Political Order and Political Decay (71 page)

The emergence of middle-class societies also increased the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a political system. In chapter 28 I noted the critique of liberal democracy made by writers as varied as Mosca, Pareto, and Marx that its advent was in the end a fraud, masking the continued rule by elites. But the value of formal democracy and an expanded franchise became evident in the twentieth century. Democratic majorities in Europe and North America used the ballot box to choose policies beneficial to themselves, regulating big business and putting into place redistributive welfare state provisions.

WHO IS MIDDLE CLASS?

Before proceeding to analyze further the political consequences of the rise of the middle classes, it is necessary to step back and define what the middle class is. There is a difference in the way that economists and sociologists think about it. The former tend to define middle class in income terms. A typical way is simply to choose some band like the middle three quintiles of the income distribution, or to count those individuals who fall within 0.5 to 1.5 times the median income. This makes the definition of middle class dependent on a society's average wealth and thus incomparable cross-nationally; being middle class in Brazil means a much lower consumption level than in the United States. To avoid this problem, some economists choose an absolute level of consumption, ranging from a low of US$5 a day, or $1,800 in parity purchasing power per year, up to a range of $6,000–$31,000 annual income in 2010 U.S. dollars. This fixes one problem but creates another, since an individual's perception of class status is often relative rather than absolute. As Adam Smith noted in
The Wealth of Nations
, a pauper in eighteenth-century England might have lived like a king in Africa.

Sociologists, in a tradition beginning with Karl Marx, tend not to look at measures of income but instead at how one's income is earned—occupational status, level of education, and assets. For the purpose of understanding the political implications of a growing middle class, the sociological approach is vastly preferable. Simple measures of income or consumption, whether relative or absolute, may tell you something about the consumption habits of the person in question but relatively little concerning his or her political inclinations. Huntington's theory of the destabilizing impact of the gap between expectations and reality is much more closely tied to social and occupational status than to any absolute level of income. A poor person of low social status and education who briefly rises out of poverty and then sinks back is likely to be more preoccupied with day-to-day survival than with political activism. A middle-class person, by contrast—someone, say, with a university education who cannot find an appropriate job and “sinks” to a social level he or she regards as beneath his or her dignity—is far more challenging politically.

Thus, from a political standpoint, the important marker of middle-class status would be occupation, level of education, and ownership of assets (a house or an apartment, or consumer durables) that could be threatened by the government. Marx's original definition of “bourgeoisie” referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker.

A strong middle class with some assets and education is more likely to believe in the need for both property rights and democratic accountability. One wants to protect the value of one's property from rapacious and/or incompetent governments, and is more likely to have time to participate in politics (or to demand the right to participate) because higher income provides a better margin for family survival. A number of cross-national studies have shown that middle-class people have different political values from the poor: they value democracy more, want more individual freedom, are more tolerant of alternative lifestyles, etc. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and middle-class status produce what he calls “post-material” values in which democracy, equality, and identity issues become much more prominent than older issues of economic distribution. William Easterly has linked what he labels a “middle class consensus” to higher economic growth, education, health, stability, and other positive outcomes. Economically, the middle class is theorized to have “bourgeois” values of self-discipline, hard work, and a longer-term perspective that encourages savings and investment.
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From the earlier discussion of Europe in the nineteenth century, however, it should be clear that the middle classes are not inevitably supporters of democracy. This tends to be particularly true when the middle classes still constitute a minority of the population. Under these circumstances, opening up a country to universal political participation may lead to large and potentially unsustainable demands for redistribution. In this case, the middle classes may choose to align themselves with authoritarian rulers who promise stability and property rights protection.

Such is arguably the case in contemporary Thailand and China. The Thai political system went from an authoritarian military regime to a reasonably open democracy between 1992 and 1997, preparing the way for the rise of the populist politician Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin, one of the country's richest businessmen, organized a mass political party based on government programs to provide debt relief and health care to rural Thais. The middle classes, who had strongly supported the democratic opening in the early 1990s, turned against Thaksin and supported a military coup that forced him from power in 2006. He was charged with corruption and abuse of power, and has had to exercise power from exile since then. The country subsequently became sharply polarized between Thaksin's Red Shirt supporters and middle-class Yellow Shirt adherents, and saw an elected government pushed out of power by the military in 2014.
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A similar dynamic may exist in China. The size of the Chinese middle class in 2014 depends obviously on definition but is estimated to be perhaps 300–400 million people out of a population of 1.3 billion. These new middle classes are often the source of resistance to the authoritarian government; they are the ones who are on Sina Weibo (the Chinese Twitter equivalent) and who are likely to publicize or criticize government wrongdoing. Survey data from sources like AsiaBarometer suggest that there is widespread support for democracy in China, but when asked about the specific content of democracy, many respondents associate it either with greater personal freedom or with a government responsive to their needs. Many believe that the current Chinese government is already providing them with these things and do not oppose the system as a whole. Middle-class Chinese are less likely to express support for a short-term transition to multiparty democracy under universal suffrage, although it is very difficult to get accurate polling data on this subject.

The Thai and Chinese cases, as well as the nineteenth-century European ones, suggest that the size of the middle class relative to the rest of the society is one important variable in determining how it will behave politically. When the middle class constitutes only 20–30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it and the populist policies they may pursue. But when the middle class becomes the largest group in the society, the danger is reduced. Indeed, the middle class may at that point be able to vote itself various welfare-state benefits and profit from democracy. This may help to explain why democracy becomes more stable at higher levels of per capita income, since the size of the middle class relative to the poor usually increases with greater wealth. Middle-class societies, as opposed to societies with a middle class, are the bedrock of democracy.

Such societies appeared in Europe by the early decades after World War II, and they have been gradually spreading to other parts of the world ever since. The Third Wave of democratization was not “caused” by the rise of the middle class, since many democratic transitions occurred in countries—like those in sub-Saharan Africa—that did not have appreciable middle classes at the time. Contagion, imitation, and the failures of incumbent authoritarian regimes were all significant factors triggering democratic transitions. But the ability to consolidate a stable liberal democracy is greater in countries that have large and broad middle classes, in contrast to ones in which a relatively small middle class is sandwiched between a rich elite and a mass of poor people. Spain, the country that kicked off the Third Wave, had been transformed from a backward agrarian society at the time of the civil war in the 1930s to a much more modern one by the early 1970s. Surrounded by examples of successful democracies in the European Union, it was much easier to contemplate a democratic transition then than it had been a generation earlier.

This suggests that the prospects for democracy globally remain good, despite the setbacks that occurred during the early twenty-first century. A Goldman Sachs report projects that spending on the part of the world's middle three income quintiles will rise from the current 31 percent of total income to 57 percent in 2050.
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A report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies projects that the numbers of middle class people will grow from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020, and 4.9 billion in 2030 (out of a projected global population of 8.3 billion).
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The bulk of this growth is slated to occur in Asia, particularly China and India, but all regions of the world will participate in this trend.

Economic growth by itself is not sufficient to create democratic stability if it is not broadly shared. One of the greatest threats to China's social stability today is its rapid increase in income inequality since the mid-1990s, which by 2012 had reached Latin American levels.
7
Latin America itself had reached middle-income status well before East Asia but continued to be plagued by high levels of inequality and the populist policies that flowed from it. One of the most promising developments for the region, however, has been the notable fall in income inequality in the decade of the 2000s, as documented by economists Luis Felipe López-Calva and Nora Lustig.
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There have been significant gains to the Latin American middle class. In 2002, 44 percent of the region's population was classified as poor; this had fallen to 32 percent by 2010 according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America.
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The cause of the decline in inequality is not entirely understood, but a certain portion of it is attributable to social policies like conditional cash transfer programs that have deliberately distributed benefits to the poor.

THE MIDDLE CLASS AND CLIENTELISM

The arrival of a large middle class may also have important effects on the practice of clientelism and the forms of political corruption associated with it. I argued earlier that clientelism is an early form of democracy: in societies with masses of poor and poorly educated voters, the easiest form of electoral mobilization is often the provision of individual benefits such as public-sector jobs, handouts, or political favors. This suggests that clientelism will start to decline as voters become wealthier. Not only does it cost more for politicians to bribe them, but the voters see their interests tied up with broader public policies rather than individual benefits.

Civil service reform, where it has taken place, has typically come on the back of a rising middle class. We saw in chapter 8 how the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in Britain served the interests of the new British middle classes who found themselves excluded from the old aristocratic patronage networks. A middle class created by capitalist growth is almost by definition a supporter of meritocracy. Similarly, in the United States the civil service reform movement during the Progressive Era was driven by middle-class groups who stood outside the existing patronage system. These educated, often Protestant businessmen, lawyers, and academics looked down on the machine politicians who mobilized masses of immigrant voters in the country's growing cities. Merchants and industrialists, moreover, needed a competent civil service to provide the increasingly complex services expected from the government. Contemporary anticorruption movements in China, India, and Brazil all recruit heavily from the middle classes.

As in the case of democracy, however, the simple emergence of a middle class does not mean that this group will automatically support clean government and an end to clientelistic politics. New social actors are perfectly capable of being recruited into existing patronage networks and profiting from it. In the United States, the railroads—exemplars of technological modernity during the nineteenth century—quickly learned how to buy politicians and manipulate the patronage system to their own benefit. Many legislatures in western states were said to be owned lock, stock, and barrel by railroad interests. Indeed, the railroads' ability to play this political game is the reason that older agrarian groups like midwestern farmers were eager to join the Progressive coalition in support of civil service reform.

Thus as economic growth occurs, there is something of a race between different interests to recruit the new middle classes to their cause. The old patronage politicians are perfectly happy to extend their largesse to middle-class supporters. As in a democracy, their willingness to support the reformist side in this struggle will depend on their numbers, their sense of economic security, and their social status. If they feel excluded and unrecognized by those above them, as in Britain, or by those below them (who nonetheless held political power), as in America, they are much more likely to turn their indignation to reform or overthrow of the existing clientelistic system.