Middle-Class Guardians of Autocracy, with Bryn Rosenfeld

Scope Conditions Podcast

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Bryn Rosenfeld, an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, about her new book, The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy (Princeton University Press).
This book’s starting point is a puzzling observation that Rosenfeld made during years conducting research in the post-Soviet region. She noticed that, in places like Russia and Kazakstan, the rising middle class was not a commercial bourgeosie or a growing cohort of private-sector white-collar professionals. Rather, in much of the post-Soviet world, the middle class was composed largely of public sector employees. In other words, as compared to what we see in most established democracies, where much of the middle class is deeply embedded in the market, the post-Soviet middle class was much more heavily reliant on the state for its livelihood.
In her book, Rosenfeld explores the implications of a state-dependent middle class for the prospects for democracy in a region dominated by autocrats. A long research tradition in comparative politics casts a large, educated middle class as a key constituency for democracy -- as a group that demands political reform and the protection of individual rights.
But what happens when authoritarian governments pursue top-down strategies of economic modernization, leaving the rising professional class dependent on the regime for its continued prosperity? How democratic is a middle class that prospers in a dictator’s employ? And, more broadly, how do the prospects for democratization of authoritarian regimes depend on the basic structure of the economy?
These are the questions Rosenfeld’s work grapples with. In this conversation, Rosenfeld outlines the puzzle motivating her work, the argument at the center of the book, and the research design she uses to test that argument. One particular area we focus on is the empirical challenge of determining how a person’s political beliefs are shaped by the nature of their employment, given that individuals “select into” occupations for reasons that may be related to their political views. Rosenfeld explains how she tackles this inferential problem. We also explore the implications of Rosenfeld’s findings for paths out of autocracy: if the state-dependency of the middle class is the problem, can privatization pave the road to democracy?
You can find references to scholarly work discussed in the episode on our website, here.