Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development.

By Eva Bellin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. 256p. $35.00.

Liberalization Against Democracy: The Local Politics of Economic Reform in Tunisia.

By Stephen J. King. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 168p. $44.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Two recent books based on close studies of Tunisian politics focus on the dynamics of nondemocratic rule in the developing world. Together, they complement each other by providing a comprehensive picture of how democracy has remained elusive in distinct spheres of the Tunisian political economy. Eva Bellin's Stalled Democracy concentrates on the urban sector to explain why capital and labor have remained reluctant democrats, despite the predictions of structural accounts of democratization based on the experience of industrialized countries. Stephen King's Liberalization Against Democracy provides a close ethnographic study of agricultural sector reform to show why economic liberalization has not bred political opening in rural politics, contrary to the expectations of neoliberal economic theory. The two studies agree that societal groups have not been agents of democratization in Tunisia—and, indeed, their reluctance is critical to any explanation of persistent authoritarianism—but diverge on the logic underlying their arguments. This difference is not just an artifact of their distinct foci (the urban versus the rural sectors) but is also due to different perspectives on how economic liberalization has affected and might continue to affect domestic politics.

Two “paradoxes”—the “developmental paradox” and the “democratic paradox”—are at the center of Bellin's explanation for “stalled democracy,” or a political state in which democracy is “stunted halfway between autocracy and fully accountable government” (p. 4) in late developers. The first paradox arises because the developmental state creates social forces, such as an indigenous bourgeoisie and a class of wage laborers as part of its efforts to promote growth and development. Once they take root in society, these forces can potentially amass sufficient power to challenge the state and control the policymaking agenda. The second paradox occurs because state sponsorship creates classes that have limited commitment to democratization. Dependence on a state that distributes favors on a discretionary basis dampens support for general political opening. Further, capital and labor are reluctant to extend their privileged positions in the domestic political economy to society as a whole through the creation of more genuinely representative institutions.

In the first five chapters, Bellin makes her case through a detailed, historically grounded account of the rise of capital and organized labor and their shifting relationships with the state in postindependence Tunisia. A final chapter aims to generalize the framework by extending the arguments to developing countries in diverse regions. The argument places substantial weight on measuring the power and autonomy of capital and labor vis-à-vis the state. The author defines power as the capacity to impose preferences on the state (p. 47), and autonomy as the ability to adopt political positions and operate independently of the state (p. 49). Although the respective power of state and society is not zero-sum, she argues, the power and autonomy of these two categories are mutually exclusive.

In Chapters 1 and 3, Bellin sets out to demonstrate that both capital and labor acquired significant power over the course of several decades. The discussion reflects a deep familiarity with the ups and downs of indigenous private sector and labor movement. This deep contextual knowledge of the shifting fortunes of Tunisian social groups since independence may explain the vacillating descriptions of the bourgeoisie as “significant” yet “persistently weak” (Chapter 1). Because of contradictory characterizations of the power of societal groups, the analysis effectively places greater stock in societal autonomy from the state (or lack thereof) to explain stalled democracy. Power is only significant to the extent that it is acted upon, pointing to the importance of autonomy, or the capacity to act independently of the state.

Comparison with other cases extends Bellin's logically rigorous account of stalled democracy. The ambivalent attitudes of state-sponsored capitalists in Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico and organized labor in Mexico, South Korea, Egypt, and Zambia support the linkage between the developmental paradox and persistent authoritarianism. Further, the cases show that support for democratization from either capital or labor—and not both—is sufficient to unhinge stalled democracy. For example, in South Korea, an autonomous labor movement threw its weight behind political opening while business provided ex post facto support. The reverse held true in Mexico. These comparisons raise interesting questions about when either capital or labor support alone is sufficient to loosen the foundations of authoritarianism.

Bellin makes a strong case for how the twin developmental and democratic paradoxes potentially undermine political liberalization. The argument might be on shakier ground in suggesting possible paths away from authoritarianism. In particular, she argues that marketization can break the vicious circle by undermining the discretionary power of the state (p. 46) and that cronyism has not been politicized in Tunisia (pp. 76–77). Studies of transitions from planned to market-based economies demonstrate that there is no necessary or even likely linkage between economic and political liberalization. Both state and societal elites devise cunning strategies to shore up control over resources, profit from newly privatized assets, and limit true competition, even as they profess their commitment to economic reform. Indeed, the Tunisian case may be a case in point, as families close to the president have allegedly gobbled up investment opportunities in the late 1990s generated by privatization and structural adjustment. The book's treatment of the private sector as a unit, which potentially masks the differential effects of marketization on investors, depending on their extent of capital holdings, sectoral activity, trade orientation, or political connections, may obscure how intensified economic liberalization in the 1990s and beyond could have reinforced privileged access to opportunities among certain elites and, hence, state discretionary power.

King directly challenges the conventional, neoliberal wisdom about the political and economic benefits of trade liberalization. Through a study of the political economy of reform in the agricultural sector, the supposed primary beneficiary of structural adjustment, his book demonstrates that economic outcomes do not necessarily support the predictions of neoliberal economists. Instead, politics and the political priorities of the state shape how reforms are enacted. The book speaks directly to contemporary debates about the relationship between political and economic change. Chapter 1 reviews these approaches, arguing that modernization theory and more recent literature on “transitions” to democratic rule neglect the origins of elite preferences and factional splits. Like Bellin, King highlights the role that social groups, such as capital labor or farmers, can play in driving democratization. But King places more stock in democratic projects propelled by less privileged social groups: If social structure matters for democracy, then a more egalitarian class structure will support this trend. He argues that neoliberal reforms increase inequality and therefore are inherently inimical to political change. By reinforcing “traditional” rural patron–client relations, marketization consolidated authoritarianism.

Chapter 2 attempts to generalize the argument to the whole national political economy by arguing that neoliberal reforms strengthened both urban and rural elites. But the book is strongest in tracing the politics of economic reform in the rural sector through a close case study of Tebourba, a prominent agricultural town in northern Tunisia. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the process of privatizing agriculture and its social effects in Tebourba. In-depth ethnographic research convincingly demonstrates that economic liberalization has concentrated land holdings in the hands of a small group of wealthy farmers, exacerbated the economic hardship of smallholders and landless peasants, and reinvigorated rural patron–client relations. Thus, King successfully debunks the argument that economic opening necessarily spurs political liberalization even in the rural sector, where the benefits of neoliberal reform are theoretically greatest. In Chapter 5, he links these findings to an economic literature on development and average farm size, showing that the political dynamics of agricultural reform in Tunisia go against the growing consensus that small and middle farmers can achieve greater productivity than large holders. Instead, state officials structured land redistribution to favor important elite allies.

This book makes an important contribution to the moral economy literature by showing how the state—and not just local communities of the marginalized—can promote notions of distributional justice. Tunisian state officials manipulated moral economic arguments to encourage wealthier rural residents to redistribute wealth on a “voluntary” basis in order to diminish potential unrest from dislocating economic shifts (pp. 89, 106). Buried in observations interspersed throughout the book, this important insight deserves greater emphasis and further development. What are the economics of the moral economy and how are notions of fairness constructed? King shows how Islamic charitable obligations provided the ideological framework for the moral economy in Tebourba but does not explore which aspects of these traditions were systematically emphasized or downplayed.

A central claim of the book—that marketization retraditionalized rural social relations—also deserves further elaboration. Did the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s revive prior patterns of patron–client relations or create new social relations? What is missing is a full, sociological account of the postindependence state, as well as a clear understanding of rural social relations in the decades leading up to reform. King makes broad contentions that structural adjustment unduly benefited elites, notably the old beylical families who were linked to the ruling monarchy in the precolonial and colonial periods. But this contradicts the conventional wisdom on postindependence state-society relations in Tunisia, where the independent state marginalized the beylical elite and, if anything, favored midlevel provincial elites closely tied to the independence movement. Thus, if the old, beylical families have benefited from recent land reforms, this raises important historical questions and demands an explanation in itself. The argument also suggests that the state and its rural elite allies have reinvented rather than revived tradition to profit from structural adjustment.

These two studies not only illuminate the macro- and micropolitics of economic reform in Tunisia but also offer important lessons for persistent authoritarianism in many late developers. Bellin's explicitly comparative, cross-national framework offers more readily generalizable findings, while King's near-exclusive focus on a single case limits its explanatory power beyond Tunisia. But single-case studies can yield important causal hypotheses and can undercut existing, established claims. Both works challenge theorized linkages between economic and political reform, particularly in the developing world, even as they diverge in their perspectives on how, if ever, marketization can trigger democratization. By filling in precise causal mechanisms, such close case studies are an essential part of the growing literature on democratization and persistent authoritarianism.