Capitalism and Democracy in the Post-war Period
In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War the advanced capitalist countries, led by Great Britain and the United States, faced a number of daunting challenges. if global order of the kind their leaders desired was to be achieved, they needed to secure the economic recovery and political stability of those countries devastated by warfare, eliminate the sources of conflict which had led to the war itself, and put the world capitalist economy back on a sound footing. And as if this were not enough, they had to do so in the context of the enormously enhanced prestige and influence of the Soviet Union, growing pressure around the world for economic development and social reform, and demands for political independence in the many areas still subject to colonial rule. The 'political development theory' with which this book is concerned represented an attempt to address these issues from the perspective of the perceived interests of the leading capitalist states, and the United States in particular. This chapter describes the historical and theoretical contexts from which it emerged, and provides an outline of its rise and fall between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s.
Crisis, Cold War and Revolution
At this distance in time, it is easy to forget just how immensely difficult the tasks facing the leading capitalist states appeared as the Second World War came to an end. The three decades following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 were more unstable, and more destructive on a global scale, than any in the previous history of the world. In addition to the two periods of open world war which framed them, they witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the deep crisis of the global capitalist system in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Thereafter, the years leading to the outbreak of the Second World War witnessed intense economic nationalism and military rivalry, while demand for social and political change mounted in the advanced capitalist countries themselves. In this context, it should be recalled that the building of the welfare state in Britain had only just begun on the eve of the First World War, with the United States lagging further behind, and that social provision through the state was still in its infancy in 1945. At the same time, experience around the world of liberal democracy with mass participation was still extremely limited. Britain had completed the introduction of the universal franchise only in the decade following the First World War, then experienced political crisis and national government in the 1930s and the suspension of political competition during the Second World War; in the United States corrupt and clientelistic political machines remained dominant in many areas, while many blacks and poor whites in the south were excluded from the franchise altogether; and in France, Germany and Italy liberal democracy was highly unstable, and had recently lapsed into authoritarian rule.
If one thing was clear in the circumstances that prevailed once the Second World War came to an end, it was that while a return to the circumstances of the 1930s had to be avoided at all costs, there could be no going back to the global order that had prevailed before 1914. The leaders of the advanced capitalist countries faced a new challenge: to restore global order in the context of mass social and political participation at home, with its attendant pressure for economic improvement, and growing demands for social and economic participation and political reform throughout the 'non-Western world'. What is more, a new factor and clear danger in the situation was that the Soviet Union, with its record of unprecedented accelerated economic development, and its massive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany, appeared to offer a powerful and attractive alternative to capitalist development.
The implications of this situation for the 'non-Western world', or the 'Third World', as it came to be known, were complex. On the one hand, it seemed evident that the demand for social, economic and political change could not be ignored. On the other, it was not at all clear what might happen if demands for change were encouraged in the unstable context produced by Cold War, global economic instability, and great social and economic backwardness and inequality. Although the context was somewhat different, the central issue was essentially the same as that faced at home in the United States and Western Europe: it was thought to be essential that the process of change should be controlled by responsible elites committed to capitalist development, but there was no guarantee, and often no good reason to believe, that such control could be achieved in practice.
The practical and intellectual dilemmas inherent in this situation were never resolved in the three decades following the Second World War. First, the phase of intense 'Cold War' confrontation which had marked the immediate post war years (1946–53) gave away, after a period of sporadic attempts to negotiate key issues, to a decade (1969–79) of sustained negotiation or detente between the United States and the Soviet Union (Halliday 1983: ch. 1). The assumption at this point, until a 'second Cold War War' was launched by the United States at the end of the 1970s, was that the Soviet Union would be a permanent fixture with which the West would have to learn to live. Secondly, the period was punctuated by waves of 'Third World Revolutions' which in turn provoked counter-revolutionary responses on a global scale. The first of these waves reached a high point with a success of Mao Zedong's revolution in mainland China, saw the establishment of North Korea and North Vietnam, and subsided in the mid-1950s in the face of counter-revolutionary success in Iran and Guatemala. But almost immediately widespread decolonization and the upsurge of radical nationalism across the Third World combined to produce an explosive situation. A second wave of Third World revolutions took place from the late 1950s on: Fidel Castro's victorious guerrilla forces entered Havana on 1 January 1959, Patrice Lumumba won the independence of Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) in 1960, and in 1962 the French were finally evicted from Algeria. Once again, counter-revolution followed, destroying Lumumba and his regime, isolating Cuba, spreading a counter-insurgency blanket across Central and South America (with Brazil in 1964 seeing the imposition of the most significant of a number of 'national security' regimes), and establishing Suharto's regime in Indonesia at the cost of enormous bloodshed. Indo-China apart, a tide of revolution was once again contained. But even before the defeat of the West was complete in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (with US withdrawal in 1973 and the fall of Saigon in April 1975) a third wave of revolutions commenced in 1974 in Ethiopia and Portuguese Africa, and spread by 1979 to Iran and Nicaragua, prompting the reopening of the Cold War (83–97).
By the late 1960s, too, it was becoming clear that the international economic order set up at Bretton Woods after the war was entering a phase of serious destabilization. This arose in part out of social and economic problems internal to the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, and the tensions this generated in their relations with each other. The policy responses which resulted provoked increased global stability which in turn fed back into domestic politics, giving a further twist to the process of global destabilization. At the end of the decade, the United States unleashed a wave of global inflation by breaking the link between the dollar and gold, and in response to this and other developments aggressive economic nationalism replaced relatively docile subservience to the activities of multinational corporations across the globe. In the early 1970s the Third World, initially in the form of the oil-producing countries gathered in OPEC, mounted a substantial challenge to the right of the leading capitalist countries to dictate terms in the global economy. The successive 'oil shocks' of 1973 and 1979, in conjunction with revolution elsewhere in the developing world, suggested that the leading capitalist powers were unable to control either the politics or the economic activity of the developing world. In the same period, of course, the politics of the United States were thrown into turmoil by successive challenges to the myth of domestic harmony: the civil rights movements, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John and Bobby Kennedy, the wave of mass opposition to the Vietnam War, and the impeachment and removal from office of President Nixon.
Against this background a substantial literature was produced in the United States from the mid-1950s onwards on the topic of political change in the developed and developing world. It is with the literature on this topic, which came to be known as' political development', that this book is concerned. It had its origins, as we shall shortly see, in an analysis of the global situation in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and the causes of instability in Europe that had led to conflict: Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) reflects these concerns. The first volumes of the Studies in Political Development series (1963–78), from Pye's Communications and Political Development (1963a) on, were written in the context of the first and second waves of Third World revolutions. The last, Tilly's The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975a) and Grew's Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (1978a), were published amidst the third wave of revolution and the economic upheavals of the late 1970s, and significantly turned back from the contemporary third world to European and US history for their subject matter. As this outline periodization suggests, the key 'political development' texts have to be read in the context of the times in which they were written. The pattern of wave after wave of revolution and counter-revolution, against a background of increasing economic instability and assertiveness across the periphery, and a searching critique of the extent and quality of democracy at home, was extremely uncongenial to the project to which political development theory was committed. At the same time, and perhaps for that very reason, it explains the persistence with which the conservative doctrine at its core was preached without regard for the theoretical mishaps which attended it at every turn.
As we shall see during the course of the investigation, the project at the heart of political development theory was the establishment across the developing world of stable capitalist regimes, in which governing elites enjoyed sufficient authority to be able to grant a degree of participation to the masses without risking losing control over the fundamental character of the social and economic system. The subject matter of the political development literature – the attempt to specify the conditions under which such stable participatory political regimes might be established – arose from the genuine and frequently uncomfortable belief that in the end capitalist regimes could not survive unless they were based upon extended participation and consent. The introduction of such regimes, therefore, was seen as a medium- to long-term condition for the solid establishment of capitalism in the areas of the world throughout which the Cold War was fought.
The central dilemma at the heart of the literature, and the strategy it adopted in response, were best expressed by LaPalombara, writing in the early 1960s. Reflecting on the problems which arose from demands for social and economic progress, he allowed himself
to speculate whether it would not be possible to manipulate demands so that goals of democratic political development enjoy a status equal to that of economic change. Less emphasis might be given to grand schemes of economic development, more to local-level development that might bring forces of local political participation into play. This might also be a means of encouraging the evolution of the kind of private economic sector that would constitute an embryonic middle class and an eventual counterpoise to the power of the centralized bureaucracy. I might say that I strongly believe that it is more than historical coincidence that economic liberalism preceded the emergence of political liberalism in the West. A similar, if not exactly duplicate, type of evolution might be encouraged in the developing nations. Some political benefit would surely derive from encouraging the kind of economic enterprise that is individually rather than collectively oriented, that exalts the place of the private entrepreneur rather than that of an all-embracing collectivity symbolized by large-scale, unwieldy and unbending public bureaucracies (1963: 30; emphasis mine).
As this passage suggests, the theorists of political development were clear about what they wanted, but not at all confident in this period that their goals could be achieved. Citizens and governments around the developing world, far from showing an interest in elite democracy with minimal social and economic content and embracing the ideology of free enterprise capitalism, tended to favour strategies of intensive state-led development or outright socialist revolution which they hoped would rapidly bridge the gulf in standards of living between the advanced capitalist states of the West and themselves.
In these circumstances, no leading theorist of political development either favoured or advocated the wholesale and immediate introduction of competitive democratic politics in the developing world. Because the immediate prospects for democratic capitalist regimes in the developing world appeared extremely poor, the issue presented itself more as a problem than as an opportunity. This situation was traced to two related deficiencies – the lack of insulation of political institutions from social pressure, and the lack of elite authority over the masses.
At the heart of political development theory, in other words, was the perception that democracy in the developing world was both essential and impossible. In these circumstances, the political development industry operated on a number of levels: as theory, as ideology, and as a lobbying and public relations exercise on behalf of capitalism and of a particular political model felt to be the most appropriate to its establishment and continued success, whether in the developing world or in the more mature capitalist societies. This model, elite-led democracy with controlled and limited popular participation, operating in support of and subservience to a social and economic system based on free enterprise, was defined by revisionist behaviourists in the United States in the post-war period.
Given their perception that major efforts of persuasion and of public policy re-orientation at home and abroad were required if their goals were to be achieved, the leading practitioners of political development theory were committed ideologues, lobbyists and public relations executives as much as they were disinterested scholars – yet their presentation of themselves as disinterested scholars, and perhaps their perception of themselves as such, was an essential precondition for their success as ideologues and sales persons (salesmen, to a person, in point of fact) for capitalism on a global scale. At the same time, the various roles which they adopted tended to conflict with each other. As we shall see in the following chapters, this explains characteristics of the literature which otherwise appear baffling. It erected complex theoretical superstructures on vaguely defined and intuitive foundations; it refused to modify its characterization of the politics of the developing world in terms of the 'non-wWestern political process' first defined in the 1950s despite the mass of evidence which suggested that it was fundamentally misleading; it abandoned the developing world as an area of study in the 1960s in a favour of studies of the history of political development in Europe and the United States; and it triumphantly survived its failure not only to produce any coherent theory of political development, but even to decide what' political development' was. Before we can begin to understand how this could be, we need to know something of the intellectual climate out of which political development theory emerged, and something of its own peculiar history. These issues are treated in turn in the following sections. First, I examine the evolution of theories of democracy in the inter-war and post-war periods, as they sought to come to terms with 'mass society' and with the horrors of previous decades. I then turn to the trajectory of political development theory itself.
Liberal Democratic Theory and Mass Society
No sense can be made of political development theory or the doctrine for political development to which it gave rise if it is assumed that they were primarily concerned with the 'non-Western world'. They have their roots in the rethinking and rewriting of the theory of democracy in response to modern industrial society, and the experience of fascism and communism. Three texts in particular give a composite picture of the intellectual climate generated by reflection on these themes – Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1970), Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), and Kornhauser's The Politics of Mass Society (1960). Their main arguments relevant to the genesis of 'political development theory' are outlined in this section.
Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was influential in the post-war period on account of the contrast he offered, in the course of a discussion of the relationship between socialism and democracy, between the classical doctrine of democracy on the one hand and what he termed 'another theory of democracy' on the other (Schumpeter 1970: chs. 20–23). He described 'the classical doctrine' (actually an amalgam of a number of different approaches) as holding that 'the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will (250). Against this view, Schumpeter argued that because ultimate values differ from one person to another there was no such thing as 'a uniquely determined common good that all people could agree on or be made to agree on by the force of rational argument' (251), and that even if there were, there would still be fundamental disagreement on the best way to achieve it. Furthermore, individual citizens were not rational and independent in forming their opinions, and their 'sense of reality' and level of commitment diminished as they turned away from local politics and issues directly related to their own interests and expertise to matters of broader national and international significance:
Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyses in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again (262).
In sum, the ordinary citizen, at the mercy of irrational prejudice and impulse, was such an easy prey to the manipulations of professional politicians and other groups with axes to grind that 'the will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process' (263).
According to Schumpeter, the classical doctrine of democracy had survived despite its obvious lack of realism because it had acquired the status of a religious belief; and democracy had changed from 'a mere method that can be discussed rationally like a steam engine or a disinfectant' (266) to an ideal and a mystical symbol. This process had been reinforced by the historical association between the doctrine and the process of national liberation in Europe and the United States, and by the fact that it still appeared to fit the case of simple societies, or those in which there was little motive for serious disagreement.
In its place he offered 'another theory which is much truer to life and at the same time salvages much of what sponsors of the democratic method really meant by this term' (269). This said that the purpose of the democratic method was not to select representatives who would carry out the will of the people, but to choose individuals who would govern on their behalf:
To put it differently, we now take the view that the role of the people is to produce a government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce a national executive or government. And we define: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote (269: emphasis mine).
For Schumpeter, the advantages of this theory were that it associated democracy with a specific and easily identifiable procedure, rather than an abstract notion based upon dubious premises; it provided for 'proper recognition of the vital fact of leadership' (270); it drew attention to the process by which the interests of particular groups in society were worked up into elements of political programmes; it recognized reality in allowing for less than perfect competition, and the use of dubious practices in 'free competition for a free vote' (271); it attached a precise if limited meaning to the individual freedom which democracy offered (such that everyone was free to compete for political leadership in the same sense in which 'everyone was free to start another textile mill'); it included the idea that the electorate could evict the government, but not that it could control it during its period in office; and by defining elections as nothing more than a method for producing a government it gave a simple rationale for handing power over to the individual or team who commanded the most support, and cut the ground from under the case for proportional representation.
Having outlined his alternative theory, Schumpeter turned to the social conditions that were necessary for the successful working of the democratic method in 'great industrial nations of the modern type'. The first was that 'the human material ... should be of sufficiently high quality', which in turn required 'the existence of a social stratum itself a product of a severely selective process, that takes to politics as a matter of course':
If such a stratum be neither too exclusive nor too easily accessible for the outsider and if it be strong enough to assimilate most of the elements it currently absorbs, it not only will present for the political career products of stocks that have successfully passed many tests in other fields – served, as it were, an apprenticeship in private affairs – but it will also increase their fitness by endowing them with traditions that embody experience, with a professional code and with a common fund of views (291).
The second condition was that 'the effective range of political decision should not be extended too far' (291), as it would otherwise threaten the operation of non-political public agencies. The third was that
democratic government in modern industrial society must be able to command, for all purposes the sphere of public activity is to include – no matter whether this be much or little – the services of a well-trained bureaucracy of good standing and tradition, endowed with a strong sense of duty and a no less strong esprit de corps (293).
Fourth and last, Schumpeter required a 'set of conditions' summed up under the rubric of 'Democratic Self-Control'. These conditions (Box 1.1) required, in Schumpeter's words, 'a lot of voluntary subordination' on all sides, 'a lot of self-control on the part of the citizen,' and 'just the right amount - not too much, not too little - of traditionalism' in parliamentary procedure and etiquette (294-5).
Crisis, Cold War and Revolution
At this distance in time, it is easy to forget just how immensely difficult the tasks facing the leading capitalist states appeared as the Second World War came to an end. The three decades following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 were more unstable, and more destructive on a global scale, than any in the previous history of the world. In addition to the two periods of open world war which framed them, they witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the deep crisis of the global capitalist system in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Thereafter, the years leading to the outbreak of the Second World War witnessed intense economic nationalism and military rivalry, while demand for social and political change mounted in the advanced capitalist countries themselves. In this context, it should be recalled that the building of the welfare state in Britain had only just begun on the eve of the First World War, with the United States lagging further behind, and that social provision through the state was still in its infancy in 1945. At the same time, experience around the world of liberal democracy with mass participation was still extremely limited. Britain had completed the introduction of the universal franchise only in the decade following the First World War, then experienced political crisis and national government in the 1930s and the suspension of political competition during the Second World War; in the United States corrupt and clientelistic political machines remained dominant in many areas, while many blacks and poor whites in the south were excluded from the franchise altogether; and in France, Germany and Italy liberal democracy was highly unstable, and had recently lapsed into authoritarian rule.
If one thing was clear in the circumstances that prevailed once the Second World War came to an end, it was that while a return to the circumstances of the 1930s had to be avoided at all costs, there could be no going back to the global order that had prevailed before 1914. The leaders of the advanced capitalist countries faced a new challenge: to restore global order in the context of mass social and political participation at home, with its attendant pressure for economic improvement, and growing demands for social and economic participation and political reform throughout the 'non-Western world'. What is more, a new factor and clear danger in the situation was that the Soviet Union, with its record of unprecedented accelerated economic development, and its massive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany, appeared to offer a powerful and attractive alternative to capitalist development.
The implications of this situation for the 'non-Western world', or the 'Third World', as it came to be known, were complex. On the one hand, it seemed evident that the demand for social, economic and political change could not be ignored. On the other, it was not at all clear what might happen if demands for change were encouraged in the unstable context produced by Cold War, global economic instability, and great social and economic backwardness and inequality. Although the context was somewhat different, the central issue was essentially the same as that faced at home in the United States and Western Europe: it was thought to be essential that the process of change should be controlled by responsible elites committed to capitalist development, but there was no guarantee, and often no good reason to believe, that such control could be achieved in practice.
The practical and intellectual dilemmas inherent in this situation were never resolved in the three decades following the Second World War. First, the phase of intense 'Cold War' confrontation which had marked the immediate post war years (1946–53) gave away, after a period of sporadic attempts to negotiate key issues, to a decade (1969–79) of sustained negotiation or detente between the United States and the Soviet Union (Halliday 1983: ch. 1). The assumption at this point, until a 'second Cold War War' was launched by the United States at the end of the 1970s, was that the Soviet Union would be a permanent fixture with which the West would have to learn to live. Secondly, the period was punctuated by waves of 'Third World Revolutions' which in turn provoked counter-revolutionary responses on a global scale. The first of these waves reached a high point with a success of Mao Zedong's revolution in mainland China, saw the establishment of North Korea and North Vietnam, and subsided in the mid-1950s in the face of counter-revolutionary success in Iran and Guatemala. But almost immediately widespread decolonization and the upsurge of radical nationalism across the Third World combined to produce an explosive situation. A second wave of Third World revolutions took place from the late 1950s on: Fidel Castro's victorious guerrilla forces entered Havana on 1 January 1959, Patrice Lumumba won the independence of Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) in 1960, and in 1962 the French were finally evicted from Algeria. Once again, counter-revolution followed, destroying Lumumba and his regime, isolating Cuba, spreading a counter-insurgency blanket across Central and South America (with Brazil in 1964 seeing the imposition of the most significant of a number of 'national security' regimes), and establishing Suharto's regime in Indonesia at the cost of enormous bloodshed. Indo-China apart, a tide of revolution was once again contained. But even before the defeat of the West was complete in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (with US withdrawal in 1973 and the fall of Saigon in April 1975) a third wave of revolutions commenced in 1974 in Ethiopia and Portuguese Africa, and spread by 1979 to Iran and Nicaragua, prompting the reopening of the Cold War (83–97).
By the late 1960s, too, it was becoming clear that the international economic order set up at Bretton Woods after the war was entering a phase of serious destabilization. This arose in part out of social and economic problems internal to the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, and the tensions this generated in their relations with each other. The policy responses which resulted provoked increased global stability which in turn fed back into domestic politics, giving a further twist to the process of global destabilization. At the end of the decade, the United States unleashed a wave of global inflation by breaking the link between the dollar and gold, and in response to this and other developments aggressive economic nationalism replaced relatively docile subservience to the activities of multinational corporations across the globe. In the early 1970s the Third World, initially in the form of the oil-producing countries gathered in OPEC, mounted a substantial challenge to the right of the leading capitalist countries to dictate terms in the global economy. The successive 'oil shocks' of 1973 and 1979, in conjunction with revolution elsewhere in the developing world, suggested that the leading capitalist powers were unable to control either the politics or the economic activity of the developing world. In the same period, of course, the politics of the United States were thrown into turmoil by successive challenges to the myth of domestic harmony: the civil rights movements, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John and Bobby Kennedy, the wave of mass opposition to the Vietnam War, and the impeachment and removal from office of President Nixon.
Against this background a substantial literature was produced in the United States from the mid-1950s onwards on the topic of political change in the developed and developing world. It is with the literature on this topic, which came to be known as' political development', that this book is concerned. It had its origins, as we shall shortly see, in an analysis of the global situation in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and the causes of instability in Europe that had led to conflict: Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) reflects these concerns. The first volumes of the Studies in Political Development series (1963–78), from Pye's Communications and Political Development (1963a) on, were written in the context of the first and second waves of Third World revolutions. The last, Tilly's The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975a) and Grew's Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (1978a), were published amidst the third wave of revolution and the economic upheavals of the late 1970s, and significantly turned back from the contemporary third world to European and US history for their subject matter. As this outline periodization suggests, the key 'political development' texts have to be read in the context of the times in which they were written. The pattern of wave after wave of revolution and counter-revolution, against a background of increasing economic instability and assertiveness across the periphery, and a searching critique of the extent and quality of democracy at home, was extremely uncongenial to the project to which political development theory was committed. At the same time, and perhaps for that very reason, it explains the persistence with which the conservative doctrine at its core was preached without regard for the theoretical mishaps which attended it at every turn.
As we shall see during the course of the investigation, the project at the heart of political development theory was the establishment across the developing world of stable capitalist regimes, in which governing elites enjoyed sufficient authority to be able to grant a degree of participation to the masses without risking losing control over the fundamental character of the social and economic system. The subject matter of the political development literature – the attempt to specify the conditions under which such stable participatory political regimes might be established – arose from the genuine and frequently uncomfortable belief that in the end capitalist regimes could not survive unless they were based upon extended participation and consent. The introduction of such regimes, therefore, was seen as a medium- to long-term condition for the solid establishment of capitalism in the areas of the world throughout which the Cold War was fought.
The central dilemma at the heart of the literature, and the strategy it adopted in response, were best expressed by LaPalombara, writing in the early 1960s. Reflecting on the problems which arose from demands for social and economic progress, he allowed himself
to speculate whether it would not be possible to manipulate demands so that goals of democratic political development enjoy a status equal to that of economic change. Less emphasis might be given to grand schemes of economic development, more to local-level development that might bring forces of local political participation into play. This might also be a means of encouraging the evolution of the kind of private economic sector that would constitute an embryonic middle class and an eventual counterpoise to the power of the centralized bureaucracy. I might say that I strongly believe that it is more than historical coincidence that economic liberalism preceded the emergence of political liberalism in the West. A similar, if not exactly duplicate, type of evolution might be encouraged in the developing nations. Some political benefit would surely derive from encouraging the kind of economic enterprise that is individually rather than collectively oriented, that exalts the place of the private entrepreneur rather than that of an all-embracing collectivity symbolized by large-scale, unwieldy and unbending public bureaucracies (1963: 30; emphasis mine).
As this passage suggests, the theorists of political development were clear about what they wanted, but not at all confident in this period that their goals could be achieved. Citizens and governments around the developing world, far from showing an interest in elite democracy with minimal social and economic content and embracing the ideology of free enterprise capitalism, tended to favour strategies of intensive state-led development or outright socialist revolution which they hoped would rapidly bridge the gulf in standards of living between the advanced capitalist states of the West and themselves.
In these circumstances, no leading theorist of political development either favoured or advocated the wholesale and immediate introduction of competitive democratic politics in the developing world. Because the immediate prospects for democratic capitalist regimes in the developing world appeared extremely poor, the issue presented itself more as a problem than as an opportunity. This situation was traced to two related deficiencies – the lack of insulation of political institutions from social pressure, and the lack of elite authority over the masses.
At the heart of political development theory, in other words, was the perception that democracy in the developing world was both essential and impossible. In these circumstances, the political development industry operated on a number of levels: as theory, as ideology, and as a lobbying and public relations exercise on behalf of capitalism and of a particular political model felt to be the most appropriate to its establishment and continued success, whether in the developing world or in the more mature capitalist societies. This model, elite-led democracy with controlled and limited popular participation, operating in support of and subservience to a social and economic system based on free enterprise, was defined by revisionist behaviourists in the United States in the post-war period.
Given their perception that major efforts of persuasion and of public policy re-orientation at home and abroad were required if their goals were to be achieved, the leading practitioners of political development theory were committed ideologues, lobbyists and public relations executives as much as they were disinterested scholars – yet their presentation of themselves as disinterested scholars, and perhaps their perception of themselves as such, was an essential precondition for their success as ideologues and sales persons (salesmen, to a person, in point of fact) for capitalism on a global scale. At the same time, the various roles which they adopted tended to conflict with each other. As we shall see in the following chapters, this explains characteristics of the literature which otherwise appear baffling. It erected complex theoretical superstructures on vaguely defined and intuitive foundations; it refused to modify its characterization of the politics of the developing world in terms of the 'non-wWestern political process' first defined in the 1950s despite the mass of evidence which suggested that it was fundamentally misleading; it abandoned the developing world as an area of study in the 1960s in a favour of studies of the history of political development in Europe and the United States; and it triumphantly survived its failure not only to produce any coherent theory of political development, but even to decide what' political development' was. Before we can begin to understand how this could be, we need to know something of the intellectual climate out of which political development theory emerged, and something of its own peculiar history. These issues are treated in turn in the following sections. First, I examine the evolution of theories of democracy in the inter-war and post-war periods, as they sought to come to terms with 'mass society' and with the horrors of previous decades. I then turn to the trajectory of political development theory itself.
Liberal Democratic Theory and Mass Society
No sense can be made of political development theory or the doctrine for political development to which it gave rise if it is assumed that they were primarily concerned with the 'non-Western world'. They have their roots in the rethinking and rewriting of the theory of democracy in response to modern industrial society, and the experience of fascism and communism. Three texts in particular give a composite picture of the intellectual climate generated by reflection on these themes – Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1970), Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), and Kornhauser's The Politics of Mass Society (1960). Their main arguments relevant to the genesis of 'political development theory' are outlined in this section.
Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was influential in the post-war period on account of the contrast he offered, in the course of a discussion of the relationship between socialism and democracy, between the classical doctrine of democracy on the one hand and what he termed 'another theory of democracy' on the other (Schumpeter 1970: chs. 20–23). He described 'the classical doctrine' (actually an amalgam of a number of different approaches) as holding that 'the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will (250). Against this view, Schumpeter argued that because ultimate values differ from one person to another there was no such thing as 'a uniquely determined common good that all people could agree on or be made to agree on by the force of rational argument' (251), and that even if there were, there would still be fundamental disagreement on the best way to achieve it. Furthermore, individual citizens were not rational and independent in forming their opinions, and their 'sense of reality' and level of commitment diminished as they turned away from local politics and issues directly related to their own interests and expertise to matters of broader national and international significance:
Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyses in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again (262).
In sum, the ordinary citizen, at the mercy of irrational prejudice and impulse, was such an easy prey to the manipulations of professional politicians and other groups with axes to grind that 'the will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process' (263).
According to Schumpeter, the classical doctrine of democracy had survived despite its obvious lack of realism because it had acquired the status of a religious belief; and democracy had changed from 'a mere method that can be discussed rationally like a steam engine or a disinfectant' (266) to an ideal and a mystical symbol. This process had been reinforced by the historical association between the doctrine and the process of national liberation in Europe and the United States, and by the fact that it still appeared to fit the case of simple societies, or those in which there was little motive for serious disagreement.
In its place he offered 'another theory which is much truer to life and at the same time salvages much of what sponsors of the democratic method really meant by this term' (269). This said that the purpose of the democratic method was not to select representatives who would carry out the will of the people, but to choose individuals who would govern on their behalf:
To put it differently, we now take the view that the role of the people is to produce a government, or else an intermediate body which in turn will produce a national executive or government. And we define: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote (269: emphasis mine).
For Schumpeter, the advantages of this theory were that it associated democracy with a specific and easily identifiable procedure, rather than an abstract notion based upon dubious premises; it provided for 'proper recognition of the vital fact of leadership' (270); it drew attention to the process by which the interests of particular groups in society were worked up into elements of political programmes; it recognized reality in allowing for less than perfect competition, and the use of dubious practices in 'free competition for a free vote' (271); it attached a precise if limited meaning to the individual freedom which democracy offered (such that everyone was free to compete for political leadership in the same sense in which 'everyone was free to start another textile mill'); it included the idea that the electorate could evict the government, but not that it could control it during its period in office; and by defining elections as nothing more than a method for producing a government it gave a simple rationale for handing power over to the individual or team who commanded the most support, and cut the ground from under the case for proportional representation.
Having outlined his alternative theory, Schumpeter turned to the social conditions that were necessary for the successful working of the democratic method in 'great industrial nations of the modern type'. The first was that 'the human material ... should be of sufficiently high quality', which in turn required 'the existence of a social stratum itself a product of a severely selective process, that takes to politics as a matter of course':
If such a stratum be neither too exclusive nor too easily accessible for the outsider and if it be strong enough to assimilate most of the elements it currently absorbs, it not only will present for the political career products of stocks that have successfully passed many tests in other fields – served, as it were, an apprenticeship in private affairs – but it will also increase their fitness by endowing them with traditions that embody experience, with a professional code and with a common fund of views (291).
The second condition was that 'the effective range of political decision should not be extended too far' (291), as it would otherwise threaten the operation of non-political public agencies. The third was that
democratic government in modern industrial society must be able to command, for all purposes the sphere of public activity is to include – no matter whether this be much or little – the services of a well-trained bureaucracy of good standing and tradition, endowed with a strong sense of duty and a no less strong esprit de corps (293).
Fourth and last, Schumpeter required a 'set of conditions' summed up under the rubric of 'Democratic Self-Control'. These conditions (Box 1.1) required, in Schumpeter's words, 'a lot of voluntary subordination' on all sides, 'a lot of self-control on the part of the citizen,' and 'just the right amount - not too much, not too little - of traditionalism' in parliamentary procedure and etiquette (294-5).
Box 1.1 Schumpeter's conditions for 'Democratic Self-Control'
Source: Schumpeter 1970: 294-5.
- Electorates and parliaments must be on an intellectual and moral level high enough to resist crooks and cranks
- Measures passed must have regard to the claims of others and the national situation, or democracy will be discredited and allegiance undermined.
- The supporters of the government must accept its lead and allow it to frame and act upon a program, and the opposition should accept the lead of the 'shadow cabinet' at its head and allow it to keep political warfare within certain rules.
- The voters outside of parliament must respect the division of labor between themselves and the politicians they elect. They must not withdraw confidence to easily between elections and they must understand that, once they have elected an individual, political action is his business and not theirs
- Finally, effective competition for leadership requires a large measure of tolerance for difference of opinion
Source: Schumpeter 1970: 294-5.
Having outlined the 'conditions for the success of the democratic method', Schumpeter asserted that they required specific social conditions, including agreement on the fundamental structures of society that were by no means universal:
Even the necessary minimum of democratic self-control evidently requires a national character and national habits of a certain type which have not everywhere had the opportunity to evolve and which the democratic method itself cannot be relied upon to produce. And nowhere will that self-control stand tests beyond a varying degree of severity. In fact the reader need only review our conditions in order to satisfy himself that democratic government will work to full advantage only if all the interests that matter are practically unanimous not only in their allegiance to the country, but also in their allegiance to the structural principles of the existing society. Whenever these principles are called into question and issues arise that rend a nation into two hostile camps, democracy works at a disadvantage. And it may cease to work at all as soon as interests and ideals are involved on which people refuse to compromise (295–6; emphasis mine).
On this basis, incidentally, he argued that when democracy entered 'troubled times' it was reasonable to abandon competitive and to adopt monopolistic leadership (296), provided that it be for a short run emergency or for a period definitely limited in time.
In sum, then, Schumpeter moved the theory of liberal democracy in a frankly elitist direction. He sought to place the business of government in the hands of an experienced elite drawn from a political class with shared values, and to insulate this elite and the institutions through which it governed from direct pressure from the majority of the population.
A decade later, Robert Dahl offered the first account of a 'pluralist' theory of democracy, strongly influenced by Schumpeter's approach. His Preface to Democratic Theory took as its point of departure the assertion that 'democratic theory is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a relatively high degree of control over leaders' (Dahl 1956: 3). It raised, by way of a discussion of Madison's contribution to constitutional debate in the United States, the problem of tensions between the power of majorities and political equality on the one hand, and the power of minorities and limitations to popular sovereignty on the other. Dahl outlined Madison's position in the following terms:
On the one hand, Madison substantially accepted the idea that all the adult citizens of a republic must be assigned equal rights, including the right to determine the general direction of government policy. In this sense majority rule is 'the republican principle'. On the other hand, Madison wished to erect a political system that would guarantee the liberties of certain minorities whose advantages of status, power, and wealth would, he thought, probably not be tolerated indefinitely by a constitutionally untrammelled majority. Hence majorities had to be constitutionally inhibited. Madisonianism, historically and presently, is a compromise between these two conflicting goals (31).
Dahl, like Madison (and like Schumpeter), opposed the 'populistic' democracy of unconstrained majority rule. However, he rejected Madison's argument that the tyranny of the majority over minorities could be prevented by constitutional checks and balances. It would be prevented, if at all, by 'the inherent social checks and balances existing in every pluralistic society' (22) and 'internalized restraints in the individual behavior system, such as the conscience and other products of social indoctrination' (36).
Dahl argued that a 'populistic' democracy of unconstrained majority rule could not be achieved in practice for a variety of empirical and technical reasons, and that in any case it was not desirable in principle. A populistic democracy postulated only two goals to be maximized – political equality and popular sovereignty. Yet no one, except perhaps a fanatic, wishes to maximize two goals at the expense of all others' (50). These goals should be assessed on purely instrumental grounds, as means to the legitimacy and stability of the government, a sense of personal well-being, or the realization of other desirable individual or group goals. Dahl found 'no a priori reason for supposing that populistic democracy would maximize one's goals (or the goals of others) in every culture, society, and time' (52), and no strong ethical grounds for supporting it.
He therefore expressed a preference for 'polyarchy', a situation falling short of full democracy in which the conditions existed 'to a relatively high degree' for the adoption of the policy choice preferred by most citizens. He insisted at the same time that 'as distinguished from Madisonianism, the theory of polyarchy focuses primarily not on the constitutional prerequisites but on the social prerequisites for a democratic order' (82). Specifically, polyarchy required a relatively high level of agreement, secured by intensive social training, not only upon the norms which underpinned the system of government itself, but also the policy goals among which alternatives were canvassed (79). In other words, it was only possible where a prior consensus existed on both the limits within which policy choices were to be disputed, and the procedures by which choices were made. Where two large opposing groups regarded the victory of the other as a fundamental threat to something they valued highly, as in the Civil War, no constitutional machinery was likely to preserve a system of majority rule. Similarly, rules and procedures could not ensure stability when a weakly committed majority faced a strongly committed minority. In the particular case of the United States this end was not achieved by any of three institutional mechanisms with which it was sometimes associated – judicial review combined with minority veto over constitutional amendments, equal state representation in the Senate, and the sharing of powers between the presidency, the two houses of Congress, and the electorate.
On this basis, Dahl presented seven propositions on the theory of democracy (Box 1.2). These dropped the idea of majority rule, and suggested that in a plural democracy 'minorities rule' in a context of generally shared consensus. Hence:
Prior to politics, beneath it, enveloping it, restricting it, conditioning it, is the underlying consensus on policy that usually exists in the society among a predominant portion of the politically active members. Without such a consensus no democratic system would long survive the endless irritations and frustrations of elections and party competition. With such a consensus the disputes over policy alternatives are nearly always disputes over a set of alternatives that have already been winnowed down to those within the broad area of basic agreement (132–3).
Box 1.2 Dahl's seven propositions on the theory of democracy
Source: Dahl 1956: 132-143.
- On matters of specific policy the majority rarely rules, as elections do not reveal the will of the majority on specific issues. Rather, the 'majority' they produce is made up of different minorities who have differing goals and priorities.
- Elections and 'continuous political competition among individuals, parties, or both' provide for social control over leaders by vastly increasing the size, number, and variety of minorities whose preferences must be taken into account by leaders in making policy choices.
- The specific policies selected by a process of 'minorities rule' probably lie most of the time within the bounds of consensus set by the important values of the politically active members of the society, of whom the voters are a key group.
- If majority rule is mostly a myth, then majority tyranny is mostly a myth too. The 'real world' issue is not a majority tyranny, but 'the extent to which various minorities in a society will frustrate the ambitions of one another with the passive acquiescence or indifference of a majority of adults or voters'.
- In so far as there is any general protection in human society against the deprivation by one group of the freedom desired by another, it is probably not to be found in constitutional forms.
- Constitutional rules are mainly significant because they help to determine what particular groups are to be given advantages or handicaps in the political struggle.
- A central guiding thread of American constitutional development has been the evolution of a political system in which all the active and legitimate groups in the population can make themselves heard at some crucial stage in the process of decision.
Source: Dahl 1956: 132-143.
Within this context, rule by a plurality of minorities influenced 'the kinds of leaders recruited, the legitimate and illegitimate types of political activity, the range and kinds of policies open to leaders, social processes for information and communication - indeed ... the whole ethos of society. It is in these and other effects more than in the sovereignty of the majority that we find the values of a democratic process' (133-4). Hence the viability of polyarchy itself and the protection of minorities was determined by 'the extent of consensus on the polyarchal norms, social training in the norms, consensus on policy alternatives, and political activity' (135). If pluralist democracy worked in the United States it was not because the writers of its constitution had been particularly gifted or farsighted, but because the terms of the constitution had been quickly accepted, it had been adapted when necessary to fit the changing social balance of power, and US society itself was 'essentially democratic' in character (143).
In sum, Dahl accepted that not every group had equal control over political outcomes in a pluralist democracy, as the wealthier and better educated tended to be more active and influential, but argued that so long as its social prerequisites remained intact, the system provided a relatively efficient means for 'reinforcing agreement, encouraging moderation, and maintaining social peace in a restless and immoderate people operating a gigantic, powerful, diversified, and incredibly complex society' (151).
In The Politics of Mass Society, Kornhauser reflected on the breakdown of democracy in Europe and sought to specify the social conditions in which liberal democratic institutions could be sustained. He made a fundamental distinction, similar to that made by Dahl between populistic and pluralist democracy, between mass and pluralist society (Box 1.3). He argued that 'insofar as a society is a mass society, it will be vulnerable to political movements destructive of liberal democratic institutions; while insofar as a society is pluralist, these institutions will be strong' (Kornhauser 1960: 7).
Box 1.3 Kornhauser's distinction between mass society and pluralist society
|
Mass society
Elites lack autonomy Non-elites have no independent group life Intermediate groups are weak Atomization of non-elites makes them available to elites Modes of access are direct Democracy is populist, involving direct action of large numbers of people, resulting in the circumvention of institutional channels and invasion of individual privacy Source: Adapted from Kornhauser (1960) |
Pluralist society
Elites enjoy autonomy Non-elites have independent group life Intermediate groups are strong Strength of community and association among non-elites limits their availability to elites Modes of access are institutionalized Democracy is liberal, involving political action mediated by institutional rules, and therefore limitations on the use of power by majorities as well as minorities |
The essential difference between pluralist and mass society was that in pluralist society multiple intermediate associations stood between the state and the citizen, and between elites and the majority of the population, whereas in mass society such intermediate associations were either weak or absent. Thus Kornhauser defined a mass society as 'a social system in which elites are readily accessible to influence by non-elites and non-elites are readily available for mobilization by elites' (39), and contrasted it with a pluralist society in the following terms:
Pluralist society requires accessible elites and unavailable non-elites if it is to sustain its freedom and diversity - as in certain liberal democracies. Elites are accessible in that competition among independent groups opens many channels of communication and power. The population is unavailable in that people possess multiple commitments to diverse and autonomous groups. The mobilization of a population bound by multiple commitments would require the breaking up of large numbers of independent organizations, as totalitarian movements have sought to do. Mass society requires both accessible elites and available non-elites if it is to exhibit a high rate of mass behaviour. Elites are accessible and non-elites are available in that there is a paucity of independent groups between the state and the family to protect either elites or non-elites from manipulation and mobilization by the other. In the absence of social autonomy at all levels of society, large numbers of people are pushed and pulled toward activist modes of participation in vital centers of society; and mass-oriented leaders have the opportunity to mobilize this activism for the capture of power. As a result, freedom is precarious in mass society (40-41).
In a pluralist society, then, elite accessibility was high, while non-elite availability was low; in a mass society, elite accessibility and non-elite availability were both high. The central dilemma of representative democracy was that elites had to be accessible, but at the same time they required protection from direct pressure from non-elites. Elites in turn were indispensable, as 'in any large and complex system the protection of standards necessarily must be the work of a relatively few people who possess the requisite values and skills' (52).
Kornhauser followed Schumpeter directly in characterizing democracy as 'essentially an institutional procedure for changing leadership by free competition for the popular vote' (130, citing Schumpeter 1970: 269–73). In this context 'responsiveness of elite to non-elite is the central meaning of access, and responsiveness requires non-elite participation in choosing from among competing elites (or would-be elites)' (55). Drawing on Schumpeter again, he characterized 'mass behaviour' as direct action in response to objects remote from personal experience and daily life, generally highly unstable in its intensity and focus of attention, which 'abrogates institutional procedures intended to guarantee both majority choice and minority rights, and denies respect for principles of free competition and public discussion as the basis for compromising conflicting interests' (46). In sum
the manner in which the populous intervenes in elite distinguishes mass Society from plural Society the populous tends to intervene directly and in an unrestrained manner in the master Society but in the plural society the manner of participation is less direct and unrestrained, since the population is not available for activistic modes of behaviour (59).
In conditions of mass politics, then, 'large numbers of people engage in political activity outside of the procedures and rules instituted by a society to govern political action' (227). In contrast, the existence of a plurality of independent and non-inclusive groups permits liberal democratic control, which 'requires that people have access to elites, and that they exercise restraint in their participation' (81). The absence of intermediate associations between primary and national levels in mass society gave rise to a situation in which 'the state and national organization assume the central role in the direction of all kinds of collective activity' (94).
Anti-democratic mass movements emerged, according to Kornhauser, as a consequence of 'major discontinuities in social process as measured by the rate, scope, and mode of social change' (125). These may be discontinuities in authority, community, or society. Where there are discontinuities in authority (or where political change is sharply discontinuous), the prospects for stable democracy are poor. Thus where the state is already constitutional, the introduction of democracy will lead to a liberal regime, characterized by 'political action mediated by institutional rules, and therefore limitations on the use of power by majorities as well as minorities'. Where it is autocratic, it will lead to a populist regime, characterized by 'direct action of large numbers of people, which often results in the circumvention of institutional channels and the ad hoc invasion of individual privacy' (131). Hence,
Democratization along liberal lines requires a capacity on the part of ruling groups to accommodate new social elements, and progressively to share political rights and duties with them. Democratization along populist lines characteristically follows upon the failure of pre-existing governing groups to accommodate additional social elements, which thereupon seek the destruction of the old ruling groups and the institutional basis for their authority (132).
In general, then, 'the rapid introduction of democratic rule in the society that lacks a strong constitutional tradition leaves authority insecure and vulnerable to mass attacks' (134). Similarly, discontinuities may arise in 'community', as a result of rapid and destabilizing processes of urbanization and industrialization. For the most part Kornhauser illustrates these arguments by reference to the cases of Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Germany and Russia. But in this particular case of breakdowns in community, in an isolated reference to the Third World, he gives Argentina as an example, and comments further that
to the extent that large parts of Africa and Asia are just now moving into the initial period of industrialization, these countries may expect to witness a plethora of mass movements, depending in part on the rate and mode of industrialization (158).
From the foregoing accounts we can derive a composite statement of the revisionist theory of democracy which was influential in the post-war period (Box 1.4). This will serve as a summary of the texts discussed above, and a point of reference in subsequent chapters.
Box 1.4 The revisionist theory of liberal democracy
Because the great majority of citizens are neither interested in politics nor rational in their approach to it, they should confine themselves to choosing periodically between alternative sets of leaders, and in the meantime leave government to those they have elected. If this system is to operate so as to produce stability, it requires (1) a political class responsive to the preferences of the electorate but resistant to direct pressure; and open to continuous renewal, but able to absorb and assimilate new elements and socialize them into its habits and modes of operation, and (2) a bureaucracy responsive to broad political direction but sufficiently independent to operate according to impartial criteria. All actors within the political system should act with self-restraint, with citizens refraining from pressuring politicians directly, and politicians limiting their pursuit of partisan demands in order to play a co-operative part in the operation of the system as a whole, in proper recognition of the broader national interest and the need to preserve the loyalty of citizens to the system itself. The range of options open for political debate should be relatively narrow, and rest upon a broader framework of agreement. This state of affairs cannot be secured by constitutional means alone. It requires in its turn (1) an underlying consensus on the procedures themselves, and on the fundamental elements of social and economic structure, and 92) a plurality of autonomous organized minorities or intermediate associations between the citizens and the state. These requisites may be the product of a long process of historical development which cannot easily be replicated. In such a system abuses and dubious practices will doubtless occur, and the wealthier, better educated and more articulate members of society will exercise disproportionate influence, but the overall result will be that governments are reasonably responsive to the preferences of their citizens.
Because the great majority of citizens are neither interested in politics nor rational in their approach to it, they should confine themselves to choosing periodically between alternative sets of leaders, and in the meantime leave government to those they have elected. If this system is to operate so as to produce stability, it requires (1) a political class responsive to the preferences of the electorate but resistant to direct pressure; and open to continuous renewal, but able to absorb and assimilate new elements and socialize them into its habits and modes of operation, and (2) a bureaucracy responsive to broad political direction but sufficiently independent to operate according to impartial criteria. All actors within the political system should act with self-restraint, with citizens refraining from pressuring politicians directly, and politicians limiting their pursuit of partisan demands in order to play a co-operative part in the operation of the system as a whole, in proper recognition of the broader national interest and the need to preserve the loyalty of citizens to the system itself. The range of options open for political debate should be relatively narrow, and rest upon a broader framework of agreement. This state of affairs cannot be secured by constitutional means alone. It requires in its turn (1) an underlying consensus on the procedures themselves, and on the fundamental elements of social and economic structure, and 92) a plurality of autonomous organized minorities or intermediate associations between the citizens and the state. These requisites may be the product of a long process of historical development which cannot easily be replicated. In such a system abuses and dubious practices will doubtless occur, and the wealthier, better educated and more articulate members of society will exercise disproportionate influence, but the overall result will be that governments are reasonably responsive to the preferences of their citizens.
The Trajectory of the 'Political Development' Literature
The 'political development' approach has a clear trajectory within the broader literature on the issue of political change in the developing world. It was dominant, though contested, in the 1960s, and virtually abandoned in the face of mounting criticism from within and without in the 1970s. By this time there was a general consensus, among its practitioners and its critics alike, that it had failed to produce anything approaching a theory of political development, and that it was unlikely ever to produce one. This situation did not change. Nevertheless, the approach was brought back to life in the 1980s, and it enjoys greater prestige and influenced today than at any time in the past. At the same time, it makes a virtue of the claim that it has no theory to offer. It is this paradox which I aim to explore.
Let us begin, then, at the beginning. Over the years, political development theory has been subjected to numerous criticisms from its opponents. But the best evidence that it was founded on fundamental confusion is that the contributors to the literature themselves were unable to decide what 'political development' was. One of their most frequent criticisms was that the subject-matter of the literature was never clearly delimited. The term 'political development' itself was used in different ways by different authors, and never defined in a way that would allow the clear identification of research issues, and the establishment of a research programme capable of producing cumulative results over time. Pye, for instance, noted at an early stage that the concept had first been defined by statesman and policy makers rather than scholars, with the result that 'considerable ambiguity and imprecision' still attended it use in academic discourse (Pye 1966b: 33). He then listed 10 distinct senses in which the term was used in the literature: the political prerequisite of economic development; the politics typical of industrial societies; political modernization; the operation of a nation-state; administrative and legal development; mass mobilization and participation; the building of democracy; stability and orderly change; mobilization and power; and finally, one aspect of a multidimensional process of social change (33–45). In a later attempt to persuade his colleagues to drop the term in favour of the more neutral alternative of 'political change', Huntington upstaged Rustow (who had remarked that ten definitions was nine too many), by suggesting that 'one should go one step further. If there are ten definitions of political development, there are ten too many, and the concept is, in all likelihood, superfluous and dysfunctional' (Huntington 1971: 303). A decade later Riggs was able to list no fewer than 65 different uses in a review of the history of the concept. He argued that it had become a 'power word' whose meaning was secondary in importance to its use as a badge or slogan, and expressed the hope that his analysis would put an end to the tendency for the use of the concept 'to paralyse substantive analysis, provoke fruitless controversy, and confuse systematic thought' (Riggs 1981: 338). By this time, as noted above, the term and the intellectual effort with which it was associated and both fallen into disrepute.
The picture of hopeless confusion which these comments conjure up is not in the slightest misleading: reasonably like-minded scholars can rarely have failed so conspicuously to agree upon what it was they were studying and how they should go about it, yet have persevered in their labours for so long. Time after time, new initiatives were announced as preliminary efforts heralding more definitive studies in the future, only to be abandoned, and followed by new efforts from a different perspective, presented just as hopefully as a first tentative step in the direction of what would eventually be a genuine theory of political development. It was quite reasonable for Coleman to announce in 1960, in the conclusion to The Politics of the Developing Areas, that 'the development of a rigorous theory of political modernisation is still unfinished business' (Coleman 1960b: 576). Thirteen years later, though, Almond and Mundt (1973: 619) were still describing Crisis, Choice and Change as unfinished business ... work in progress', and adding that 'the reader in search of hard theory … will find little comfort in this analytical framework and our collection of case studies'. Verba had similarly described Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Binder et al. 1971) as a framework for the study of political development, not yet a theory (Verba 1971: 283), and more than a decade later he would remark that 'we have been studying political development for a long time but we are no longer confident of what it is or our ability to understand it' (Verba 1985: 28–9). Following in the same tradition, a recent study of 26 countries derived 49 tentative propositions from the following ten 'theoretical dimensions':
Political culture; regime legitimacy and effectiveness; historical development (in particular the colonial experience); class structure and the degree of inequality; national structure (ethnic, racial, regional, and religious cleavage); state structure, centralization, and strength (including the state's role in the economy, the role of autonomous voluntary associations and the press, federalism, and the role of the armed forces); political and constitutional structure (parties, electoral systems, the judiciary); political leadership; development performance; and international factors (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1989a: xiv).
Having expended this massive effort, its authors conceded that their material was not integrated into 'a single, all-encompassing theory, and that it will be some time (if ever) before the field produces one (xv). In sum, the outcome of 25 years of Herculean labour was to move from ten alternative definitions of what political development might be to a list of ten dimensions which might shape it but which, in defiance of their progenitors' fond hopes, still had nothing theoretical about them at all.
Faced with this catalogue of impromptu starts and disappointments, it is easy to sympathize with Holt and Turner, who once suggested that some basic questions regarding sequential models raised by Verba at the end of Crises and Sequences in Political Development
after seventeen years of prodigious effort, dozens of commissioned and financially supported articles, six major volumes and other published works … should have been raised in 1963, when the volume was conceived so that the authors of the central chapters could have addressed themselves to the issues (Holt and Turner 1975: 988).
In fact they were – Verba's 'conclusion' was initially a position paper preparatory to the production of the volume itself – but they went unanswered then and since.
There is indeed something strange about the political development literature of the 1960s and 1970s. It was marked by a striking combination of high theoretical ambition, massive sustained funding and limited achievement. Its major professed goal, the quest for a scientific theory of political development, ended in comprehensive failure, and the bulk of the work produced under its label, particularly the major studies funded and carried out in the 1960s, appears largely unread both then and now. Yet its major protagonists saw a strong revival in their fortunes in the late 1980s and 1990s, despite their continuing failure to produce the results expected of 'political science as science' three decades earlier, while their core values – elite rule, limited popular participation, and an economy based upon free enterprise – are today dominant in both the current literature on comparative politics, and political practice around much of the developing world.
This book assesses this record of theoretical failure and practical success, and concludes that the two are intimately linked. The first step in the explanation is the recognition that political development theory has had a coherent ideological commitment – a set of core values – which has remained constant, and a set of policy objectives which were and are immune to methodological and theoretical failure, and which have been pursued consistently over the years. This consistent core is set out in Chapter 2. The political development literature has never had a primary commitment to democracy in the developing world, despite illusions to the contrary in some quarters. Rather, its primary value has been a commitment to capitalism both as a global system and as a model of social and economic organization appropriate for the developing states themselves.
The concept of the 'non-Western political process', explored in further detail in the following chapter, predated the concerted effort to produce a theory of political development, and its fundamental assumptions survived intact throughout its trajectory. As a first graphic impression of the highly dangerous character of politics in the developing world, it prompted the twin concerns behind the political development literature, the quest for a theoretical understanding of the process, and practical proposals for policy towards and within the developing areas. In the first efforts to respond to these concerns, the functional and cultural approaches respectively, theoretical ambition was so great and theoretical advance so meagre, that little advance was made on practical policy objectives. These approaches, each a failed effort to establish a robust theory which might underpin the policy and ideological concerns of the literature, are the subject of Chapters 3 and 4.
In view of the shortcomings of these successive attempts to come up with a strong theory of political development, the emphasis was changed in the monumental core of the political development literature, the Studies in Political Development series funded by the Ford Foundation, supervised by the Committee on Comparative Politics of the New York Social Science Research Council, and published by Princeton University press. It was in these volumes that attention switched from a theory of political development to a doctrine for political development, and a focus on institutions and public policy became paramount. In this period the main outlines of the doctrine briefly noted above – that 'political development' required the insulation of the political process from social pressure and the establishment of elite authority over the masses before extended participation and reliance upon consent could be introduced – were brought together and spelled out in detail. An account of its emergence is given in chapter 5.
However, the recasting of political development concerns in a more purely policy oriented form could not of itself bring about a satisfactory analysis of the political process in the developing world. Nor could it produce the conditions in which the end stake desire by the advocates of elite control could be brought about. In their absence, the attention of political development theorists on their funders switched to almost entirely from 1967 onwards away from the developing world to the history of the United States and Western Europe. This switch of attention was primarily means of continuing to pursue the ideological project at the heart of the literature, in the face of its apparent failure to fit the observed character of the developing world. This is examined, along with a quite devastating internal critique which put an end to efforts to produce any theory of political development, in chapter 6. The final three chapters then offer a broad critical evaluation of the literature as a whole, focusing successively on the treatment of the developing world and the question of democracy, the refinement of a doctrine for political development (in place of the abandoned theory of political development) between the mid 1960s and the early 1990s, and the close relationship between political development theory and doctrine and the promotion of capitalism. I shall argue the various attempts to construct a theory of political development always broke down precisely at the point of which they turned their attention from European the United States to the developing world. It was at this point that the doctrine for political development emerged from the theory, and prompted an early shift away from analysis to prescription. It's most striking characteristic wasn't appeal to leadership in the developing world, and this emphasis was central to the doctrine when it was provided in the 1980s.
The true character of 'political development theorists' as lobbyists for capitalism and elite-led democracy in the developing world explains their otherwise mysterious resurgence in the 1990s. For reasons which had nothing at all to do with the success of political development theory as theory, and a great deal to do with the dramatic evolution of the global economy during the 1970s and 1980s – marked by the triple process of the all but universal collapse of state socialist regimes around the world, extended crisis in the global capitalist economy, and the parallel collapse of state-led developmentalism in the Third World – the implementation of the ideological project of the heart of critical development theory became possible in a way that it never had been in the 1960s. This prompted the emergence of a 'political development' literature very different to that which first emerged in the 1960s. This new literature dismisses the continuing absence of any theory of political development as insignificant, proclaims a normative commitment to elite-led political democracy oriented to capitalist development, and concentrates it efforts upon producing a detailed procedure guide to its implementation, notably in the 45 'guidelines for democratizers' announced by Huntington at the end of the 1980s.
The reading of the doctrine for political development and the successive attempts to theorize it offered here has a number of implications for the way in which the literature should be understood, and the significance which should be attached to it.
The failure of the political development theorists to produce a theory and their success as ideologues for global capitalism are intimately linked, precisely because their success as ideologues depends upon their drawing a veil, as much for themselves as for others, over the fact that their conception of democracy was shaped by their advocacy of capitalism and their sense of its political requirements.
At the same time, there runs through the literature a genuine difficulty arising from an inadequate understanding of issues of political economy and their implications for the characteristics of political regimes. In particular, attempts to produce a theory of political development were hampered by a failure to identify the conditions they sought – a state insulated from direct social pressure, and elite control over the masses – as specific to democratic regimes in capitalist societies. Secondly, attempts to produce a viable doctrine for political development reveal an inability to distinguish between permanent structural imperatives and temporary or conjunctural situations in capitalist regimes. These weaknesses were not original to the theory of political development. On the contrary, they were deeply embedded in the revisionist theory of democracy itself. In part this was a consequence of the assimilation of the very different social systems of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union into the model of 'totalitarianism'. In part, too, it was the consequence of an aversion to Marxist theory, and in the post war period, an ignorance of it which contrasted sharply with Schumpeter's detailed if unsympathetic knowledge. These combined to produce the lamentable confusion on the relationship between capitalism and democracy which pervades this work. Dahl, for example having recognized at the outset that Madison's concern was to protect the privileges of status, power and wealth, and demonstrated through empirical analysis that equal state representation in the Senate favoured farmers and mineowners, and prejudiced blacks, sharecroppers, migrant workers, wage earners and coal-miners, was still obliged to confess that he found the pattern of groups benefited and handicapped by equal representation 'entirely arbitrary' (Dahl 1956: 118). The theorists of political development have proved no more able to comprehend, let alone to theorize, the relationship between capitalism and democracy: Diamond, Linz and Lipset, for example, throw up their hands in despair and describe the term 'capitalist economic systems' as 'in its vagueness almost meaningless' (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1989a: xx). Only an analysis grounded in Marxist political economy is able to identify the nature of the links between capitalism and liberal democracy, and to expose the character of a literature which is simultaneously deeply ideological and deeply confused.
This does not mean however that the political development literature should be lightly dismissed. The contemporary relevance of the literature of the 1960s and 1970s lies precisely in the fact that whatever the confusions which pervaded it, it was primarily concerned with the issue of tailoring democracy in the developing world to the needs of global capitalism. It is not coincidental, therefore, that it has returned to favour at the conclusion of the 'Second Cold War,' when the focus of Western intervention in the politics of the Third World has shifted from that of preventing external incursions hostile to capitalism to building sound capitalist regimes from within. It might be argued that in the intervening period its initial confusion has become a deliberate strategy – the presentation of the social relations and institutions of capitalism as natural, as a foundation for the now all too familiar argument there is no alternative to them. If this is so, it will only lose it theological character and make possible a better understanding of the dynamics of change in the contemporary world if it is explicitly recognized but its subject-matter is in fact the particular relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, and if students of comparative politics set out to explore the nature of the connections between the two, and the consequent limits of liberal democracy as a form of political representation, in a systematic manner.