Why do societies today distribute political power more equally than before? Most scholars believe that this transition is explained by the rise of capitalism but have long disagreed about why it mattered. The author argues that dominant models fail to capture why capitalist development helps key actors win what they seek. Drawing on comparative and historical work, the author introduces a model of the democratic transition that centers on the concept of disruptive capacity. He collects data on employment structures for much of the modern period to study democratization over the same period. In cross-national regressions, the author finds evidence that the disruptive capacity of nonelites drives democratic gains, and the finding that landlord capacity stymies it is reproduced. Counterfactual exercises show that slightly more than half of the democracy gap between the developing and developed world can be explained by the fact that late development bolstered landlords while handicapping nonelites.

中文翻译：

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民主与阶级斗争

为什么今天的社会比以前更平等地分配政治权力？大多数学者认为这种转变可以用资本主义的兴起来解释，但长期以来一直不同意为什么它很重要。作者认为，主导模型未能捕捉到资本主义发展为何能帮助关键参与者赢得他们所寻求的东西。作者利用比较和历史工作，介绍了一个以破坏能力概念为中心的民主转型模型。他收集了大部分现代时期的就业结构数据，以研究同一时期的民主化。在跨国回归中，作者发现有证据表明非精英的破坏能力推动了民主收益，而地主能力阻碍民主收益的发现得到了再现。