Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside. By Marcus J. Kurtz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 264p. $70.00.

Marcus Kurtz makes his contribution to a sizable body of works examining the impact of economic liberalization on political opening in Latin America, arguing that the countryside in Latin America offers us a crucial piece of the puzzle of why transitions to democracies may succeed despite widening social inequalities. The answer to this paradox, Kurtz argues, is that “competitive national-level democracy [is] based in part on conservative hegemony and peasant quiescence in the countryside” (p. 21). He contends that processes put in place by market-based policies, rather than coercion or clientelism, explain why peasants and rural workers continued to back the politicians who initiated and deepened programs of credit deregulation, price liberalization, and trade opening. Thus, the grim lesson of Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside: If those with the most to lose in neoliberal conditions are quickly atomized and dispossessed by transitions to market-based conditions, competitive multiparty electoral systems will endure at national levels. Or, in a semantic twist worthy of Alice in the rabbit hole, in modern conditions, democracy thrives on a certain lack of it.