Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside

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. 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.

Acknowledgements; Part I. The Framework and Theoretical Argument: 1. Posing the right questions; 2. The sectoral foundations of free market democracy; Part II. The Cases: 3. Neoliberalism and the transformation of rural society in Chile; 4. Social capital, organization, political participation and democratic competition in Chile; 5. The consolidation of free market democracy and Chilean electoral competition, 1988–2000; 6. Markets and democratization in Mexico: rural politics between Corporatism and Neoliberalism; Part III. Conclusions and Implications: 7. Political competitiveness, organized interests, and the democratic market; References; Index.

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 at the same time engendering a backlash against either reform or democratization.