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The Overdeveloped Study of Political Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

R.S. Milne
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia

Abstract

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Type
Note Bibliographique/Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1972

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References

1 The title was suggested by Ruth, Ann Will-ners’ important article, “The Underdeveloped Study of Political Development,” World Politics, XVI, no 3 (1964), 468–82.Google Scholar

2 Almond, Gabriel A. and Powell, G. Bingham Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston, 1966), 22–5.Google Scholar It is impossible to cite all the relevant literature here. I have tried to consider the issue of differentiation and administrative development in “Differentiation and Administrative Development,” Journal of Comparative Administration, 1, no 2 (1969), 213–33. Differentiation as a concept is largely dependent on “functionalism” (see inter alia, Flanagan, W. and Fogelman, E., “Functional Analysis,” in Charlesworth, J.C., ed., Contemporary Political Analysis (New York, 1967), 7285).Google Scholar

For a criticism referring to the difficulty of applying Almondian views of differentiation to the USSR and to private systems, see Holt, Robert T. and Turner, John E., The Political Basis of Economic Development (Princeton, 1966), 1317.Google Scholar “Rationality” as a criterion of development is called in question by Nash, A.E. Keir, “Pollution, Population, and the Cowboy Economy: Anomalies in the Developmentalist Paradigm and Samuel Huntington,” Journal of Comparative Administration, 2, no 1 (1970), 123–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See pp. 562–3.

4 Compare, for example, his Administration in Developing Countries: the Theory of Prismatic Society (Boston, 1964) with his Thailand, the Modernization of a Bureaucratic Policy (Honolulu, 1966).

5 “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics, XVII, no 3 (1965), 394. It will be noted that these four criteria may conflict just as it is argued later in this paper that political goals may conflict.

6 See p. 568, below. He has also discarded the term political development.

7 “Parsimony and Empiricism and Comparative Politics: an Anti-Scholastic View,” in Holt, Robert T. and Turner, John E., eds., The Methodology of Comparative Research (New York, 1970), 129–32.Google Scholar

8 “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces, XVIII, no 4 (1940), 563.

9 Malenbaum, Wilfred, “Economic Factors and Political Development,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 358 (1965), 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Shils, Edward, Political Development in the New States (The Hague, 1965).Google Scholar

11 Ann Ruth Willner, “Underdeveloped Study,” World Politics, 473 and 480. On ethnocentrism see also Kautsky, John H., The Political Consequences of Modernization (New York, 1972), 1115.Google Scholar

12 “National Political Development: Measurement and Analysis,” American Sociological Review, 28, no 2 (1963), 253–64. Cf., McCrone, Donald J. and Cnudde, Charles F., “Toward a Communications Theory of Democratic Political Development: A Causal Model,” American Political Science Review, LXI, no 1 (1967), 72–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deane E. Neubauer, “Some Conditions of Democracy,” ibid., no 4, 1002–9; Cutright, Phillips and Neubauer, Deane E., “Communications,” Ibid., LXII, no 2 (1968), 578–81.Google Scholar

13 Political Man (New York, 1960), chap. 2.

14 Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, 193 and 205–7.

15 Ibid., 195–205.

16 Ibid., 35 (nation building, state building, participation, distribution).

17 Rustow, D.A., A World of Nations (Washington, DC, 1967), 36Google Scholar (identity, authority, equality).

18 Pye, Lucian W., Aspects of Political Development (Boston, 1966,) 62–7Google Scholar (identity, legitimacy, penetration, participation, integration, distribution).

19 Pennock, J. Roland, “Political Development, Political Systems, and Political Goods”, World Politics, XVIII, no 3 (1966), 415–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 For example, the indices of manpower, population, and economic growth mentioned by Deutsch, Karl when considering the “dimensions of growth” of a political system in The Nerves of Government (New York, 1963), 250.Google Scholar

21 Cf. Horowitz, Irving L., Three Worlds of Development (New York, 1966), 357Google Scholar; Huntington, , “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics, 3, no 3 (1971), 293–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, 207.

23 See p. 560, above.

24 Apter and Halpern (cited in fns. 25 and 26), although using the word, modernization, seem in the contexts quoted to share the “general capability” approach to political development. Other writers use modernization to refer to other interpretations of political development, discussed below. In some senses “modernization” does not seem to overlap with “political development”; for example, it may be used to refer to the control of man over nature, to wholesale transformation as shown by a wide range of economic and social indicators, to the borrowing or cultural diffusion of practices, institutional forms, or technologies. The writer is sympathetic to the views expressed in the following books and articles: Bendix, Reinhard, “Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, IX, no 3 (1967), 292346CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, Samuel P., “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics, 3, no 3 (1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; L Rudolph, Loyd I. and Rudolph, Susan Hoeber, The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago, 1967)Google Scholar; Singer, Milton, “Beyond Tradition and Modernity in Madras,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13, no 2 (1971), 160–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitaker, C.S. Jr., The Politics of Tradition, Continuity and Change in Northern Nigeria 1946–1966 (Princeton, 1960)Google Scholar; Whitaker, C.S. Jr., “A Dysrhythmic Process of Political Change,” World Politics, XIX, no 2 (1967), 190217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

To the extent that the study of modernization focuses on the ways in which political leaders try to adopt particular ideas or practices from outside, and attempt to make them congruent with the existing cultural setting, it resembles the emphasis on the study of leadership, decision-making and outputs mentioned at the end of this paper.

25 The Politics of Modernization (Chicago, 1965), 67.

26 “The Rate and Costs of Political Development,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 358 (March, 1965), 173.

27 Bienen, Henry, Violence and Social Change (Chicago, 1968), 64.Google Scholar

28 Comparative Politics, 29.

29 Ilchman, Warren F. and Uphoff, Norman T., The Political Economy of Change (Berkeley, 1969), 209.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 20 (fn. 28).

31 Almond, G.A., “Political Development: Analytical and Normative Perspectives,” Comparative Political Studies, 1, no 4 (1969), 447–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The “domestic and international” capability no longer appears and the symbolic capability has been redefined to refer to “political capital accumulation.” Almond also notes that responsive performance is different from extractive, regulative, and distributive performance because it is not simply an output but rather a set of ratios of demands for participatory activity to outputs or responses which legitimate such demands (p. 463).

32 A contrast is sometimes drawn between political development and economic development in this regard. “The definition of political development in terms of goals would not have created difficulties if there were clearcut criteria and reasonably accurate indices (e.g., the political equivalent of per capita Gross National Product) to measure progress toward these goals.” ( Huntington, , “The Change to Change”, Comparative Politics, 3, no 3 (1971), 303).CrossRefGoogle Scholar However, Giovanni Sartori points out that the difference has been made to appear greater than it is because “economic development” generally sets aside the redistributive question “Political Development and Political Engineering,” in Montgomery, J.D. and Hirschman, A.O., eds., Public Policy, XVII (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 268Google Scholar, fn. 18). Cf. Montgomery, John D., “The Quest for Political Development,” Comparative Politics, 1, no 2 (1969), 287–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Binder, Leonard, Coleman, James S., Lapalombara, Joseph, Pye, Lucian W., Verba, Sidney, Weiner, Myron, Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, 1971).Google Scholar Most of the criticisms made below are candidly raised by the authors themselves on pp. 77, 98, 192, 292, 295, 306, 313.

34 See n. 16, 17, and 18, above.

35 See Deutsch, Karl W., “Toward an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in Comparative and International Politics,” American Political Science Review, LIV, no 1 (1960), 3457CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” ibid., LV, no 3 (1961), 493–514; Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, 1968).Google Scholar

36 Political Order, 5, 55. The relations are in fact more complex, because social mobilization is partly dependent on economic development. See also, on conflict and choice, Rostow, W.W., Politics and the Stages of Growth, (Cambridge, 1971), 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 The Role of Popular Participation in Development, MIT Report no 17 (Boston, 1969), 31. See also Lapalombara, Joseph, “Public Administration and Political Change: a Theoretical Overview,” in Press, Charles and Arian, Alan, eds., Empathy and Ideology: Aspects of Administrative Innovation (Chicago, 1966), 103, 107.Google Scholar

38 Montgomery, “The Quest for Political Development,” pp. 289–291.

39 Pye, Aspects of Political Development, 47.

40 My italics.

41 Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, 311, and for another example, 331. See also Rostow, Politics, 16. For a good empirical example, see Perkins, D.H., “Mao Tse-Tung's Goals and China's Economic Performance,” Current Scene, IX, no 1 (1971), 115.Google Scholar

42 Almond, “Political Development,” 461.

43 Ibid., 462.

44 Ibid., 466.

45 Ibid., 466–7.

46 Pennock, “Political Development,” World Politics, 418.

47 Ibid., 429–31.

48 Braybrooke, D. and Lindblom, C.E., A Strategy of Decision (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

49 “The Dialectics of Developmental Conflict,” Comparative Political Studies, 1, no 2 (1968), 197–226.

50 That is, the degree to which roles are differentiated and coordinated.

51 Ibid., 199.

52 Ilchman, Warren F. and Bhargava, Ravindra C., “Balanced Thought and Economic Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, no 4 (1966), 396.Google Scholar See also Dr. Swee, Goh Keng (Singapore's Minister for Defence and former Finance Minister) “Selecting the Goals,” The Mirror (Singapore), 7, no 20, (May 17, 1971)Google Scholar, on conflicts of choice between economic growth and nation-building. For examples of conflicts of goals in Sarawak and Sabah, see Milne, R.S. and Ratnam, K.J., New States in a New Nation; Political Development in Sarawak and Sabah, Malaysia (London, 1973)Google Scholar, chap. 8. Politicians seem to recognize the importance of conflicts in policy-making even if some academics do not.

53 E.G. Apter, Politics of Modernization, chap. 11; Rustow, World of Nations, especially pp. 120–32 and 276–9. However some writers less careful than Rustow are too rigid in their portrayal of stages, for example, Organski, A.F.K., The Stages of Political Development (New York, 1965).Google Scholar His account of the division into four stages – the politics of primitive unification, the politics of industrialization, the politics of national welfare, the politics of abundance – suggests that at particular points of time a government may have one major political goal only. This is simply not so; many countries start industrializing before even “primitive” unification is adequately achieved. A later attempt to qualify the severe divisions between the stages (p. 212) merely throws doubt on the desirability of postulating stages at all.

54 An approach indicated in Weiner, Myron, “The Macedonian Syndrome: An Historical Model of International Relations and Political Development,” World Politics, XXIII, 4 (1971), 665.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a warning against accepting the presumption that “the less industrialized and less modernized ('traditional') countries of the world have to follow the known and proven path of socio-economic change as shown in Western Europe's march towards ‘progress’ and sophistication,” see Kothari, Rajni, “State Building in the Third World; Alternative Strategies,” Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, (February, 1972), 233–44.Google Scholar Kothari draws particular attention to the importance of the “international dimension,” which he thinks has been largely neglected.

55 Now explicitly added by Rustow to his three previous processes. “Modernization and Comparative Politics: Prospects in Research and Theory,” Comparative Politics, 1, no 1 (1969), 40.

56 Joseph LaPalombara, “Parsimony and Empiricism and Comparative Politics,” 132 and 140.

57 Almond, “Political Development,” 455. He is still using “political development” terminology.

58 Ibid., 466.

59 “The Change to Change,” 316.

60 Ilchman and Uphoff, Political Economy of Change, 33.

61 “The Change to Change,” 303–5.

62 Ibid., 305.