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Approaches to the Study of Political Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Robert A. Packenham
Robert A. Packenham
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Interest in the politics of the developing areas has increased steadily since World War II, and scholars have now produced a sizable collection of single-country monographs, several regional studies, and at least one attempt at a global synthesis.1 This literature has tended to stress various conditions as the primary correlates or determinants of political development. This research note offers a taxonomy of five approaches to the study of political development. The taxonomy draws upon both traditional and contemporary sources, and studies of both “developing” and “developed” areas, to derive a framework for ordering the literature on political development produced in the past two decades. The five approaches are (I) “legal-formal,” (2) “economic,” (3) “administrative,” (4) “social system,” and (5) “political culture.”

Type
Research Note
Information
World Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , October 1964 , pp. 108 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1964

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References

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

2 Three books not discussed elsewhere but directly relevant are Pye, Lucian W., ed., Communications and Political Development (Princeton 1963)Google Scholar; LaPalombara, Joseph, ed., Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ward, Robert E and Rustow, Dankwart A., eds., The Political Modernization of Japan and Turkey (Princeton 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These are the first of a projected series of seven “Studies in Political Development” sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council. The other volumes also will be published by Princeton University Press and will deal with “Education and Political Development,” “Political Parties and Political Development,” “Comparative Political Culture,” and “A Theory of Political Modernization.”

3 Some of the studies grouped as examples of one approach have characteristics that legitimately suggest they might be placed under another heading. For example, we would call Professor Deutsch's social mobilization approach primarily a social system one, although his hypothesis clearly contains elements of the political culture and administrative approaches as well. The social system and political culture approaches are particularly closely related. Those works which build on Max Weber and Talcott Parsons—such as Seymour Martin Lipset's The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York 1963)Google Scholar and Apter's, David two books on African political systems, The Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton 1955)Google Scholar and The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton 1961)Google Scholar—are included in the political culture approach, even though the relationship of values to social system is intimate. Many theories overlap somewhat, but each tends to emphasize one approach more than the others. In spite of the problem of overlapping, this taxonomy seems reasonable and useful.

4 Eckstein, Harry, “A Perspective on Comparative Politics, Past and Present,” unpublished manuscript, n.d. (c. 1961), 27–44; UNESCO, Contemporary Political Science, Publication No. 426 (Paris 1950); and Austin RanneyGoogle Scholar, The Governing of Men (New York 1956), chap. 24, especially 576–84.Google Scholar

5 See Woolsey, Theodore D., Political Science, or, The State: Theoretically and Practically Considered (2 vols., New York 1878)Google Scholar; Wilson, Woodrow, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics: A Sketch of Institutional History and Administration (Boston 1892)Google Scholar; and Burgess, John W., Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (2 vols., Boston and London 1891). See also Eckstein, 39–45Google Scholar, and Crick, Bernard, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley 1959)Google Scholar.

Examples of comparative government textbooks on Europe are Carter, Gwendolen M., Herz, John H., and Ranney, John C., Major Foreign Powers (New York 1957)Google Scholar, and Taylor, R. Cole and others, European Political Systems (New York 1953)Google Scholar. Examples of Latin American texts that devote large proportions of their discussions to constitutions which exist for the most part on paper (as the authors themselves sometimes point out) are Macdonald, Austin F., Latin American Politics and Government (New York 1949Google Scholar, 1954), and Jorrin, Miguel, Governments of Latin America (New York 1953)Google Scholar. Recendy some texts have incorporated other approaches more or less systematically. See especially Almond, and Coleman, , eds., and Beer, Samuel H. and Ulam, Adam B., eds., Patterns of Government: The Major Political Systems of Europe (New York 1962)Google Scholar.

6 Hawley, Claude E. and Dexter, Lewis A., “Recent Political Science Research in American Universities,” American Political Science Review, XLVI (June 1952), 470–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Almond, Gabriel A., The American People and Foreign Policy (New York 1960), 154–57Google Scholar.

7 Kling, Merle, “Area Studies and Comparative Politics—The Latin American Experience,” paper prepared for delivery at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York City, September 4–7, 1963Google Scholar.

8 David Fellman has traced this strain from its origins in seventeenth-century England through the end of the Jacksonian era, which he takes to be about 1850. ‘The Economic Interpretation in Early American Political Theory,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1934Google Scholar.

9 This tradition has been interpreted as a “common theme” in “liberalism, classical economics, Marxism, conservatism and Saint Simonism—[as well as] much of modern sociology.” Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 487–88Google Scholar. See also Wolin, Sheldon S., Politics and Vision (Boston 1960)Google Scholar, chaps. 9 and 10.

10 See Beard, , An 'Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York 1935)Google Scholar, chap. 1, “Historical Interpretation in the United States.”

11 See White, Morton, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York 1949), 74, 109, 125–27Google Scholar; Benson, Lee, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, Ill., 1960)Google Scholar; and Osgood, Robert E, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago 1953, 1955), 371–76Google Scholar.

12 See Blinkoff, Maurice“The Influence of Charles A. Beard upon American Historiography,” University of Buffalo Studies, XII (May 1936), 4–84Google Scholar.

13 Benson, Both and Brown, Robert E., Charles A. Beard and the Constitution (Princeton 1956)Google Scholar, make this point. Brown's book in 1956 and McDonald, Forrest, We, the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago 1958)Google Scholar, appear to have been the first systematic tests of Beard's thesis.

14 Millikan, Max F. and Rostow, W. W., A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York 1957)Google Scholar.

15 It should be noted that the authors state flatly that they reject the “crude materialist thesis that progress consists exclusively in ‘extra food in the stomach’ …” (ibid., 21). There are parts of the book (especially 21–42) which indicate adherence to the social system and political culture approaches (see below) to political development. However, the proposal itself, which is guided by a “banking concept,” is not very clearly tied to these approaches and does seem to reflect the economic approach to a greater extent; see especially chaps. 6 and 7.

16 Martin Lipset, Seymour, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.YGoogle Scholar., 1960), chap. 2; James S. Coleman, “The Political Systems of the Developing Areas,” in Almond and Coleman, eds., 538–44; Hagen, Everett E., “A Framework for Analyzing Economic and Political Change,” in Asher, Robert E. and others, Development of the Emerging Countries: An Agenda for Research (Washington 1962), 1–8Google Scholar; and Outright, Phillips, “National Political Development: Measurement and Analysis,” American Sociological Review, XXVIII (April 1963), 253–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Shannon, Lyle W. has found positive correlations between level of economic development and political independence, i.e., formal self-government. However, his work does not deal with political development after independence. See his “Is Level of Economic Development Related to Capacity for Self-Government?” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XVII (July 1958), 367–82;CrossRefGoogle Scholar“Socio-economic Development and Political Status,” Social Problems, VII (Fall 1959), 157–69Google Scholar; and “Socio-economic Development and Demographic Variables as Predictors of Political Change,” Sociological Quarterly, III (January 1962), 27–63Google Scholar.

17 In Coleman's data, for example, Cuba, Venezuela, and the United Arab Republic rank high in economic development but low in political competitiveness; Hagen's three exceptions are Cuba, the U.A.R., and Iraq. Other obvious examples are Nazi Germany, the USSR, and de Gaulle's France.

18 Wolf, Charles Jr., Foreign Aid: Theory and Practice in Southern Asia (Princeton 1960), 408CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The Anatomy of Revolution (New York 1959), 264–79Google Scholar.

20 de Tocqueville, Alexis, On the State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 (London 1888), 152, quoted in Wolf, 304nGoogle Scholar.

21 W. Phillips Davison, “A Review of Sven Rydenfelt's Communism in Sweden,” P-570, The RAND Corporation, 1954, 27–29, cited in ibid.

22 Buchanan, William and Cantril, Hadley, How Nations See Each Other (Urbana 1953) 30–37Google Scholar; Hagen, 36–38; and Davies, James C., “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review, XXVII (February 1962), 5–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Davies, 5–6, and Lipset, Political Man, 63–64.

24 Davies, 5–6.

25 lbid., 19.

26 Easton, David, “An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” World Politics, IX (April 1957), 383–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Lipset, Political Man, 29.

28 Research on these works would be useful. One might start with the writings of John Stuart Mill—for example, the final chapters of Representative Government.

29 Examples are: Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, “A Study of United States Military Assistance Programs in Underdeveloped Areas,” Annex C, Volume II, Supplement to the Composite Report of the President's Committee to Study the Military Assistance Program (Washington 1959), esp. 77–80Google Scholar; Badgley, John H., “Burma's Political Crisis,” Pacific Affairs, XXXI (December 1958), 350–51Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “The Politics of Underdevelopment,” World Politics, IX (October 1956), 55–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pauker, Guy, “Southeast Asia as a Problem Area in the Next Decade,” World Politics, XI (April 1959), 342–45Google Scholar; and Howard Wriggins, “Foreign Assistance and Political Development,” in Robert E. Asher and others, 181–214.

30 Pye, Lucian W., Politics, Personality and Nation Building: Burma's Search for Identity (New Haven and London 1962), 38Google Scholar. See also Selznick, Philip, Leadership and Administration (Evanston 1957)Google Scholar; Simon, Herbert A., Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York 1947)Google Scholar; March, James A. and Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (New York 1958)Google Scholar; and the valuable discussion in Wolin, chap. 10.

31 Deutsch, Karl W., “Toward an Inventory of Basic Trends and Patterns in Comparative and International Politics,” American Political Science Review, LIV (March 1960), 38–39Google Scholar.

32 For a statement of this view, see Fred W. Riggs, “Bureaucrats and Political Development: A Paradoxical View,” in LaPalombara, ed., 120–67.

33 The quotation is from Pye, Politics, Personality and Nation Building, 39. Taylor's book is The Principles of Scientific Management (New York 1911)Google Scholar.

34 For example, see Lipset, , Political Man, chap. 2; and Cutright; Hagen; and Buchanan and CantrilGoogle Scholar.

35 His most comprehensive statement is Nationalism and Social Communication (New York 1953)Google Scholar. See also “The Growth of Nations,” World Politics, v (January 1953), 168–96Google Scholar.

36 Coleman, James S., Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1960)Google Scholar; Emerson, Rupert, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrison, Selig, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Deutsch, Karl and others, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton 1957)Google Scholar.

37 On the latter point, see Dahl, Robert A. and Lindblom, Charles E., Politics, Economics and Welfare (New York 1953), 78–88Google Scholar; and two articles by Lindblom, , “The Science of Muddling Through,” Public Administration Review, XIX (Spring 1959), 79–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Policy Analysis,” American Economic Review, XLVII (June 1958), 298–312Google Scholar.

38 Urbana 1959.

39 Chicago 1962. See also Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (New York 1959)Google Scholar; this study, however, draws its data from the U.S. and Western Europe.

40 See “Introduction: A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics,” in Almond and Coleman, eds., 3–64.

41 Groups in a conscious, rather than a categoric, sense are what is meant here.

42 There is a rich literature on “national character” and politics, much of which might be subsumed under this approach. For some central propositions and bibliographical references, see Leites, Nathan, “Psycho-Cultural Hypotheses About Political Acts,” World Politics, 1 (October 1948), 102–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inkeles, Alex and Levinson, Daniel, “National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems,” Lindzey, Gardner, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology (Reading, Mass., 1954), 11, 977–1020Google Scholar; and Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton 1963), 12–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 13n.

43 One can, of course, trace its lineage back about as far as one chooses. The whole idea owes perhaps more to Max Weber than to any other single modern social scientist. the United States, no discussion of the historical background to the notion of political culture should omit the work of Graham Wallas, Walter Lippmann, Charles E. Merriam, and Harold D. Lasswell. Talcott Parsons has been extremely influential in transmitting and revising the insights of Max Weber. Nevertheless, the concept of political culture as a major determinant of political change and development does not seem to have become prominent until the 1950's.

44 Almond, Gabriel A., “Comparative Political Systems,” Journal of Politics, XVIII (August 1956), 391–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Leites, Nathan, On the Game of Politics in France (Stanford 1959)Google Scholar; William Wylie, Laurence, Village in the Vaucleuse (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)Google Scholar; Banfield, Edward C., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe 1958)Google Scholar; Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe 1958)Google Scholar; Binder, Leonard, Iran: Political Development in a Changing Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1962)Google Scholar; Apter, The Gold Coast in Transition and The Political Kingdom in Uganda; Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture; Lipset, The First New Nation. See also Eckstein, Harry, A Theory of Stable Democracy (Princeton 1961)Google Scholar.

46 In the U.S. arena, Lasswell, Harold D. was a pioneer; see Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago 1930)Google Scholar and Power and Personality (New York 1948)Google Scholar. Other important works are Adorno, T. W. and others, The Authoritarian Personality (New York 1950)Google Scholar; Smith, M. Brewster, Bruner, Jerome S., and White, Robert W., Opinions and Personality (New York 1956)Google Scholar; and Lane, Robert E, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does (New York and London 1962)Google Scholar.

In the field of political biography, see Alexander, and George, Juliette, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York 1956)Google Scholar; Erikson, Erik, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York 1958)Google Scholar; Gottfried, Alex, Boss Cermak of Chicago (Seattle 1962)Google Scholar; and Rogow, Arnold A., James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy (New York 1963)Google Scholar.

47 Politics, Personality and Nation Building. Others may be noted. Almond's, Gabriel A.The Appeals of Communism (Princeton 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is relevant, although it is based upon material drawn from ex-Party members in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, and France. It stimulated and served as a guide for an earlier volume by Pye, Lucian W., Guerrilla Communism in Malaya: Its Social and Political Meaning (Princeton 1956)Google Scholar, which also leans heavily on personality to explain political development.

Two other volumes, both by non-political scientists interested principally in economic development but also in broader social change, are especially noteworthy. These are Everett Hagen, E., On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood, Ill. 1962)Google Scholar, and McClelland, David C., The Achieving Society (Princeton 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is at least quite interesting that scholars with backgrounds and disciplines as different as Pye (a political scientist), Hagen (an economist), and McClelland (a psychologist) should all turn to personality to try to account for political, social, and economic change.

We know of few psychological biographies of political leaders in developing countries, although this field has rich research possibilities. To get an idea of this richness, see the revealing essay by Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, “The New Courage: An Essay on Gandhi's Psychology,” World Politics, XVI (October 1963), 98–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 “The difference between die twenties and die sixties in Brazil is that today die Brazilians have discovered themselves. They have taken a good look and they like what they see. They no longer wish to be Europeans, and dieir intellectuals no longer escape to Paris to find something to write about. They no longer describe themselves, or are so described by their own intellectuals, as a mongrel race, inferior because it consists of a mixed people. On die contrary, they find dieir creative freedom, their pride in the present, their confidence in the future precisely in this fact—that they are a mixed, a universal people. The social democracy of Brazil, and die pride Brazilians have discovered in being what they are, has released a font of creative endiusiasm.” Frank Tannenbaum, in die Introduction to Freyre, Gilberto, The Mansions and the Shanties: The Maying of Modern Brazil (New York 1963), xiGoogle Scholar.

49 See Benson, 1–92 and passim. According to Benson, Loria's “fundamental proposition was that the relationship of man to the amount of ‘free land’ available for cultivation holds the key to human history,” including the nature of the political system. Ibid., 4 and 6–9.

50 “American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.” The Frontier in American History (New York 1920), 293Google Scholar, quoted in Fellman, 294. For a reinterpretation of the Turner thesis, see Potter, David M., People of Plenty (Chicago 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See Oriental Despotism (New Haven 1957) for his thesis of the tyrannical “hydraulic society.”

52 For example, see Sir Mackinder, Halford John, Britain and the British Seas (New York 1902)Google Scholar, and “The Geographic Pivot of History,” Geographic Journal, XXIII (April 1904), 421–37Google Scholar; Mahan, Alfred Thayer, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (New York 1957)Google Scholar; and Spykman, Nicholas John, The Geography of the Peace (New York 1944)Google Scholar.

53 See especially Millikan, Max F. and Blackmer, Donald M., eds., The Emerging Nations: Their Growth and United States Policy (Boston 1961)Google Scholar. For earlier statements of this approach in more narrowly economic form, see Millikan and Rostow, chap. 5, and Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, Eng., 1960)Google Scholar.