An Insurgent Path to Democracy: Popular Mobilization, Economic Interests, and Regime Transition in South Africa and El Salvador

Literature › Works

Elisabeth Jean Wood (2001). An Insurgent Path to Democracy: Popular Mobilization, Economic Interests, and Regime Transition in South Africa and El Salvador. Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 34 No. 8. Sage Publications.

Type	journal article
Scope	Comparative and methods
Method	mixed
Period studied	1973–1994
Regions	South Africa, El Salvador
Themes	transition post apartheid, business and state, unions strikes, resistance social movements, macro fiscal finance debt, sanctions divestment, politics ideology elections, comparative theory
Citation key	wood2001

Argument

Wood argues that sustained mobilization by poor and working-class people drove the transitions to democracy in South Africa and El Salvador, forcing liberalization and creating the conditions for compromise. Mobilization transformed the economic interests of elites, who then pressed the state to negotiate, strengthening regime moderates over hard-liners. In South Africa the mechanism ran through labour and township mobilization, which suspended investment, triggered capital flight and sanctions, and pushed business to back political reform. The bargain offered insurgents political inclusion in exchange for a moderate economic agenda. Both countries are treated as 'oligarchic societies' based on state-enforced nonmarket labour regulation, and the argument uses Mill's method of agreement.

Evidence and method

Interviews with political actors in El Salvador (1987-1996) and South Africa (1997-1999), including business, government and insurgent leaders. Also documents, South African Reserve Bank and Salvadoran national accounts macroeconomic data, and secondary econometric studies (Heintz 2000; Fedderke; Kaempfer et al. 1995; Melvin & Tan 1996).

Findings

• Labour-repressive institutions kept African mineworkers' wages flat over most of the century despite productivity gains. (p. 15)

  the wages of African mineworkers did not rise in real terms between 1911 and 1969 despite a manyfold increase in productivity

• Pass-law residency controls strengthened employers' bargaining power by depressing African workers' reservation wages. (p. 15)

  a policy that strengthened employers' bargaining power by depressing the reservation wages of African workers

• A durable decline in private investment coincided with sustained mobilization and repression, apart from a brief gold-price boom. (p. 16)

  a widespread and enduring decline of previously buoyant investment—what I call the investment U-turn—coincided with this deepening pattern of sustained mobilization and repression

• Heintz's econometric work attributes most of the 1971-1992 investment fall to political instability. (p. 17)

  his decomposition of the observed decline in investment between 1971 and 1992 shows that it was the increase in political instability

• Long-term capital turned to outflow after 1977, and short-term capital flows fell in years of unrest. (p. 18)

  After 1977, the long-term capital flowed outward.

• Capital outflows depressed the rand, raising the cost of imported capital goods and of borrowing. (p. 18)

  the value of the rand declined by 34% from 1983 to 1985

• Sanctions were not exogenous but tracked the scale of black worker strike participation. (p. 19)

  the increasing number and intensity of sanctions reflected the rise in oppositional political activity in South Africa as measured by the number of Black workers participating in strikes

• The 1987 gold mine strike cost mining companies heavily and taught business to favour integrative bargaining. (p. 19)

  mining companies lost $150 million during the 1987 gold mine strike

• Business organizations took unprecedented public and private steps for political reform from 1985. (p. 20)

  In January 1985, all the principal business organizations (including the usually conservative Afrikaner organization) issued a manifesto calling for common and meaningful citizenship, the scrapping of the pass laws, and the ending of forced removals

• Economic elites expected democracy to secure their interests via labour-market discipline, capital-flight discipline and property guarantees. (p. 23)

• The National Party's coalition eroded as the economy declined and reform failed, weakening hard-liners. (p. 22)

  By the early 1980s, less than half of Afrikaners supported the National Party