Bryn Rosenfeld discusses her book The Autocratic Middle Class. Bryn introduces her groundbreaking research on the behavior of the state dependent middle class in authoritarian governments. She is an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. A transcript of her conversation with the host, Justin Kempf, is below.
The Middle Class and Democratization
Barrington Moore famously claimed, “No bourgeoisie. No democracy.” Many scholars before and after Moore have argued the middle class is necessary for successful democratization. But Moore had a specific image of the middle class. The bourgeoisie were not simply white-collar professionals. They were entrepreneurs who were independent of the landed aristocracy.
Bryn Rosenfeld recognizes a new source for the growth of the middle class. Many authoritarian regimes have established a state dependent middle class. A professional class who relies on the state bureaucracy for employment and think differently about their relationship to the regime than the bourgeoisie Barrington Moore portrayed.
Scholars have long recognized the heterogeneity of the middle class even while they described them as a homogenous group. The diverse interests and perspectives are part of what leads the middle class to demand democracy. But Bryn Rosenfeld finds there is also an autocratic middle class who rely on the state for their status and position. They view the process of democratization as a labyrinth of risk and uncertainty.
Introducing Bryn Rosenfeld
Bryn Rosenfeld is an assistant professor in the department of government at Cornell University. She is the author of The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy. Bryn is part of a new generation of comparative political scientists who blend field research with rigorous quantitative research designs to produce new insights into political behavior.
I have read my share of books on democracy published in 2020. Some are well-written. Others offer deep insights. So far, this is the most consequential book on democracy I have come across from last year. I do not doubt scholars will refer to its conclusions for years to come. It astonishes me this is Bryn’s first book. I expect to come across her name again in the future. So it’s about time I finally introduce you to Bryn Rosenfeld…
jmk
Bryn Rosenfeld welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Bryn
Thanks, Justin. It’s very good to be here.
jmk
Bryn, I want to ask you a personal question… You dedicated your book to your parents, who you say met as political science graduate students at Emory University. You mentioned your dad even gave you 50 years of back issues of the American political Science Review for your office. I don’t normally bring this stuff up, but you have such a firm grasp of modernization theory and classics of political science. I’m just curious. Did you talk political science around the house when you were a kid?
Bryn
So true story about my parents. My mom had been a political theorist and she was writing a dissertation on feminist political theory in the 1970s. She’s in her mid-seventies now. My dad was an Americanist who was working on civil rights and the desegregation of the Atlanta public school system. We did not talk about modernization theory around the dinner table. But I do remember getting letters on Supreme court cases when I went away to sleep away camp. That’s also a true story.
jmk
You definitely seem like you have a very, very firm grounding, whether it’s just from your own studies or whether it’s because you had a leg up by having conversations in the house. Well, Bryn, your main thesis for the book is so impressive, but it’s so mind bogglingly simple: the middle-class in autocracies has an important distinction between those who are independent of the state and those who are dependent on the state for employment. What makes the book interesting of course, are all the implications that come out of this single insight. I’d like to know, how did you come up with this idea?
Bryn
So like a lot of social science, it begins with an observation that was puzzling to me. I was spending a lot of time in the region in the two thousands, first, as a study abroad student, and then later for work. And what was clear was that despite the fact that the size of the middle-class was growing very rapidly. Russia was undergoing this very fast paced period of economic growth during the two thousands. Its political system was becoming more and not less autocratic. And this was truly puzzling from the perspective of these canonical theories of democratization which suggested that the middle class should be a force for democracy.
It was also around this time that I started thinking about the project and observed that regimes in the region were really approaching the middle-class, both expanding the size of the middle-class and what role the middle-class would play politically, and their societies very strategically. So, it was Russia’s strategy 2020, which was to increase the size of the middle class up to 50% of the population and policies to ensure that the middle class would remain loyal. It was the Nur Otan party and, and the formation of Kazakhstan’s new party doctrine adopted around this time that described the key task of the party is the formation of a strong middle class. That was how they described this autocratic, dominant party’s objective. And that middle-class would serve as a basis for political stability.
So, just one more story motivates the focus of the book. In 2013, when I was living in Kazakhstan, I went to this large meeting new conference that the party Nur Oton had held in Kazakhstan’s capital to discuss this new party doctrine and his opening remarks, the secretary of the party, quips, you know, “It was simpler when there were peasants, the proletariat and the intelligentsia.” That was the class constellation that existed formally after the October revolution. Now clearly the party had to turn its attention to this more complex phenomenon, which is the middle-class, the construction of a Kazakh middle-class, and the role that it would play politically.
jmk
It floors me that nobody has thought more about this before you. And your book is very well-researched so you can always correct me and say, ‘Well, actually I’ve got citations for this person, and this person, and that person,’ but it’s interesting to me because there’s so much talk about the military as a separate institution that has its own interests, there’s so much literature in terms of civil resistance that thinks in terms of trying to co-opt members of the state, and yet, when we talk about the middle class, there was never a differentiation between whether they worked for the state, or whether they were independent of the state. It’s just amazing to me how, when you wrote it, I thought, ‘Aha! That makes so much sense!’ But I can’t recall coming across it in the literature before you.
Bryn
So, it’s trying to understand what was going on and how the region’s growing middle classes deviated from what was this conventional wisdom. I wasn’t the, the first scholar to certainly to note the middle-class has this kind of striking degree of a dependency on the state. There were a number of Russian scholars and area studies experts who began to note this phenomenon. The discussion at that time, really, focused on the relative size of different groups within the middle class, not to mention simply measuring how large the middle-class was and you know, whether it was growing.
But they focused on the state dependency and relative size of different groups within the middle-class. And often this work would speculate about their political orientations, would sort of draw kind of broad observations about their political behavior. But there were sort of two things in my view, as I set out on this project, that were missing. One, that discussion was really largely divorced from broader debates on the relationship between economic development and democratization, which was a very central and mainstream discussion within academic political science and one that had strong echoes and lots of journalistic expectations and observations about what was happening in the region.
And the other thing that was missing was this study that would rigorously examine the implications of this prominent role of a state in middle-class formation, a kind of, you know, careful study at the individual level, which was increasingly possible, because there was great survey data from the region that would study the attitudes and behaviors of a state dependent middle-class and what that meant for processes of democratization.
jmk
I do agree that there has been a recognition that there’s a distinction between the two. It’s interesting how you recognized how sizable that middle-class, that state dependent middle-class, had grown so that it makes such an impact on the process of democratization. Now, of course, when we’re talking about the middle-class, there’s different ways to be able to discuss it. Some economists sometimes define it as literally being the middle of the income distribution. You have a sociological definition of the middle-class. Why don’t you explain a little bit about what you mean when you say middle class?
Bryn
So, for me, simply, the middle-class highlights the distinction between educated white collar workers and entrepreneurs versus less educated routine and manual laborers. It’s a very broad range of occupational groups that exist between working class and the economic elite. So, this is, as you say, it’s a sociological definition, that’s rooted sort of empirically in education, possession of higher education and occupation in white collar professional or entrepreneurial types of jobs. It’s a definition that is most closely aligned with Modernization theory, but a view that education enlightens and that white collar jobs and the professions build skills that allow people to participate effectively in democratic politics, and then incline them towards democracy. Right? Those are some, some of the key ideas in modernization theory.
jmk
Why don’t you go ahead and describe modernization theory in your own words, and you kind of just did, but what I’d really like you to do is explain how your insights diverge, or maybe even just help explain modernization theory through new insights.
Bryn
Sure. So, it’s a very simply put idea. The crux of modernization theory is that economic growth leads to a strong middle class and greater demands for democracy. Really, you could say that it’s even more simple than that: Economic growth leads to democracy. And then, modernization theory is often criticized for not being very explicit about why economic growth or the processes through which development leads to democratization. But one theme of a lot of this writing going back to seminal work by Seymour Martin Lipset is that it’s a strong middle-class that provides that mechanism, that conduit whereby a growing economy leads to rising demands for democracy and democratization.
jmk
I find it interesting how Lipset’s ideas about modernization are sometimes criticized for being too based on economics while the book that he came out with around the same time as that seminal article, Political Man, was so based on sociology and the way that you think of human beings. It’s got all those quotes from Aristotle right before you start the book. Later in life he’s even president of the American sociological. Association. So, his ideas of democracy are oftentimes much more based on civic culture, place within the community, and cross-cutting cleavages, of course, which I think your studies are really, just about where people who worked for the state have very different interests than people who don’t. So even though they’re both part of the middle-class, they have different views, different interests, which is something Lipsett probably would have gravitated towards and understood.
Bryn
That’s right. A lot of the heterogeneity within the middle-class gets ignored and in thinking about the middle class and, and sometimes, quite starkly, as a sort of unitary actor. So, whether it’s modernization theory or skeptics of modernization theory, like no less famous than Lipsett, Huntington, or political economies, redistributive theories, or the values-based versions of modernization theory which focus on democratic values that emerge first among that middle-class. All of those bodies of work and political science have expected the middle-class to be an agent of democratization.
jmk
You mention Huntington, let me ask you about Huntington and of course his student, Francis Fukuyama. Huntington’s big insight was that political modernization is not dependent on economic modernization. And Francis Fukuyama has gone on beyond that, in his two-volume work on political origins, he talked a lot about the idea of state capacity and the importance for building a strong state to be able to produce a modern society, and, of course, even democracy in the end. And he’s talked a lot about how democracy sometimes fails when they don’t have adequate state capacity.
There’s a sense within Huntington and Fukuyama that it’s important to create the state, even if it’s under an authoritarian regime to have strong governance under a democracy. Do you feel like your work is kind of a broad side against that? Because you’re saying that if you build too large of a state, it’s going to create complications for the process of democratization.
Bryn
In response, I want to draw a clear distinction between the size of the state and state capacity. So let me, let me say that, that while I’m certainly suggesting that it hurts democracy’s chances when autocratic states come to play this very significant role in the economy and as employers through a large state administration, a large government budget sector.
I want to be careful to distinguish between that large state and high state capacity. So whether you’re thinking about Fukuyama’s emphasis in defining state capacity on aspects like the States autonomy from political control or from politicization or alternative approaches to capacity…. I mean…. Wow. You know, big debates within academic political science, about how best to think about state capacity, a very thorny concept. But if you take alternatives to Huntington’s approach, that focus more on outcomes and often in areas like health and education, and what I guess I’d say is that what’s common in the region is large States with weak to intermediate capacity.
So that state capacity in a sense that Fukuyama uses it is undercut by endemic, bureaucratic corruption by low transparency, meritocratic retention, and promotion. It’s undercut by politicization of the public sector. So, just to reframe your question a little bit I might be more concerned that low state capacity or what some might prefer to call low quality government will stand as an obstacle for democratization.
jmk
It’s interesting because Hannah Arendt talked about how totalitarian regimes oftentimes actually had weak state capacity effectively. She didn’t use the word state capacity, but because they kept cycling, through systematic purges, it actually weakened the ability of the state to govern. It’s interesting because you’re mentioning that these authoritarian regimes have increasingly large States, have increasingly large employment sectors within the state, yet they’re not necessarily stronger for it.
Bryn
Yeah, that’s right. And I think of the countries that I examine in the book the clearest example of this is, perhaps Ukraine, where you’ve got low state capacity that’s made it really hard to carry out necessary reforms and then the resulting popular dissatisfaction has made it difficult to consolidate democracy. And so, these relatively high levels of state capacity may in fact, you know, some scholars have argued help to stabilize authoritarian regimes. Autocracy that delivers is likely to be more popular that may help stabilize an autocratic system, but together with what I said about low state capacity, democratization prospects are strongest in those middle ranges of state capacity, not before political modernization occurs or after it’s especially successful at yielding a well-functioning authoritarian state.
jmk
So, do you feel that the state dependent middle class is resistant to democracy more out of economic motives or more out of a sociological motive? And I mean that in terms that they’re going to have to change the way that they do their job. They’re going to have to change the way that they do things on a regular basis. Anyone who’s run an organization knows that change within an organization is incredibly difficult. And I would imagine when you start looking at change within a structure as large as a regime, it’s incredibly difficult. And there’s always going to be resistance to making reforms. So is it more of a sociological resistance or more of an economic resistance?
Bryn
There are several factors that I suggest in the book for which the state dependent middle-class is supportive of the state, reticent about democratization. A key one among these is that they rarely have alternative career prospects in the private sector. There’s a strongly sort of materialist bent to the argument in the book that the middle-class is really reticent and about what its prospects are likely to be under democratization. And this could be for several reasons. They may anticipate that democratization comes with a high degree of uncertainty. It may, under democratization, lose its job stability, its networks, and know how may be tied up with the state.
It often has these contexts where there’s bureaucratic corruption. Its privileges and its benefits depend on who controls the state politically and could be lost in the uncertainties of a democratic transition. They could be lost when a new government replaces public sector workers with its own loyalists and particularly under democracy could be lost with rising transparency in the rule of law. So, these are all reasons why a state dependent middle-class might come quite quickly to be skeptical about its prospects under democracy.
jmk
Can you go on a little bit more about how the implementation of the rule of law would affect their economic prospects?
Bryn
Take the Ukrainian state sector, public sector corruption costing something like percent of, of GDP annually. It’s a very widespread, bureaucratic corruption, and this is true, not just for a state sector middle-class working in high-ranking positions within the state administration. This is true throughout the state sector in health, and in education, where there is very large sort of everyday markets in corruption, and bribes are quite widespread. And so, this creates vulnerabilities for that state middle-class and it makes a portion of their livelihoods clearly dependent on political control of the state. And so, you might expect that with the introduction of greater transparency in the rule of law under democracy that those sources of income, those sources of livelihood diminish. And this is what happened in Central and Eastern Europe in the state sector.
And if you combine that with concern about the stability of employment over democratic transition, the fear is that because you sort of prosper under one regime, doesn’t mean that you prosper under its successor. In fact, new governments typically prefer to put their own loyalists into public sector positions. There’s a lot of reticence about what a democracy will mean for a state sector middle-class at least in the short run.
jmk
Yeah, I’d kind of like to highlight the idea that when we talk about corruption though, I don’t think that the people involved think of it as something sinister. They’re oftentimes dramatically underpaid, so for somebody who’s working a job that, let’s say in the United States, you were given a state sector job that made $20,000 a year, but you were expected to have a $50,000 a year income, and the state’s expecting you to make up the extra $30,000 a year with informal payments. They expect that you’re going to have your livelihood in part based on these informal payments.
So, if you’re doing that job and you’re familiar with that’s how things are done, I can imagine how it’s scary if you think that your typical, just regular salary is supposed to support you if a significant portion of your salary, just to make ends meet, or to be at the standard of living that you consider to be middle-class, could possibly disappear on you overnight.
Bryn
Yeah, and I agree with your observation that these are tacit agreements between regimes and their public sectors and we know from some very good work by economist in the region that there is a public private sector wage gap, that public sector salaries officially are lower than equivalent positions to the extent that those equivalents at all exist. Because really one of the characteristics of the public sectors that I’m talking about is if they’re crowding out private sector alternatives. There are very minimal private sector alternatives.
But there is a public private sector wage gap where public sector workers have for much of the post-Soviet period been paid really paltry wages and continue to be paid less on average than their private sector counterparts. But those differences are made up for in and to some degree, not always in everywhere, but are often made up for and even exceeded by the ability to earn informal rents.
jmk
Now a person who enters the public sector, obviously, all of their experience over time starts to be in something that is related to the public sector. So, for instance, if you get a job working for the state department, in the United States, your background is now in diplomacy. And while we have a very vibrant think tanks and we’ve got different people in academia that you can do, it’s not like there is an exact comparison in the private sector that matches what you do in the state sector. I’d imagine that that gap is even wider in post-Soviet States where they don’t have as much of a civil society. They don’t have as much of a private sector at all.
Does this difference begin in their education, when they’re choosing studies that make sense for public sector employment, that kind of doubles down there in that lane, that is tied to the public sector employment, or is it just because of their experience being in the public sector, and if they would’ve made a different choice earlier, they easily could have gone into the private sector?
Bryn
So, it’s a great question because in the kind of countries. You know, with the robust autocratic middle-class large public sector that I’m talking about. They said the public sector is crowding out the private sector. So, there aren’t many opportunities to be, for example, an educator or a doctor outside of public institutions. And so, if you want to be an educator or a doctor, if you choose that lane, and get an education that prepares you for one of those professions, your choice is to work in the public sector. So, as recently as 2016, there were no private hospitals in Belarus and in Russia private hospitals made up about six and a half percent of the total. So, for doctors and educators an independent livelihood in the private sector is rare.
And I think it’s one of the reasons why there’s not much evidence that people sort into these types of professions based on their political values. At the same time, there are a few key reasons why the state dependent middle-class comes quite quickly to be skeptical about its prospects under democracy and those, I think, are a function of what happens after one takes up a position in the public sector. So, specialization from their career experience or their choice of career, the type of network that they establish, their experience within the public sector is not easily transferrable to the private sector. And that would certainly be true in some kinds of positions more so than others, but the differences between the public and private sector in this regard are larger than the differences among different types of public sector occupations.
jmk
You mentioned how Russia in particular has dramatically expanded the state dependent middle-class, it’s been an increase in the size of the state. You mentioned Kazakhstan has an explicit strategic goal to increase the middle-class, oftentimes fueled by the expansion of the state. Is this aggressive expansion of the State sustainable in these countries?
Bryn
So the unrestrained growth of the state, not sustainable. Statist economies incur fiscal costs that are probably not sustainable in the long run. Then the types of statist economies that we’re talking about here, you know, where rent seeking, lower worker productivity, these things tend to decrease the public sector’s efficiency. There is the reality that these dynamics can and likely will lead to crises that destabilize regimes. So, you’ve got crises that really challenge the state to live up to its commitments, to maintain the livelihood of state workers, to continue to promote their upward mobility.
But what I think the book helps us to understand is that low support for democracy among the state middle class means that when these crises occur and even if they result in transitions that they are unlikely to produce stable democracies. I think that without this sort of broad, popular base of support for democracy, crises are more likely to lead to a regime cycling or the replacement of one autocratic regime with another. So, yeah, crises occur. And in fact, the state can rapidly become a target in such crises. State workers know who to blame for their deteriorating economic position, whereas for a private sector or private sector middle class who to blame is maybe less clear.
But that doesn’t make them democrats. And that doesn’t make them supportive of a democratic transition or of the work of building a democracy. It means that they are inclined to a more paternalistic relationship with the state and would prefer to see if one has failed, the replacement of that with another that will do better.
jmk
Well, of course, democracy is hard. It’s just hard to create a democracy. It’s hard to sustain a democracy. Have you read Sherri Berman’s recent book Dictatorship and Democracy in Europe?
Bryn
Yes.
jmk
It’s a brilliant book isn’t it?
Bryn
It’s really terrific.
jmk
What I loved about it was, she didn’t use this term, but I thought of it as the idea of democratic legacies. The more times that a country tries to democratize the easier it gets to eventually cross over that hurdle. And I think of it that way, because there’s a lot of literature on authoritarian legacies and the hurdles that democracies have to climb over, but she describes how the process of democratization, even in Europe, took so long to occur. France is the perfect example where it would democratize have a failure, redemocratize, have another failure. And now today it’s seen as one of the most successful consolidated democracies. So… But I like how your book helps explain some of the challenges that we have to be able to produce those democracies, some of the sociological challenges, economic challenges.
I know that you study post-Soviet States ao maybe I’m taking you outside of your lane when I ask you this next question. But one of the things that was buzzing in my head was about the Arab spring and the implications that your work has for that. And the reason why is because in Africa and the middle East, they have dramatically growing populations. A lot of people who thought that they’d be part of the middle-class because they went on to get a college degree and then found that it’s difficult to impossible to get a job in the state.
And I wonder if that’s part of the reason why the Arab spring took off the way that it did wasn’t necessarily just demand for democracy, but also in part, a sense of the children of people who worked for the state, who thought that they’d have a place in employment within the state that found that they didn’t have a place, which comes back to the crisis that I was asking you about whether or not it’s sustainable.Do you see a connection between that? Do you think the Arab spring has some connection to the failure to perpetually increase the size of the state?
Bryn
There are some wonderful studies that suggest that public employment is, as you hinted, that it is quite prestigious, it’s quite popular among young people, including in the middle East. I’m thinking of one that suggested that 50% of young people surveyed aspired to public sector positions prior to 2011, 2012 and they saw the public sector as providing, as I think many young people in this region has, unique avenues of social mobility. So, stagnating possibilities in the public sector combined with one of the longer-term trends, underlying or structural factors contributing to the Arab spring. That can be a tough combination. So, in the case of the Arab spring, arguably it was the state’s retreat from Arab socialism. Unmet demands from young people who were entering the labor market were part of what fueled the Arab spring movements.
jmk
The thing that, that brings me back to the Arab spring is the case of Egypt where they democratized, but it wasn’t completely an honest democratization. The people weren’t necessarily democrats. They just preferred it to the autocracy that they had. And that’s part of the reason why it fell apart. It fits your explanation almost to a T.
Bryn
Exactly. The explanation, I think, doesn’t preclude the possibility that crises arise, that there are efficiency drains to a large public sector. Studying the political economy of those dynamics is in other work, and it’s been done very well by other scholars, but what the argument in this book highlights is why it is that those types of crises often lead to unstable outcomes and this kind of regime cycling where the dissolution of that type of, you know, kind of, revolutionary coalitions that you saw that led to the erosion of what seemed to be a democratic breakthrough in Egypt or in Ukraine.
jmk
now a state that you’re probably more familiar with is Belarus. And they have been undergoing protests since the most recent election. There’s been hints of possibilities of democratization. There’s a lot of hope there. What are your thoughts on Belarus and how does it help prove your ideas and how does it, maybe, challenge some of your ideas?
Bryn
Sure. So, until this summer when the massive protests broke out in Minsk calling for Lukashenko’s resignation, Belarus, which has a very high level of state employment, one of the highest in the region, above 80% according to the data that I use in the book for the middle class so, this is a very large state. The middle class had seen fewer serious challenges to the Lukashenko regime, than some of its post-Soviet neighbors with less state dependent economies from a variety of color revolutions during the two thousands, and massive protests in Russia in 2011, 2012.
Belarus had been largely untouched by that, although it certainly had its democracy movement and periodic smaller protests over that period. But by this most recent election Belarus to look more like a good example of what happens when long-term economic deterioration that was then compounded by the COVID crisis really challenged the state’s ability to continue to provide wellbeing and upward mobility for citizens broadly. But then there’s this question of who revolts. So, who revolts? Who revolted in Belarus? A major flashpoint prior to the election was a 2015 law that taxed the unemployed that taxed, in fact, entrepreneurs, who were operating in the gray economy, were classed as unemployed or as social parasites under the law. It was dissatisfaction among those groups, joined by a large independent trade union, not the state middle class, revolting. Right? That was key to understanding the origins of the recent protests.
And so, I wrote this article, ‘Re-evaluating the Middle Class Protest Paradigm’ because we often have jumped to the conclusion, and particularly as mobilized transitions have increasingly become a norm, increasingly become the route by which countries have democratic breakthroughs and democratize, that these middle-class movements take place in capital cities. Often the sort of journalistic accounts focus on these as sort of revolts of the middle-class against the entrenched autocrat.
But that’s not an entirely accurate description of these events. I found it to be a very inaccurate and deceptive description of events in Russia in 2011, 2012. And I think some of the same insights may apply here. So, the protests in Belarus have been very massive. But why not more massive? Why not more effective and already sort of dislodging the Lukashenko regime? Well, the cleavages, I think, that the book highlights, looking in particular at this case of protests in Russia, are again evident. So, you’ve got lots of state sector professionals, including, especially in Belarus, with tremendous investments, including in recent years in the security sector, just grown.
In recent years, despite really adverse economic circumstance, they’ve been hesitant to join the opposition and that dynamic weakens, and divides, a potential pro-democracy coalition of the middle-class making it harder to mount these kind of mass numbers that make for a successful and a sustained civic movement.
jmk
Before I read your book, I had interpreted the protests entirely in the lens of nationalism it connected the dots for me and made a lot of sense, the idea of Belarus, having a divided opposition for so long because it didn’t have a firm sense of who it was as a nation. But I stumbled on a back issue of The Economist that I was looking through, which had an article on Belrus, and it was before the protest broke out. It was from January 2019. And it was talking about how Belarus had begun to move beyond its reliance on the state to produce its middle-class.
It had begun to create an independent sector for technology and for other industries that was burgeoning within recent years. And I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is exactly what Brynn’s talking about in her book.’ As that new independent middle-class forms, it makes so much sense that they would have stronger protest movements and whether they are successful or not, it definitely has much more strength than it ever has in the past.
Bryn
Yeah, that’s right, and you know, the creation of the technology sectors and those being jobs that are independent, more independent of the state creates opportunities for the tenuous balance between these coalitions to shift. It probably also speaks to one of the dynamics we’ve seen in Russia in recent years is increasing state investment. And the extension of state involvement in high-technology sectors of the economy, also in finance and banking and using sort of recent economic crises to extend the state’s reach into those sectors. I think recognizing that’s part of maintaining their connection with the middle-class that serves as a basis for the stable autocracy.
jmk
So Bryn, I want to kind of conclude with a bigger picture question for you. So, I’ve recently started reading through Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. And I disagree with significant parts of what he’s talking about, but I found it interesting how he equates a connection between capitalism and democracy in the idea that by having a free market economy, where there are options for you to go within your career. It allows you to be able to express yourself when you choose to in different ways. And that was a part of his argument I could really buy into. So, the question I’ve got for you is what do you see as the relationship between capitalism and democracy?
Bryn
So, I think the book has this sort of interesting lesson perhaps on this score which is that it’s naive to think that privatization always or by its very nature will expand the social base of support for democracy. So, whether you’re employed in the public or the private sector, the evidence in this book suggests that the working class, those below the middle-class, are no more inclined to support democracy than the state middle class. And so, we shouldn’t expect privatization if it creates downward mobility for the state dependent middle-class group to contribute to greater support for democratization. And in fact, that’s exactly what we saw across much of the post-Soviet region. After the collapse of communism, privatization in many cases pushed that state middle-class into poverty.
And that was a tendency that did not shore up democracy. It created a lot of challenges for it. So, all of this to say that privatization is most effective at broadening the social base of support for democracy when it successfully creates upward mobility. There’s no inherent relationship between privatization and democratization, but rather one that’s more contingent.
jmk
Well, thank you, Bryn. Thank you for providing your insights. It’s an amazing book and we didn’t get into the methodology, but it’s amazing how many different studies that you did in the book, both quantitative as well as qualitative, to be able to come to your conclusions. Very impressive work.
Bryn
Thank you, Justin. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.
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