front cover of Allies of the State
Allies of the State
China's Private Entrepreneurs and Democratic Change
Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson
Harvard University Press, 2010
Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson draw on extensive fieldwork as they explore the extent to which China’s private sector supports democracy, surveying more than 2,000 entrepreneurs in five coastal provinces with over 70 percent of China’s private enterprises.The authors examine who the private entrepreneurs are, how the party-state shapes this group, and what their relationship to the state is. China’s entrepreneurs are closely tied to the state through political and financial relationships, and these ties shape their views toward democracy. While most entrepreneurs favor multi-candidate elections under the current one-party system, they do not support a system characterized by multi-party competition and political liberties, including the right to demonstrate. The key to regime support lies in the capitalists’ political beliefs and their assessment of the government’s policy performance. China’s capitalists tend to be conservative and status-quo oriented, not likely to serve as agents of democratization.This is a valuable contribution not only to the debates over the prospects for democracy in China but also to understanding the process of democratization around the globe.
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front cover of Free Spaces
Free Spaces
The Sources of Democratic Change in America
Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte
University of Chicago Press, 1992
What are the environments, the public spaces, in which ordinary people become participants in the complex, ambiguous, engaging conversation about democracy: participators in governance rather than spectators or complainers, victims or accomplices? What are the roots, not simply of movements against oppression, but also of those democratic social movements which both enlarge the opportunities for participation and enhance people's ability to participate in the public world?

In Free Spaces, Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte argue for a new understanding of the foundations for democratic politics by analyzing the settings in which people learn to participate in democracy. In their new Introduction, the authors link the concept of free spaces to recent theoretical discussions about community, public life, civil society, and social movements.
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