In contrast to Lehmann, however, Chatterjee eschews the use of 'clientelism' as an analytical lens through which to explore link between local politicians or other social notables and organizations such as the People's Welfare Association, a curious lacunae and one that detracts from the power of his analysis. Cohen and Arato (1994) provide a theoretically rich account of civil society in the political economy tradition but fail to submit it to empirical testing. This failure is partly redeemed b a sociological study of the relationship between capitalism and democracy by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, in which changes in class structure (ore more accurately, shifts in the power of contending class interests) serve as the principal mediating variable. Their work is relevant here because it includes an analysis of civil society that straddles the divide between democracy-centred and political economy-centred perspectives. In this account, a strong and dense civil society is a by-product of the development of capitalism while also contributing to the development of democracy, suggesting a distinct chain of causation (capitalism civil society democracy) (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 49-50). In this schema, an expanding civil society gradually encompasses and empower previously excluded social groups, including the working class. This previously excluded social groups, they argue, is critical to the development of democracy and to the shift from formal to substantive democracy, in significant part because a strong, and dense civil society (in which subordinate classes are highly organized) acts as a vital counter-weight to the power of the The state. The relationship between the state and civil society, they argue, then becomes an important arbiter of the quality of democracy: