The Autocratic Middle Class

How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy

Bryn Rosenfeld

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691209777
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Fascisme et totalitarisme

How middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience Conventional wisdom holds that the rising middle classes are a force for democracy. Yet in post-Soviet countries like Russia, where the middle class has grown rapidly, authoritarianism is deepening. Challenging a basic tenet of democratization theory, Bryn Rosenfeld shows how the middle classes can actually be a source of support for autocracy and authoritarian resilience, and reveals why development and economic growth do not necessarily lead to greater democracy.In pursuit of development, authoritarian states often employ large swaths of the middle class in state administration, the government budget sector, and state enterprises. Drawing on attitudinal surveys, unique data on protest behavior, and extensive fieldwork in the post-Soviet region, Rosenfeld documents how the failure of the middle class to gain economic autonomy from the state stymies support for political change, and how state economic engagement reduces middle-class demands for democracy and weakens prodemocratic coalitions. The Autocratic Middle Class makes a vital contribution to the study of democratization, showing how dependence on the state weakens the incentives of key societal actors to prefer and pursue democracy.

1

The Autocratic Middle Class

Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.

—ARISTOTLE, THE POLITICS¹

MUCH HAS BEEN expected of the middle class. In two thousand years of scholarship on democratization—from Aristotle in the fourth century to Acemoglu and Robinson today—two views of the middle class have dominated. On the one hand, the middle class has been seen as a source of social stability. In this view, the middle class favors durable economic institutions and maintenance of the political status quo. Politically and socially, it acts as a conservative force. By moderating the conflicting redistributive demands of rich and poor, it stabilizes existing regimes. On the other hand, the middle class has been cast as an agent of political change and democratization. In scholarship on the the first wave of democratization in the nineteenth century, the second wave of democratizations following World War II, and the third wave of democratic transitions from the mid-1970s through the collapse of communism, the middle classes have been ascribed a critical role (see, e.g., Lipset 1960; Huntington 1991; Acemoglu & Robinson 2006; Ekiert 2010). To date, no comparative scholarship has sought to reconcile these contrasting views.

This is a matter of some urgency. Civic revolution has increasingly become the norm in recent episodes of democratization. The very fact of mass mobilization during transition, as well as its character, appears to have lasting impact on the subsequent quality of democracy (Haggard & Kaufman 2016). Although these popular insurrections are often labeled as middle-class revolutions, our understanding of the constituencies involved as well as their motivations remains limited. Moreover, while the role of the middle classes in mass uprisings against authoritarianism has varied across time and space, no clear consensus has emerged to explain these patterns (e.g., Koo 1991; Jones 1998; Shin 1999; Rueschemeyer, Stephens & Stephens 1992, 272). Recent protests around the world demonstrate the critical importance of understanding how citizens form democratic preferences under autocracy, and thereby the sources of bottom-up pressure for political change.

In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the collapse of communism inaugurated a period of market reforms, promising social transformation, prosperity, and democracy. The growth of a new, market-based middle class was widely expected to buttress these twin economic and political transitions. The transition from state socialism ended the institution of universal state employment and broadened the scope of economic activities neither initiated nor directly controlled by the state. While these processes reduced the size and influence of the state, they did so unevenly and in unexpected ways, leaving the state as an influential patron of the region’s educated, professional classes.

At the same time, the early post-communist years saw a staggering rise in unemployment, inflation, and poverty across the region. Initially, at least, these conditions produced a sharp differentiation of incomes and the immiseration of the communist-era middle class (Ekiert 2010, 112). During the 1990s, inequality rose most rapidly in the former Soviet states, where market reforms proceeded more slowly than in Eastern Europe, and were least complete (Hellman 1998). Economic recovery took off only a decade later, around 2000, when the region’s economies joined the high growth trajectory of other emerging markets. During this recovery, the post-Soviet middle classes have grown markedly, yet not only, or even primarily, because small business, entrepreneurship, and private enterprise have flourished. Instead, the rise of the middle class has been largely tied to the state. Today, it is clear that market reforms have failed to replace the old state-dependent middle classes of the communist era with an independent, entrepreneurial middle class. Moreover, a new state-dependent middle class has emerged, only deepening existing cleavages.

This book seeks to expand our grasp of authoritarian resilience and bottom-up pressures for democratization in states where economic growth is increasing the size of the middle class. Contrary to the conventional expectation, I ask why and under what conditions growth of the middle class may not increase popular pressure on regimes to democratize. To answer this question, I turn to a wide array of survey data on the political preferences and behaviors of the middle classes in the post-communist countries as well as qualitative evidence collected during nine months of fieldwork in the region. In contrast to existing scholarship, this book emphasizes that a variety of development strategies can drive an expansion of the middle class. These strategies differ in their effect on the formation of democratic constituencies. There are multiple pathways to the middle class, and not all of them, I argue, lead to greater support for democracy.

In this book, I tell the tale of two middle classes, with differing degrees of state dependency, that are nonetheless treated as one homogenous group by existing theories. The story focuses on contexts that combine autocracy with an economically interventionist state. These conditions are not rare. Pervasive public sectors are a feature of politics in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as the former Soviet Union (e.g., Hertog 2013; Diamond 1987; Weyland 1996; Gervasoni 2010; Oliveros 2016; Darden 2008). These conditions are widespread in resource states, but they are also present in post-socialist countries both with (e.g., Azerbaijan) and without oil (e.g., Belarus).

The post-Soviet middle classes typify the type of divided middle class that develops under autocratic state institutions and extensive state economic engagement. Following the collapse of communism, an important new cleavage appeared between the old, state-dependent middle class and the nascent middle class of the new market-based economy (see also, e.g., Ekiert 2010). Thanks to statist economic policies and a decade of economic recovery, the state-dependent sectors of the middle class in the former Soviet Union are growing. Civil servants and other government budget-sector employees are also increasingly well paid. Where formal wages remain low, the state has turned a blind eye to bribe-taking and graft by those on its payroll, ensuring that corruption helps to compensate. The upshot is that lucrative white-collar positions in public-sector enterprises, banks, and financial service firms as well as the state administration have become among the clearest pathways to the middle class across the former Soviet states. As society has grown wealthier, even state teachers and doctors find it increasingly lucrative to exploit their official positions (INDEM 2005). This is the new state-dependent middle class of post-communist quasi-capitalism.

The process of middle class formation now transpiring in the post-Soviet states recalls what Barrington Moore called the “feudalization” of the bourgeoisie. While a number of influential approaches to democratization—among them modernization theory, its values-based variants, and redistributive theories—expect the middle class to be a force for democracy,² an earlier macro-sociological literature understood that when the middle class maintains close ties with the state it can be a deeply conservative political force. This book problematizes recent theories of democratization, which largely ignore the implications of how growth of the middle class is achieved. Indeed, this book’s central argument is that failure of the middle class to gain economic autonomy from the state stymies support for political change and contributes to authoritarian resilience.

This study fills an important gap in the literature. While the middle classes have often been seen as a linchpin in successful democratic coalitions, very little work to date has provided a detailed empirical examination of this group’s political preferences. As Ansell & Samuels (2014, 46) write, “Scholars have paid insufficient attention to the concrete interests of the … middle classes in the study of regime change.” The distinctive contribution of this book is to show concretely, at the individual level and for a broad set of cases, how state-led development produces middle classes that are beholden to autocratic regimes. The findings thus contribute to our understanding of why some countries are democratic, while others are not. They also speak to long-standing debates in comparative politics about the role of class actors in democratic transition and participation in contentious politics, as well as a newer literature on the rise of state capitalism in contemporary autocracies. In addition, this research advances our understanding of the consequences of state-directed development. While this subject has thus far been studied primarily at the institutional and macro-sociological level (Gerschenkron 1962; Bellin 2002; Kohli 2004; Wengle 2015), this book focuses on how statist strategies of development structure the incentives of individual actors to side with autocracy. It also provides new insights into the persistent puzzle of development without democratization.

This introductory chapter is organized as follows. I first lay out my argument in brief. I then situate it within existing scholarly debates. My focus is at the micro-level, on how state dependency shapes the incentives faced by the middle classes to oppose the extension of democratic institutions. I next provide an overview of my empirical strategy. I then conclude with an outline of the book’s remaining chapters.

Argument in Brief: The Autocratic Middle Class

The question of how society’s class structure affects the prospects for democracy has long been a core preoccupation in the study of politics. One of the most enduring arguments in this literature holds that growth of the middle class gives rise to democratization. This view is echoed in many canonical approaches to democratization, including political economy’s redistributive theories, modernization theory, and its values-based variants. These theories expect the middle class—defined variously in terms of income, education, or occupation—to play a key role in democratic transition.

Yet remarkably little systematic research examines middle-class attitudes toward democracy in autocratic settings. As the developing world’s middle classes have grown rapidly over the past two decades, largely in nondemocracies, this gap has become even more significant. Will these growing middle classes “turn the scale,” enhancing their countries’ prospects for democracy? Or standing the conventional logic on its head: Might it be the case that certain modes of state-supported middle-class growth, in fact, delay democratization?

This book argues that a middle class whose status depends on public employment for an authoritarian state is often antithetical to democracy. Drawing lessons from the post-communist countries, it sheds light on how the economic institutions of state employment benefit autocrats, helping them to secure the support of key middle-class constituencies. While existing theories expect that growing middle classes will confront old networks of patronage and privilege, they ignore crucial variation in the extent to which the middle classes are stakeholders in existing autocratic systems. Indeed, in many contemporary autocracies, expanding opportunities within the state sector—within the state bureaucracy, public institutions, and state-owned enterprises—supply the principal avenues of mobility into the middle class and drive its numerical expansion.

Under autocracy, an expansive public sector can dampen democratic demands. How a person gains and maintains their place in the middle class affects their expected benefit from democracy and willingness to challenge the political status quo. The distinction between the middle classes of the state and private sectors is thus real, politically significant, and becomes the locus for divergent economic and political interests in autocratic systems. This distinction forms the basis for access to privileges, benefits, and at times even differing status before the law. Where the state supplies the principal avenues of social mobility into the middle class, a self-conscious, democratizing middle class fails to form. Material incentives based on employment status and workplace mobilization all militate against the expression of democratic demands. Rather, selective incentives are used to mobilize growing middle classes in support of autocracy.

I connect the middle classes’ reticence about democracy to the power of authoritarians to bestow or withhold benefits that are contingent and could be diminished or disrupted by change in the political control of the state. Some of these benefits are formal, like jobs, employment protections, shorter working hours, access to healthcare, and loans on advantageous terms from state banks. Other benefits are informal, though rooted in an official position, like opportunities to solicit bribes and kickbacks and preferential treatment by other state institutions. In turn, the power of state selective incentives varies with an individual’s exit options. These options are limited when an extensive public sector employs a preponderance of the middle class, crowding out private-sector alternatives. Limited exit options deepen dependence on the state. By tying future benefits to regime continuity, state economic engagement that concentrates rents in the public sector creates its own middle-class constituencies, encouraging opposition to democratization and dividing potential democratic coalitions.

If we survey the developing world today, it is possible to tell a tale of two middle classes: one whose economic opportunities and life chances are owed directly to the state, and the other whose economic livelihood is less directly dependent. These categories roughly correspond to two pathways into the middle class: one through the state, the other through the private sector. While the latter group may fear predation by a large authoritarian state, the former group has the state to thank for its upward mobility and middle-class status. White-collar workers at state and quasi-state enterprises,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Autocratic Middle Class
• 2. State Dependency and Middle-Class Demand for Democracy
• 3. The Post-Communist Middle Classes, the State, and Democratization
• 4. Rethinking the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm
• 5. Choosing to Work for the State
• 6. Revolution, Democratic Retrenchment, and the Middle Class
• 7. Aligning the Middle Class with Autocracy: Rhetoric and Practice
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix I: Regression Results
• Bibliography
• Index