Given the inequalities and distributional conflicts free market reforms usually engender, how can politicians render them compatible with democratic politics? The answer outlined in this chapter differs markedly from both the historical treatments of democratic regime formation in Europe that emphasized agrarian class structures and political coalitions (Moore 1966; Luebbert 1991) and from the contemporary emphasis on institutional structures and elite interactions in the literature on “third wave” democratization (O'Donnell et al. 1986; Gunther et al. 1995; Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Linz and Stepan 1996). Instead, the argument made here borrows from both literatures, emphasizing the importance of social coalitions founded in the countryside, but situating them in the neoliberal institutional context of the third-wave democratic transitions. The contrast with elite-centric, voluntaristic approaches is more stark: I contend that the structural and institutional conditions examined here in large measure define and strictly delimit the terrain on which political “bargains” can be struck. My approach is in one sense an extension of the civil society/social capital arguments (Putnam 1993, 2000). The difference is that associational life is an intermediate step in the argument, one that I explain rather than take as exogenous.