Capitalism and Democracy: The return of an old problem

Δεν διατίθεται περίληψη.The huge wave of democratization that swept almost all the regions of the globe has brought back an issue which ran through the entire modem political thought: the relation between Capitalism and Democracy, between Socioeconomic modernization and democratic institutions. The article explores how the two main research strategies of Comparative Politics and Comparative Historical Sociology, namely the pluralistic and the class paradigms, have conceptualized this relation. It maintains that some tendencies of contemporary internationalized postfordist capitalism, as well as the recent structural political changes, undermine fundamental presuppositions and tacit assumptions that the two paradigms use in order to explain the relation between Capitalism and Democracy. Moreover, it focuses on these aspects of the current transformation that may tend, though in a non deterministic sense, to deteriorate the quality of Democrac