ABSTRACT
While the 1990s saw a global advance of democracy – the overthrow of party dictatorships in the socialist world, the democratization of many dictatorships in Southeast Asia and Latin America – today, people are witnessing a reverse tendency. Liberal think tanks such as Freedom House document that, for more than a decade, countries where democracy is in decline outnumber the countries where democratic governance is deepened. The liberal school of political science sees this connection in an oftentimes normative way as a relation of mutual reinforcement. Marxist scholars take the system of representative liberal democracy as the natural and only possible form of bourgeois society. Poulantzas speaks of an interior bourgeoisie rather than a national one and notes that this capital faction is also beholden to foreign capital. It is therefore not strictly distinct from the comprador bourgeoisie, and not completely independent of it.
