Paths toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and Latin America. By Ruth Berins Collier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 230p. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Abstract

Ruth Collier has written an important contribution to the literatures on democracy and on labor, one that should reorient much discussion and work on democratization. Collier makes a powerful case that labor has been a far more important and decisive actor in redemocratization than con- ventionally thought, and her reconceptualization of the cases on this basis yields an important new typology of regime transitions. The book casts a wide empirical net, examining the contribution of labor to the emergence of democracy in numerous countries in both the Americas and Europe.