Was Barrington Moore Right? The Role of Agriculture in Democratization

• In Event: The Political Economic Origins of Democracy

Abstract

This paper explores the role of agricultural dynamics in transitions to democracy. Barrington Moore famously argued that the transition from feudalism to agrarian capitalism played an important role in laying the foundations for democracy in England. Does this hypothesis hold in a wider sample of cases? Utilizing data from the “first” and “second” green revolutions, which impacted Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and Asia and Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, respectively, this paper shows that technology-driven improvements in productivity leading to the commercialization of agriculture played an important role in early but not late democratization. Comparative case studies indicate that one reason for this is that later incumbents were more effective at coopting the new commercial elites that emerged from agricultural productivity revolutions – and that in cases where they failed to do so, the second green revolution played a role in democratization too.

Author

• Aditya Dasgupta, University of California, Merced