Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside [Hardcover]

This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy.Democracy's stability may hinge as much or more critically on the transformation of social structure and social life that was induced by the imposition of free market policies in the 1970s and 1980s in Chile and Mexico. This book turns the traditional top-down explanations on their head, showing how atomizing rural societal transformations induced by free markets undergird national democratic consolidation. Existing research has often examined the effect of democratic politics on the process of economic reform, but has avoided this deeper question of how free market reforms are connected to the process of democratic consolidation.Democracy's stability may hinge as much or more critically on the transformation of social structure and social life that was induced by the imposition of free market policies in the 1970s and 1980s in Chile and Mexico. This book turns the traditional top-down explanations on their head, showing how atomizing rural societal transformations induced by free markets undergird national democratic consolidation. Existing research has often examined the effect of democratic politics on the process of economic reform, but has avoided this deeper question of how free market reforms are connected to the process of democratic consolidation.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.Acknowledgements; Part I. The Framework and Theoretical Argument: 1. Posing the right ql³*