Introduction

Not everyone will be surprised to learn that political regimes have no effect on average rates of economic growth. One generally held view, made influential by Huntington (1968), is that what matters for economic development is political stability, rather than the particular political institutions. Any system of political institutions promotes development as long as it maintains political order. The danger is “political instability.”

We put “instability” in quotation marks because the concept is congenitally muddled. The functionalist sociology that dominated thinking about development during most of the post-war era was constitutionally incapable of conceptualizing social change in other than vaguely evolutionary terms. Under the influence of Parsons (1951), its theoretical program was to search for conditions of the “equilibrium,” conceptualized in a sui generis way as “functional balance.” Anything that disturbed this balance, any abrupt change, was seen as a “breakdown,” a limiting category. As such, it could not be conceptualized any further. The conclusion was that things are stable when they do not change: “We may say that the political system is stable when the impact on the system and the environment are neutralized to the extent of keeping them from altering … the structure of the political system” (Ake 1967: 100–1).

When combined with an anti-communist ideology, the “structural-functional approach” turned “instability” into the central peril facing the “new nations.” Instability became a specter, a harbinger of revolution.