ABSTRACT
Countries with the most rigidly stratified and severely unequal class structures proved least successful in developing any kind of democratic polity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Quasi-feudalistic patterns of land tenure and labor exploitation, and enormous concentrations of land and other forms of wealth, were forbidding obstacles. An equally rich area for comparative analysis concerns the rise of the working class and the way in which it became excluded from or incorporated into the political process. Admiration for the political dynamism of the United States was reflected in the degree to which new democracies in Latin America modeled their constitutions after that of the United States. The role of an emergent bourgeoisie in pressing for democratization and the limitation of state power in Latin America is an obvious and important issue for investigation. The development and maintenance of democracy is greatly facilitated by values and behavioral dispositions of compromise, flexibility, tolerance, conciliation, moderation, and restraint.
