Business Community Support for New Democracies

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SES-9911267Charles KurzmanThe study examines a "wave" of democratizations in which, according to preliminary research, the business community abandoned support of democracy while expressing relatively little concern over economic and cultural threats. The goals of the project are 1) to understand why business communities abandon support of new democracies; 2) to test the hypothesis that this turn reflects challenges to the business community's control of the state, in competition with the emerging "class" of modern intellectuals, even where business's economic position and cultural values are not threatened; and 3) to investigate the last completed "wave of democratization" not complicated by decolonization and the Cold War, namely the constitutional revolutions of 1905-1912.Qualitative comparative-historical research will be completed on three cases, Mexico, Portugal and Turkey using primary source materials in three languages. The case studies will consist of a systematic examination of: 1) publications of business organizations; 2) memoirs of business leaders and their contemporaries; 3) contemporaneous periodicals; 4) the archives of government ministries monitoring anti-democratic activity; and 5) the observations of foreign diplomats as recorded in published and unpublished diplomatic documents. Source materials will be analyzed for information regarding 1) the business community's support for democracy, with attention to possible shifts in this support over time; and 2) the economic, cultural and political context of this support.This project is limited in theoretical scope. It is designed to study business community support for new democracies, but it does not address other possible causes of democratic survival and collapse, which are considered in the longer-term research agenda from which this project is drawn. This project will also not explore the implications of its findings for the fate of new democracies at the end o the 20th century.