chile and Mexico may depend as much, or more critically, on the transformation of social structure and social life induced by the imposition of free market policies in the 1970s and 1980s. This book demonstrates how rural societal transformations induced by free markets support national democratic consolidation. Although existing research has often examined the effect of democratic politics on the process of economic reform, it has avoided analyzing how free market reforms are connected to the process of democratic consolidation. "This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy. It demonstrates how the implementation of even very painful free market economic reforms in Chile and Mexico have helped to consolidate democratic politics without engendering a backlash against either reform or democratization."--BOOK JACKET "This book begins with an odd contrast: while the recent emergence of many ""free market democracies"" in Latin America and much of the rest of the underdeveloped world is not in doubt, this outcome stands in marked conflict with almost two decades of scholar"

This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy.