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Securing Authority: The View from the Top

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Raymond F. Hopkins
Raymond F. Hopkins
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College
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Extract

Although the literature on political development has been remarkably insightful, hopes for a science of “nation-building” have not been realized. While numerous works have described the effects of traditional patterns, ethnic and linguistic cleavages, and rapid mobilization, and have investigated factors such as culture, bureaucracy, ideology, and parties, we have learned very little about how to alter favorably the political conditions these have fostered. Political scientists, more often than not, have documented obstacles to, and failures in, political change desired by leaders in new states, rather than explored strategies whereby such change might be realized.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , January 1972 , pp. 271 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1972

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References

1 See, for instance, Pye, Lucian W., ed., Communications and Political Development (Princeton 1960)Google Scholar; Deutsch, Karl W., Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge 1966Google Scholar, rev. ed.); Pye, Lucian W. and Verba, Sidney, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton 1965); David Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago 1965)Google Scholar; and Rustow, Dankwart, A World of Nations (Washington 1967)Google Scholar, as well as numerous country studies.

2 Both Ilchman/Uphoff and Wriggins note the similarity of their analytical posture to that of Machiavelli.

3 Moreover, infrastructure for them is only an analytical distinction from that of resources; consequently, conceptual overlaps and confusion are possible. “The fact that the line between resource and infrastructure cannot always be discerned should not cause undue concern, since the distinction is ultimately an analytical one” (p. 73). Some of the items they label infrastructure might be considered part of the regime, e.g., legislatures and police; others might be included among sectors, e.g., political parties; still others might be counted as resources, e.g., ideology.

4 Leites and Wolf, for instance, have numerous suggestions about how authorities might more effectively counter insurgencies.

5 Categories of ruled are discussed in Ilchman and Uphoff, p. 40, and Wriggins, pp. 60–88; resources are described in Ilchman and Uphoff, pp. 58–91, and Leites and Wolf, pp. 32–42

6 Ilchman and Uphoff assert that their “restricted focus on the statesman's choices has been a matter of exposition rather than a matter of ethics” (p. 282).

7 See Huntington, Samuel P. and Moore, Clement H., eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society (New York 1970), especially Moore's essay, 48–60Google Scholar.

8 For example, Potter, Jack and others, eds., Peasant Society (Boston 1967)Google Scholar, especially the essay by George Foster on the notion of the “Limited Good,” which describes how economic goods are treated as a zero-sum resource in some societies, 300–323.

9 See Brunner, Ronald D. and Brewer, Garry D., Organized Complexity: Empirical Theories of Political Development (New York 1971)Google Scholar.

10 Even in a “radical” state such as Tanzania, the price and sales of one of its important export items, pyrethrum, are determined by one firm in London. The Tanganyika Extract Company (TECO) limits output, yet controls all purchases. In 1968, as a result, the local market value of pyrethrum flowers declined by 45 per cent. I am indebted to Idrian Resnick, economist in the Tanzanian Ministry of Development Planning, for pointing this out.

11 These concerns need not be excluded from the rigorous analysis imposed by the discipline of “political economy.” See, for instance, the article by Moore, Thomas Gale, “An Economic Analysis of the Concept of Freedom,” Journal of Political Economy, LXXVII (July/August 1969), 532–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Curiously, articles from this journal are nowhere cited by Ilchman and Uphoff.

12 For a discussion of legitimacy, see Sternberger, Dolf, “Legitimacy” in Sills, David, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX (New York 1968), 244–48Google Scholar; and Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York 1965), 348–72Google Scholar.

13 Robert L. Peabody, “Authority,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, I (fn. 12), 473–76.

14 This term is used by Karl Deutsch to describe the effects of literacy, urbanization, industrialization, and other aspects of modernity upon society. See Deutsch, K. W., “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” American Political Science Review, LV (September 1961), 493–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Peabody (fn. 13).

16 See Riggs, Fred, “Administration and a Changing World Environment,” Public Administration Review, XXVIH (July 1968) on this pointGoogle Scholar.

17 This is similar to the categorization used by Merelman, Richard M., “Learning and Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, LX (September 1966), 548–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Riggs (fn. 16).

19 In the last decade dozens of articles and books have repeatedly referred to legitimacy. In most cases, however, no careful analysis for clarifying the concept was presented, and an empirical investigation of the phenomenon was rarer still. For instance, a most extensive research effort by Easton, David and Dennis, Jack, Children in the Political System: Origins of Political Legitimacy (New York 1969)Google Scholar focused only on die acquisition of attitudes of “diffuse support” (Easton's definition of legitimacy) by children, and used few if any questions which relate directly to “the general idea of legitimacy,” namely, the ethical acceptability of government (see p. 414).

20 When legitimacy is quite low, authority becomes naked power, whereas when other resources vanish, authority is merely formal, not effective. Lasswell, Harold D. and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society (New Haven 1950), 135–41Google Scholar.

21 Nordlinger, Eric A., “Political Development: Time Sequences and Rates of Change,” World Politics, XX (April 1968), 508Google Scholar.

22 See Gamson, William A., Power and Discontent (Homewood, 111. 1968), 45–54Google Scholar, whose concept of “generalized trust” parallels that of Easton's idea of “diffuse support” and may be related to legitimacy. A government is more likely to be seen as legitimate when one trusts that it will do what it should do, and there is a high probability of preferred outcomes being achieved.

23 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man (Garden City, N.Y. 1960), 70Google Scholar.

24 Stinchcombe, Arthur, Constructing Social Theories (New York 1968), 162Google Scholar, cited in Flacks, Richard, “Protest or Conform: Some Social Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, V, No. 2 (1969), 134Google Scholar.

25 Richard Flacks, ibid.

26 The Federalist Papers are a classic illustration of the history of the formulation of such doctrines.

27 See Lane, Robert, Political Ideology (New York 1960)Google Scholar.

28 See Lasswell and Kaplan (fn. 20), 126–34.

29 This might also be a responsiveness strategy. See Rothchild, Donald, “Kenya's Africanization Program: Priorities of Development and Equity,” American Political Science Review, LXIV (September 1970), 753Google Scholar.

30 Samuel P. Huntington makes a strong argument for shifting our attention from viewing the political process in terms of “development” to examining politics in terms of “change” in his essay, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics, III (April 1971), 283–322Google Scholar.

31 Some of the diagrams in Leites and Wolf and the distinctions made by Ilchman and Uphoff occasionally leave this impression. For the critique of “mindless theorizing” see Hirschman, Albert O., “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding,” World Politics, XXII (April 1970), 329–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 See Pennock, J. Roland, “Political Development, Political Systems, and Political Goods,” World Politics, xviii (April 1966), 415–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 In the United States, for instance, there is no functional equivalent to the National Council of Economic Advisors for political policy, at least not one staffed by professional political scientists. Those who serve as advisors in the U.S. or abroad are nearly always specialists in comparative politics and political development who are asked to advise on policies of foreign and military strategy, or specialists in public administration and law who are consulted on problems in bureaucratic and agency performance. One reason for this situation is that until recently there has been little scholarship devoted to planning and policy among professional political scientists.

34 James (Samuel) Coleman, at an International Political Science Roundtable on Quantitative Mediods, in Mannheim, Germany, July 5–10, 1971, suggested that the impending important dispute in political science was likely to be between “political economists”—that is, a group who seek greater rigor in theoretical models and quantitative techniques—and those “behavioralists” who are satisfied with established data analysis and descriptive statistical approaches.