This book is a tour de force of data collection and analysis. Bryn Rosenfeld examines from virtually every conceivable angle the links between middle-class positionality and support for democracy in post-communist countries. In test after test, exploring a plethora of potential confounding factors, she shifts effortlessly from one to another estimation technique to provide strong, consistent evidence that middle-class citizens employed by the state in these countries are less likely to support democratization—either in principle or in action—than their counterparts in the private sector.
Even before displaying her quantitative methodological virtuosity, Rosenfeld contributes to the field by adding conceptual clarity. As a residual term, “middle class” is often used loosely in practice, which is one reason debates over the group's effect on democratization can seem irresolvable, and Rosenfeld addresses that problem from the beginning. The definition she chooses is admittedly not what one might expect: citizens with at least some higher education and a white-collar job. In the countries she studies, this is decidedly not the same as “middle income”; Rosenfeld shows that some of these citizens may be in the top 20–25% of wage earners. Still, this group is indeed a class—it has a particular relationship to the means of production—rather than people in different economic positions who happen to have similar salaries; it does not assume private employment, as some investigations at least implicitly do; and it does not embed attitudes toward democratization in the definition of the group. This clear definition is an important contribution in itself.
The main body of the study incorporates three post-communist cases—Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan—as well as a cross-national analysis including twenty-seven post-communist states. For the cross-national investigation, Rosenfeld makes full use of the first wave (2006) of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development's Life in Transition Survey to show that middle-class citizens are more likely to support democracy than non-middle-class citizens across all included countries. In authoritarian states, however, only those employed in the private sector show such an increased propensity, and this relationship holds true in the face of myriad controls and robustness checks. In the Russian case, she deftly analyzes survey data from protest participants and from the population at large to show that a similar difference exists regarding decisions to engage in political demonstrations. Furthermore, deploying her own survey of Russian undergraduate students, she demonstrates that these distinctions are not the result of self-selection—people who choose a career in the Russian state support democracy at the same rate as their private-sector counterparts at the time of that decision. For the Ukrainian case, Rosenfeld takes advantage of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, which interviewed a cohort of citizens in 2003, 2004, and 2007: before and after the Orange Revolution of 2004–5. She is thereby able to show that middle-class citizens’ tendency to support democracy dropped after they joined the state sector, not before. Finally, in Kazakhstan, she uses original interviews and a combination of surveys to show that, regime lip service notwithstanding, most of the country's middle class is linked to the state sector and shows commensurately lower commitment to democratization. In all, it is an extraordinary body of work consistently and convincingly showing a political difference between members of the private and public middle classes in post-communist countries.
If there is a concern to raise, it is that some readers may make claims beyond what Rosenfeld has shown, much like many have implicitly turned Moore's “no bourgeoisie, no democracy” into “if bourgeoisie, then democracy.” In Rosenfeld's case, they may assert that she shows that all members of a private middle class support democracy or that all members of a public middle class support autocracy. She does not, and does not claim to, but she does sometimes use language that may encourage a reader to see public as bad and private as good. For instance, she refers to the “state dependency” of public employees (Chap. 2), but not the “private” or “capitalist dependency” of private employees. She blurs together the categories of democracy and rule of law (9), and writes of “state intervention in the economy” (233) as if the natural, and preferred, state of affairs were for the state to be absent from a functioning market economy. None of these assertions or implications is crucial to the study's main argument or the mountain of data that supports it, but they are sprinkled throughout the book, which may create a narrative frame that readers push further than is warranted.
In sum, this is a first-rate example of social scientific research, and anyone who wants to write about post-communist democratization, authoritarian stability, or patronage systems will need to grapple with this book.
