This is in continuation of posts here and here, from Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay. Barrington Moore was one of the leading interpreters of democracy coming from the Marxist tradition of explaining political systems based on the underlying social order. His central argument was that democracy requires a bourgeoisie that could displace the old aristocratic order.
Liberal democracy has two dimensions. One liberal rule of law, which enshrined certain individual and property rights. Two, universal adult suffrage which allowed mass political participation and therefore political accountability.
The upper economic classes are clearly concerned about the rule of law, on both individual and, especially, property rights. It cannot be denied that they have a non-trivial concern about universal suffrage, in so far as it can lead to demands for economic redistribution. Ideally, their interests are best met by a liberal oligarchy.
The lower income classes are concerned about earning enough to live a dignified life. To this extent, they are interested in the political rights that can support demands for economic redistribution. Such redistribution would include not only subsidies but also certain livelihood protections and safeguards. Assuming a minimal set of individual rights, their material interest in broader individual and property rights are secondary.
The interests of the remaining classes fall somewhere between these two extremes. An illustration of a typical set of preferences in a developing country context is shown in the table below.
Note: I am referring to preferences for formal trappings of individual and property rights. Further, the preferences are also reflexive with the status quo.
On the interests of the aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and proletariat, Francis Fukuyama wrote,
Each of these three classes wanted a different political outcome: the traditional landowning class wanted to preserve the old authoritarian order; the bourgeoisie wanted a liberal (i.e., rule of law) regime protecting their property rights that might or might not include formal electoral democracy (they were always more interested in the rule of law than in democracy); and the proletariat, once it achieved consciousness of itself as a class, wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would in turn socialize the means of production, abolish private property, and redistribute wealth.
Highlighting the real motivations of the progressives in different era, Fukuyama wrote,
It is important to note that the two components of liberal democracy—liberal rule of law and mass political participation—are separable political goals that initially tended to be favored by different social groups. Thus the middle-class authors of the French Revolution were not, as many historians have pointed out, committed democrats in the sense that they wanted immediate expansion of the franchise to peasants and workers. The Rights of Man were conceived as legal guarantees that would protect the property and personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie limiting the power of the state but no necessarily empowering the mass of French citizens. Similarly, the Whigs, who forced the constitutional settlement on the English king during the Glorious Revolution in the previous century, were largely wealthy taxpayers that included part of the aristocracy, the gentry, and the upper middle classes. Their ranks were joined in the succeeding two centuries by the growing numbers of commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, as well as by middle-class lawyers, doctors, civil servants, teachers, and other professionals set off from the working classes by their education and property ownership. These groups constituted the base of support for the British Liberal Party during the nineteenth century. The main interest of the Liberals tended to be rule of law much more than democracy—that is, legal protection for private property and individual rights, as well as policies such as free trade, meritocratic civil service reform, and public education that would make possible upward mobility.
It is no different in modern times. For example, take the case of America. The liberals never accepted the electoral verdict in favour of Trump and have used every opportunity to overturn it. And the dominant proportion of Trump supporters belong to the lower class, the "basket of deplorables" as Hillary Clinton famously described them. Put the two together, and one could see the support for an argument in favour of a limited democracy among liberals.
While there are several competing explanations for what contributes to the emergence of democracies, the reasoning which points to the importance of the bourgeoisie is compelling.
Liberal democracy emerged as the preferred political order in western countries as a result of the interactions among the different economic classes. The collective political preference of a country will depend on the prevailing distribution of the different economic classes and the nature of their interactions. The emergence of a collective preference appropriate for democracy is both evolutionary and, as I blogged here, path dependent.
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