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Comparative Grassroots Politics in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Walter L. Barrows
Walter L. Barrows
Affiliation:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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Extract

Until recently, our best studies ofpoint of departure the systemicthe developinglevel of analysis—theareas tookna- as tional parties,1 the state institutions,2 the cosmopolitan central elites,3the overarching economic and communications networks4—but the particular assumptions and inevitable shortcomings of this approach led to a call for more attention to subsystem levels of analysis. By now it has become commonplace to note the need for studies of politics at the local level to gain a more intimate understanding of the way in which processes such as political development and political integration take place in the villages and small towns of the Third World's agrarian hinterland.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , January 1974 , pp. 283 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1974

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References

1 On political parties in general, see LaPalombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton 1966CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For treatments of African parties see, for instance, Coleman, James S. and Rosberg, Carl C., eds., Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (Berkeley 1966Google Scholar); Morgenthau, Ruth S., Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa (London 1964Google Scholar); Sklar, Richard L., Nigerian Political Parties (Princeton 1962Google Scholar); Zolberg, Aristide, One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton 1964CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

2 E.g., Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven 1968Google Scholar); LaPalombara, Joseph, Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton 1963CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Adu, Amishadai L., The Civil Service in New African States (New York 1965Google Scholar); Welch, Claude E. Jr., Soldier and State in Africa (Evanston, Ill. 1970); Rivkin, Arnold, ed., Nations By Design: Institution-Building in Africa (Garden City, N.Y. 1968Google Scholar).

3 E.g., Pye, Lucian, Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building (New Haven 1962Google Scholar); Friedland, William and Rosberg, Carl G., eds., African Socialism (Stanford 1964Google Scholar); Hopkins, Raymond F., Political Roles in a New State: Tanzania's First Decade (New Haven 1971Google Scholar); LeVine, Victor T., Political Leadership in Africa (Stanford 1967Google Scholar); , Hugh H. and Smythe, Mabel M., The New Nigerian Elite (Stanford 1960Google Scholar).

4 E.g., Deutsch, Karl W., Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, Mass, and London 1953Google Scholar); Pye, Lucian W., ed., Communications and Political Development (Princeton 1963Google Scholar); Hodgkin, Thomas, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (New York 1957Google Scholar); Coleman, James S., Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1958Google Scholar); Riddell, Barry, The Spatial Dynamics of Modernization in Sierra Leone: Structure, Diffusion, and Response (Evanston, Ill. 1970Google Scholar).

5 E.g., Zolberg, Aristide R., Creating Political Order: The Party-States of West Africa (Chicago 1966), 153Google Scholar–54.

6 This problem occurs at many levels of analysis. A short discussion of the urge to assume “that each nation is a preordained entity” is found in Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Boston 1960Google Scholar), 91ff. For a general treatment, see Campbell, Donald T., “Common Fate, Similarity, and Other Indices of the Status of Aggregates of Persons as Social Entities,” in Singer, J. David, ed., Human Behavior and International Politics: Contributions from the Social-Psychological Sciences (Chicago 1965Google Scholar).

7 Bates, Robert H., “Ethnicity and Modernization in Contemporary Africa,” Social Science Wording Paper, Number 16, California Institute of Technology (November 1972Google Scholar).

8 Ibid., 31–36.

9 Kilson, Martin, Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone (Cambridge, Mass. 1966CrossRefGoogle Scholar), Part V. For a critical evaluation of Kilson's model, see Barrows, , “Rural-Urban Alliances and Reciprocity in Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, v (Summer 1972), 307Google Scholar–25.

10 Apter, , Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton 1955Google Scholar); see also “Nkrumah, Charisma, and the Coup,” Daedalus, xcvii (Summer 1968), 757Google Scholar–92.

11 For a theoretical discussion of this process, see Barrows (fn. 9).