The question of the impact of privatizations on the process of democratization remains untouched in the political science literature. One of the best ways to study the linkages between privatizations and democratization is to analyze the changes in the group of society most affected by privatizations This dissertation examines the institutional and individual effects of privatizations by adopting a comparative perspective on the labor unions and workers in Turkey and Argentina in the mid-1980s onwards. Doing that, it adopts an eclectic methodology combined of qualitative focus groups and in-depth interviews, and quantitative short questionnaires and descriptive statistics. This dissertation finds that while privatizations have similar effects on the institutions of the countries of the developing world, they bring about divergent effects on their individual citizens. Accordingly, Turkish and Argentine labor unions in the post-privatization period present convergent patterns of structural fragmentation, internal reorganization and external participation. The effects of privatizations on individual workers in Turkey and Argentina, on the other hand, are divergent: while privatizations end up in a large-scale collective action and social movement formed by individual workers in Turkey, they do not do so in Argentina. Based on the detailed analysis of processes of change in labor from a neoinstitutionalist perspective, this dissertation maintains that, given certain caveats, privatizations might democratize labor institutions by acting act as an invisible hand of democratization. This is because privatizations push unions to start looking for ways to adapt and survive in a new environment. Were it not for the disturbances caused by privatizations, unions would not have to renew their strategies. The democratizing effects of privatizations, however, seem not to reach the individual since most of unemployed workers chose (ultimately) not to mobilize and cease to become union members subsequent to privatizations. The dissertation concludes with the word of warning that increasingly uniform institutions, practices and policies brought about by privatizations do not mean that there is a unifying effect of privatizations on workers and labor unions. Contextual and historical factors at the country level as well as individual reactions in different societies might ultimately determine how privatizations will influence democratization.