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The Theory of Developing Polities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Fred W. Riggs
Fred W. Riggs
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

A decade ago Roy Macridis waved a red flag in the face of the politicel science fraternity by proclaiming that the collection of data on foreign political systems had become a sterile preoccupation because of its parochial and “monographic” concern with a limited number of Western great powers, and its theoretical shallowness.1 During the intervening years considerable money and time have been spent in a frontal attack on these deficiencies. Spearheading this attack has been a band of younger scholars brought together under the leadership of Gabriel Almond in the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , October 1963 , pp. 147 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1963

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References

1 Macridis, Roy C. and Cox, Richard, “Research in Comparative Politics: Report of the Inter-University Summer Seminar in Comparative Politics, Social Science Research Council,” American Political Science Review, XLVII (September 1953), 641–57Google Scholar. See also Macridis, , The Study of Comparative Government (Garden City, N.Y., 1955).Google Scholar

2 Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton 1960).Google Scholar

3 “The Prevalence of Clects,” American Behavioral Scientist, v (June 1962), 15–18.Google Scholar See also my “Interest and Clientele Groups,” Problems of Politics and Administration in Thailand, ed. by Sutton, J. L. (Bloomington, Ind., 1962), 153–92.Google Scholar

4 The difficulties which arise in Weiner's analysis because of the lack of categories for intermediate behavior patterns are compounded by other semantic problems. For example, Weiner writes, “To argue, as some have done, that occupational groupings are specific in their demands, and community associations are diffuse, further compounds the confusion. Many of the community associations are quite specific in their demands. The Andhra Mahasabha wanted the central government to agree to the creation of an Andhra state. In West Bengal, the many tribal associations agitate for more concessions?—jobs, educational opportunities, government grants?—for their communities …” (p. 38). Technically the words “specific” and “diffuse” are shorthand ways of saying functionally specific and functionally diffuse. In ordinary usage, to be specific is merely to be exact, precise, focused, particular. Certainly traditional groups have demands which are just as specific, in this sense, as modern groups. Traditional vengeance, for example, can be highly specific in the punishment demanded. Thus when a “tribal association” demands jobs for its members, it is both diffuse and specific at the same time: diffuse because the “association” operates at many functional levels, but specific because it has exact ideas about what it wants to obtain. To be functionally specific, by contrast, is to be concerned with a narrow range of programmatic values.

It should be further noted that there are elects in American society as well as in Indian. The White Citizens' Council, the Black Muslim movement, and the Mafia are all elects. The NAACP, however, is not a elect. It includes “white” as well as “colored” members, and demands equal, not special, treatment for minorities. The demands of the latter can be aggregated and translated into universalistic policies, but the demands of the former are mutually incompatible. If one elect were to gain power, others would be excluded from the political process, and could only seek their ends by anomic violence. The Black Muslims, having eschewed violence, may become more integrated into American society and might consequently be transformed from a elect into a religious association.

5 See, for example, Pye, Lucian W., “The Non-Western Political Process”, Journal of Politics, xx (August 1958), 468–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This essay has been revised and republished as Chapter 2 of Pye's Politics, Personality, and Nation Building,15–31.

6 In a special issue of this journal, I outlined in more schematic form some parallels between the “prismatic” model for the study of “developing” polities and a similar model which might be used in the study of a “developing” international system. See my “International Relations as a Prismatic System,” World Politics, xiv (October 1961), 144–81Google Scholar; this special issue has been published in book form as The International System: Theoretical Essays, ed. by Knorr, Klaus and Verba, Sidney (Princeton 1962).Google Scholar

7 In a work to be entitled Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society (Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, in press), I shall present in more detail a model for the analysis of transitional societies.