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Do Modern Bureaucracies Dominate Underdeveloped Polities? A Test of the Imbalance Thesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Lee Sigelman
Lee Sigelman*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Abstract

This research note analyzes a key premise of the thesis of “institutional imbalance” in less developed nations, the idea that administrative modernity promotes overparticipation in the performance of political and governmental functions. Judgmental data on fifty-seven Latin American, Asian, and African nations suggest that level of administrative development is highly correlated with overparticipation, but in precisely the opposite direction from that predicted in the literature— that is, the relationship is negative. This finding indicates the necessity of reconsidering some of the conventional wisdom of comparative administration.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 525 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1972

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References

1 Lofchie, Michael F., “Representative Government, Bureaucracy, and Political Development: The African Case,” Journal of Developing Areas, 2 (10, 1967). pp. 39–40 Google Scholar.

2 Pye, Lucian W., Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 19 Google Scholar.

3 Riggs, Fred W., “Bureaucrats and Political Development: A Paradoxical View,” in Bureaucracy and Political Development, ed. LaPalombara, Joseph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 120–167 Google Scholar.

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5 Riggs, , “Bureaucrats and Political Development,” p. 120 Google Scholar.

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7 For such a use of this variable, see, e.g., Buck, Gary L. and Jacobson, Alvin L., “Social Evolution and Structural-Functional Analysis: An Empirical Test,” American Sociological Review, 33 (06, 1968), 343–355 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Eitzen, D. Stanley, “The Use of Banks and Textor's ‘A Cross-Polity Survey’ for the Ranking of Nations: A Methodological Note,” Social and Economic Studies, 16 (09, 1967), 326–329 Google Scholar; Forward, John, “Toward an Empirical Framework for Ecological Studies in Comparative Public Administration,” in Readings in Comparative Public Administration, ed. Raphaeli, Nimrod (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967), pp. 450–472 Google Scholar; and Tsantis, Andreas C., “Political Factors in Economic Development,” Comparative Politics, 2 (10, 1969), 63–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Banks, Arthur S. and Textor, Robert B., A Cross Polity Survey (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1963), pp. 112–113 Google Scholar.

9 Sigelman, Lee, “Modernization and the Political System: A Critique and Preliminary Empirical Analysis,” Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics, Vol. 2, Series No. 01-016 (1971)Google Scholar.

10 Alternatively, according to a recent paper by Fred Riggs, “We may conclude … that a dominant bureaucracy will necessarily sacrifice administrative to political considerations, thereby impairing administra-tive performance.” See Riggs's, “Administrative Reform and Political Responsiveness: A Theory of Dynamic Balancing,” Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics, Vol. 1, Series No. 01-010 (1970), p. 579 Google Scholar. This interpretation, which is certainly plausible, reverses the causal sequence of the hypothesis tested here, and in the process renders Riggs virtually immune to disconfirmation by cross-sectional data; combining the hypothesis tested here with the later Riggs interpretation, bureaucratic overparticipation should be simultaneously correlated with both bureaucratic development and bureaucratic decay.

11 Sigelman, “Modernization and the Political System …”

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