Popular Response to Reform

Abstract

According to O’Donnell and Schmitter, a democratic ‘opening’ acts as a catalyst for the emergence of social groups spearheaded by intellectuals, who ‘press for more explicit democratisation or even revolution’.¹ Moreover, ‘privileged groups’ including industrialists, merchants, bankers and land-owners start to ‘act like a de facto opposition’, although they are concerned that the democratic transition ‘will not stop at a point compatible with the contractual freedoms of the market or the cozy relationship they enjoy with the state apparatus’.² On the one hand, intellectuals constitute the first social group to advocate further democratisation. On the other hand, to borrow Sundhaussen’s term, the ‘trading and manufacturing middle class’ supports some degree of democratic reform.