ABSTRACT
Jeffery Paige’s theory is part of a more general and highly formal theory of social movements in underdeveloped nations, employing newspaper accounts and government information to generate a statistical test of his model, which relates different types of agrarian class structures to different types of resistance movements in Third World. Theda Skocpol, in marked contrast to Paige, is not looking at social movements at all, but at the “Great Revolutions” in France, Russia, and China. Latin American states often financed themselves largely through the taxation of foreign trade and through a series of relatively small consumption taxes. Head taxes and the direct income tax remain weak there, in comparison to Western Europe. As the regimes consolidated their power, the state and government increasingly seemed to free themselves from their moorings in civil society. A democratic regime is one where different political parties contend openly for political power, and where governments are formed through periodic elections with mass participation.
