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Economic Restructuring, Social Protest, and Democratization in the Dominican Republic

Throughout the 1980s the Dominican Republic experienced simultaneously what in conventional social science of various ideological orientations would be viewed as highly contradictory trends: (1) a severe economic crisis coupled with international pressures on the government to promote market-oriented reforms, (2) an increase in protest movements in response to the negative impact of a declining economy and unfavorable economic restructuring, and (3) the longest and most enduring democratic process in the country's history as measured by such classical political indicators as regular and competitive elections, absence of political exiles or prisoners, and freedom of the press and association. The purpose of this article is to show how these seemingly contradictory processes unfolded in the 1980s. Two theoretical arguments guide this analysis. The first is that exclusive emphasis neither on the economy nor on politics is sufficient to an understanding of the complex changes that took place in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s. Instead, an approach that emphasizes the study of the economy and politics, structure and process, and their interaction is better suited to an assessment of the characteristics and prospects of democratization in the Dominican Republic. The second is that democracy is not a fixed concept that can simply be defined in abstraction but rather a socially constructed concept whose meaning must be evaluated historically.