In Search of a Theory of Political Development

The field of political development was established in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a new area of comparative politics by a group of scholars in the United States. Its institutional origins lie in the creation in 1954 of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Committee on Comparative Politics alongside the already established Committee on Political Behaviour. This committee, chaired successively by Gabriel Almond and Lucien Pye, quickly turned its attention to the politics of what it called the 'non-western' states. While Pye sought to define the 'non-western political process' (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955; Pye 1958), Almond involved himself in studies of the 'politics of the developing areas' (Almond and Coleman 1960), and the comparative politics and political culture of developed and developing countries (Almond 1956; Almond and Verba 1963). By the early 1960s the committee had settled on the term political development to identify its area of concern, and had secured funding for a number of related initiatives. In particular, two grants from the Ford Foundation covering the period from 1960 to 1967 allowed a fairly cohesive group of scholars to explore a number of theoretical issues and their implications for public policy (Riggs 1981: 298–301). A major series of texts, Studies in Political Development, drawing for the most part on research presented in conferences and workshops funded by the Foundation between 1961 and 1963, was published under its auspices from 1963 onwards, while other important texts appeared in the Little, Brown Series in Comparative Politics, with Almond, Coleman and Pye as editors. In the mid–1960s Huntington emerged as a leading influence in the literature.
  Some accounts (Higgott 1983: 15-18; Randall and Theobald 1985: 12–33; Wiarda 1991: 36–9), contrast the work of Almond and Huntington, and argue that the earlier writers were generally optimistic that liberal democracy could be easily disseminated around the developing world, but that during the 1960s order came to be valued over democracy. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the literature, whose common core is missed if a primary contrast is drawn between optimists and pessimists. First, influenced as they were by the revisionist theory of democracy discussed in the previous chapter, all the leading theorists of political development saw liberal democracy as a means of channelling and controlling restricted political participation, so the contrast between democracy and order is misplaced. Second, they all saw the central issue with which they concerned themselves – the pressure for mass participation in the new states – as problematic from the start. Mass participation was seen as virtually unavoidable, but fraught with enormous difficulties as it was likely to outrun the capacity of governments to channel and control it. As a result, support for the spread of Western democracy did not need to the advocacy of increased participation without regard for the consequences. No leading theorist of political development subscribed to an optimistic version of modernization theory which suggested that Western liberal democratic institutions and political stability could be easily replicated throughout the new states. On the contrary, because they feared that these states would prove unable to cope with pressure for change, they were concerned with control and containment from the beginning. And third, as we shall see later chapters, while all the theorists of political development felt that in principle order might be best assured by liberal democratic institutions in the longer term, none were eager to press for their widespread adoption here and now.
  On these points – the perception of political development as a problem, the consequent direct concern with issues of public policy, and the reluctance to advocate the immediate adoption of competitive liberal democratic institutions – there is precious little difference between the early work of Almond and others, and the later work of Huntington. In fact, Huntington's contribution has generally been as of an extremely able popularizer and polemicist – a role of fundamental importance, given the tasks which the political development theorists set themselves – rather than that of a contributor of either new perspectives or original ideas.
  Within the shared perspective I identify, some significant shifts did take place during the 1960s. An initial obsession with theoretical experimentation and innovation was moderated, and more elaborate theoretical frameworks were abandoned in favour of an increasing emphasis upon institutions and comparative history. These shifts of focus, first seen not in the work of Huntington but in the 'doctrine for political development' propagated in the early 1960s in the volumes of the Studies in Political Development series, did not detract from the underlying continuity of perspective and purpose in the literature. Rather, they removed contradictions between the goals pursued and the analytical frameworks adopted, refining and making more coherent a project which was explicit in the literature from the start. In sum, political development theory was always policy oriented; it always valued political stability more highly than democracy; and it always saw mass participation in the new states as a problem. These aspects of the literature are explored further in the following sections.

Political Development as a Problem

The political development theorists did not think modernization would inevitably lead to a generalization of Western political practices and institutions. They argued that modernization, although inevitable and in the long run desirable, was driven in the 'new states' (those recently emerged from colonial rule) by external forces as much as by internal evolution, and was therefore the source of considerable tension. The new states were identified as either traditional or transitional societies, and as such in a difficult situation in which they lacked the attributes of modernity but were exposed to its imperatives. This meant that the global forces of modernization impacted upon political structures and attitudes which were unprepared for them. Classifying such states as pre-mobilized modern systems' in which 'the trappings of political modernity – parties, interest groups, and mass media – have been imposed upon highly traditional societie, Almond and Powell memorably described them as

historical accidents, systems provided with a modernized elite and a differentiated political infrastructure because of the impact of colonialism or because of the diffusion of ideas and practices from more developed parts of the world long before they would have the need or the impetus to develop such structures and cultures on their own (Almond and Powell 1996: 284–5; emphasis mine).

In these circumstances for which existing theories of political change were largely unprepared, enormous practical and theoretical efforts were felt to be necessary if instability was to be avoided. So while political development theory did set itself the task of discovering 'how democratic values and modern political institutions can be most readily transferred to new environments' (Pye 1965a: 5), this was not seen as an easy enterprise. On the contrary, the growth of the political development industry reflected the perception that the kinds of political institutions and political loyalties which ist proponents wished to see would not emerge naturally – they would need to be 'developed' in accordance with blueprints established by the joint efforts of theorists and practitioners of public policy. The task was made urgent by the pressure of demands for greater participation across the Third World, and by the challenge from Marxism-Leninism; and it would be achieved, if at all, by limiting the political consequences of social and economic modernization.
  The core idea driving political development theory from the start, then, was that because mass participation in the 'new states' of the Third World was likely to be destabilizing, it was essential to moderate and contain the process of political change. In the context of widespread aspirations for political participation and global competition for political loyalty it seemed essential to promote the adoption of Western institutions. But along with the perception of this need there went an awareness of the difficulty of establishing such institutions in states which had not experienced the institutional and social developments which had preceded them in the West. The resulting preoccupation with the many risks involved in the enterprise is reflected in characteristic phrases which permeate all the central texts of the period, whether in Almond and Verba's description of democracy as an overt but difficult goal' (Almond and Verba 1963: 497), or in Pye's reference to the 'new problems of crisis dimensions' which lay behind the use of such apparently positive terms as 'developing' and 'emergent' in relation to 'the gloomy cases of countries that are barely holding themselves together, whose governments are shaky and archaic, and whose peoples are growing faster in numbers that in well-being' (Pye 1966b: 32).
  The source of this concern, as it began to make itself felt in the mid-1950s, lay in 'the problem that makes the politics of the non-Western countries are distinct category for study': unresolved cultural conflicts arising out of the uneven impact of Western influence on traditional societies facing abrupt processes of change (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955:1023). The same idea – the perception of the desire for modernity as a problem, and the resulting need to secure the generalization throughout the new states of conservative strategies of nation building – was brutally articulated in the first of the Studies in Political Development series:

People in the new countries aspire to have things which are in no way consistent with their fundamental cultural patterns; … politically, they want their societies quickly to possess all the attributes of the modern nation-state. The time has clearly arrived for those who value free institutions to face up to the very real problems of the appropriate strategies and doctrines which might facilitate the process of nation building in the new countries (Pye 1963:12-13).

Nothing could be further removed from the 'heady optimism' imagined by commentators such as Higgott (1983: xi). The theorists of political development saw good reason to look to the eventual introduction of liberal democracy in the Third World. At the same time, they felt acutely that the conditions were not appropriate for immediate introduction. As a result they were all but daunted by the magnitude of the task which faced them. The literature they produced was sombre in tone, and is better described as alarmist than optimistic, as a typical summary statement by Pye (Box 2.1) reveals.​

Box 2.1. The 'slow and difficult process' of political development

​We are led to the conclusion that it will be a slow and difficult process to achieve the substance of democratic life in most of the new states. There is much truth in the often cynically advanced generalization that these societies are 'unprepared' for democracy. This is a disturbing conclusion for many people in the West who share a basic sympathy for the struggles of the new states because personally they are committed to the democratic spirit and are naturally inclined to identify with the weak, the poor, and the disadvantaged.
  At the same time our analysis suggests a ray of hope for people who do have faith in the powers of democracy, for we have noted that advances in the direction of more democratic practices can produce strength. The advantages do not lie with totalitarian or authoritarian methods. The more political development occurs, the more the advantages of democracy will become apparent. For once people have a greater stake in their society and come to believe the progress is possible, they are more likely to appreciate the rewards of living in more open societies.
  The problem of working toward a more open society is above all a test of statecraft. To simply open the door to the ever-wider popular participation in politics of illiterate and insecure citizens can easily destroy any possibility for orderly government. In the developing areas there is genuine problem of establishing effective administrations and … the threats of insurgency and revolutionary of violence are endemic in many transitional societies. There is a need for firm rule if societies are going to advance toward definite goals.

Source: Pye 1966a: 87-8.

Political Development and Public Policy

The political development literature had a strongly practical orientation from the start. Its texts habitually coupled discussion of theory with explicit policy concerns, and its authors valued new theoretical approaches precisely because they might both advance political science and inform public policy. An early document produced by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics express the hope that 'both a scientific and a moral–political purpose may be served by the development of a systematic comparative politics' (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1041); Almond's foreword to the first of the Studies in Political Development collections declared that the series was intended 'to make a contribution to political theory as well as to enhance our understanding of the national and political "explosion" of our time' (Pye 1963a: vii); Pye declared himself to be 'equally concerned with both the theoretical problems which emerge from viewing political development in terms of communication processes and the practical policy problems of how governments in transitional societies can best manage the communications media to facilitate modernization' (Pye 1963b: 5); and LaPalombara hoped that insights derived from the study of bureaucracy would 'serve to buttress both the field of comparative politics and the development of free societies' (LaPalombara 1963a: x).
  The driving force behind the urgent desire to turn the resources of theory towards issues of international public policy was the global polarization of loyalties and values arising out of the 'Cold War' between capitalism and communism. Almond was a student of foreign policy (Almond 1950), and author of The Appeals of Communism (1954), one of the primers of Cold War politics, while Pye's first work was Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (1956). The originators of political development theory were concerned with the implications for the United States and the 'free world' of the political choices made by the new states proliferating as a consequence of global decolonization. They therefore sought to provide a policy-oriented analysis, inevitably shaped by Cold War anti-communism, of the politics of the new states and other established states in what was coming to be known as the 'Third World'. In doing so they expired not only to understand but also to influence the politics of these states.
  Attention was directed from the outset to the policy-making process in 'non-Western societies', as field workers were urged to make case studies of how governmental decisions were made, to follow the fate of policy decisions through the channels of administration, and to make an inventory of the public services actually provided by governments (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1028-9). Similar appeals were made, by Almond and others, in relation to western Europe (Almond, Cole and Macridis 1955: 1046-8). The hope was constantly expressed that research findings would be of direct use to leaders in the new states, and constant emphasis was placed on the relevance of research into political development for public policy in a United States self-consciously taking on a global political role. Thus Almond and Verba saw their exploration and advocacy of the balanced blend of participation and deference to elite and governmental authority which made up the 'civic culture' as addressing 'the central question of public policy in the next decades' (1963: 3). Similar concerns were overt and systematic in the series of multi-author texts produced by the various conferences funded by the Ford Foundation. The first of them, Communications and Political Development, may be taken as illustrative. Pye declared in his preface that

the Committee for Comparative Politics felt compelled … to discover the possible relevance of knowledge recently gained in communications research for understanding and influencing the prospects of political modernization in the new states. Our intellectual impulses were … reinforced by our concern over the fundamental issue of the prospects for freedom in societies now anxiously striving to become a part of the modern world (Pye 1963a: ix).

The introduction which followed presented communications studies as a model of a modern political science, precisely because of its primary focus on public policy. While generally 'Western political theory has ignored the problems of nation building as a systematic goal of public policy', communications research was a field in which scholars, government officials and private industry worked closely together, and in which 'there has always been a unique respect for practical policy problems and a high degree of understanding of how scholarship may be turned to policy ends without damaging the growth of knowledge'. Pye lamented, in a phrase to which I shall return, the absence of 'the necessary insights and generalized knowledge to provide the basis for a sound doctrine for political development which in turn might be of value for the policy makers in the new countries'. He then urged direct intervention in policy-making abroad, suggesting that students of international communications should turn their attention from 'the problems of communicating the policies and the image of the United States to the emerging countries to the problems of domestic communications within these countries' (Pye 1963b: 12-14). 
  It was entirely consistent with this emphasis upon the development of public policy that the conference on communications and political development which gave rise to this collection (September 1961) was followed by others on bureaucracy (January 1962) and education (June 1962). Other collections in the series reflected the same concern for public policy. In his introduction to Political Culture and Political Development, Pye hoped that the analysis of different political cultures would provide 'a better understanding of the policies and necessary investments in various socializing agents which can best produce desired changes in a nation's politics' (Pye 1965a: 11); and Verba, reviewing the achievement of Crises and Sequences in Political Development, imagined that the 'five crises' approach might eventually 'produce findings of great relevance to those interested in applying the findings of developmental studies to policy choice situations' (sic; Verba 1971: 316). Some years later Almond was looking to the potential of computer simulations of political systems and developmental processes, declaring that 'as we learn how to approximate more closely the real complexity of political processes, the experimenter may play the role of policy maker in a developmental game, and test the costs and benefits of alternative public policies' (Almond 1973: 38). The language and the theoretical influences had shifted, but the desire to apply the latest theoretical innovations to pressing policy concerns remained a constant. Had they not addressed such issues of international public policy, and touched upon matters of pressing current concern, the political development theorists would not have built a strong institutional position in the US political science establishment as quickly as they did, or won such massive funding for their research efforts.

Political Development and Political Theory

As we have seen, the theorists of political development were as concerned to contribute to new theory as they were to address issues of international public policy. This persistent emphasis reflected the influence of what was seen as a new scientific spirit informing the practice of comparative politics. The 'behavioural revolution' had begun, after all, at the University Of Chicago, where Almond had been a graduate student for a decade before the Second World War. It emphasized the observation of actual behaviour and the application of new techniques of measurement and quantitative analysis, and its ultimate goal was to uncover new general laws of universal validity, and establish political science as a predictive science. It was in this spirit that Almond immodestly celebrated his functional approach as 'an intimation of a major step forward in the nature of political science as science', and claimed to spot 'a probabilistic theory of politics' on the horizon (Almond 1960: 4).
  However, the behavioural revolution was to prove more influential for the empirical evidence regarding political behaviour which it threw up and the revised understanding of liberal democracy to which it gave rise than for its 'scientific' outlook and methodological principles. The policy advice offered by the political development theorists on the issue of mass participation drew directly on the findings of the same behavioural analyses of politics in the United States that influenced the revisionist theories of democracy reviewed in the previous chapter. It was the discovery that the average citizen had little interest in politics, little knowledge of the issues raised at election time, a weak commitment to voting, and virtually no record of political participation of any other kind which led the behaviouralists to question the relevance of the idea of the citizen in a liberal democracy as a 'rational activist', and to endorse as appropriate a low level of involvement (Almond and Verba 1963: 31-2). The theorists of political development were quick to embrace this new empirical and normative orthodoxy as they turned their attention to the new states.
  Of the various influences that can be traced in the political development literature, those springing directly from the behavioural revolution and its empirical claims regarding the political process were the most pervasive, providing the common ground on which it stood. The strong reinforced the view the democracy was a system best controlled by elites, a core belief central to the work of all the theorists of practical development. As a result, when they endorsed the adoption in the new states of the typical institutions of Western democracy, they were not advocating unbridled activism of the part of citizens, but seeking to promote the limited and elite-led pattern of participation which was understood to be the norm in Britain and the United States (Gendzier 1985).
  The other principal sources upon which the theorists of political development drew were the theory of modernization as drawn from Weber by Parsons and Shils, anthropological approaches to political culture, and the concept of the 'political system' developed by Easton. Insights from these sources were combined in an eclectic manner, and with varying emphases. The core idea, consistent with the revisionist theory of democracy, was that as the transfer of democratic institutions to the Third World was inherently problematic, it was essential to identify and build mechanisms which would enhance governmental and elite authority from the start. This stance unified the basic assumptions underlying political development theory: that the global and domestic forces of modernization were too strong to be resisted; that national political cultures were deeply embedded, and resistant to rapid change; that political systems had their own internal coherence and logic; that elites and masses (leaders and citizens) had different characteristics and roles; and that in the ideal citizen activism was tempered by the influence of traditional, non-political ties and the acceptance of governmental and elite authority. As Roxborough has remarked, such ideas were not intrinsic to the notion of modernization itself, but rather stemmed from 'a view of social structures and of social change that stressed the importance of values, of social integration, and of elites (Roxborough 1988: 755). These views led from the start to the promotion of elite leadership, and to conscious efforts to limit the expectations and demands of the masses. Significantly, too, they did not prompt efforts to obliterate everything that could be designated traditional. On the contrary, they led to attempts to foster political cultures in which 'modern' and 'traditional' elements were judiciously blended.
  Within the framework of these common themes – the conceptualization of political development as a problem, the primary concern with public policy, and the endorsement of a conservative set of ideas regarding political participation – two broadly distinct analytical strategies were pursued from the beginning, 'the first cross-sectional and classificatory, the second longitudinal and explanatory' (Almond 1973: 4). The first sought to build comparative theories of modernization, political culture, and political development; the second scrutinized the logic and implications of historical and contemporary cases of development. Each was bent to a common purpose – to discover as a matter of urgency means of channelling and controlling the consequences of mass participation in the new states. An examination of these two strands of analysis – concerned with 'modernization' and 'crises of development' respectively – identifies the central themes of the political development literature, and confirms the substantive continuity of argument stretching from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s and beyond.

Modernization, Political Culture and Political Development

Political development theory drew heavily upon modernization theory, but at the same time engaged in a critical dialogue with it. In their efforts to offer solutions to the 'problem' of political development, Almond, Pye and Huntington all drew upon the idea of modernization as a long-term process of rationalization, secularization and structural differentiation. They also compared 'Western' and 'non-Western' political systems, making use of the contrast between 'modern' and 'traditional' patterns of behaviour. However, they rejected both the polarization of the characteristics of tradition and modernity, and the suggestion that political development either implied or required required the modernization of all aspects of politics. In other words, modernization and political development were never thought to be one and the same.
  Modernization theory was used by political development theorists in a number of ways, in relation to both the behaviour of individuals and the functioning of the political system as a whole. At times its use was teleological, in that it was argued that there were real tendencies towards universal and rational values at the level of individuals, and structural differentiation and functional specificity at the level of systems; at times its use was heuristic, in that it served as a framework of an ideal-typical kind which prompted hypotheses and organized ideas; and at times its use was descriptive, in that particular 'traditional' or 'modern' elements or practices were identified in existing political systems. The contrast made by Parsons and Shils between affective, particularistic, ascriptive and functionally diffuse norms and structures in traditional societies and affectively neutral, universalistic, achievement-oriented and functionally specific norms and structures in modern societies was a standard point of reference; modernity was seen as characterized by secular (rational, instrumental, scientific and technological) rather than sacred values; and modernization was understood in terms of structural differentiation (increasing organizational complexity and functional specificity) and cultural secularization.
  First, there was undoubtedly a clear teleological strain in the literature. For example, Pye spoke of a 'world culture' characterized by

a secular rather than a sacred view of human relations, a rational outlook, and acceptance of the substance and spirit of the scientific approach, a vigorous application of an expanding technology, an industrialized organization of production, and a generally humanistic and popularistic set of values for political life

which the new states 'must accept if they are to survive in the world of independent nation states' (Pye 1966a: 10).
  Secondly, modernization theory was used in an ideal-typical fashion to set up models against which contemporary situations could be measured. Thus Almond and Powell classified a number of political systems as primitive, traditional or modern in accordance with their degree of structural differentiation and cultural secularization (Almond and Powell 1966: 215), and Pye spoke of a shared view of a 'generic' form of political development characterized by the mass participation of active citizens who accept universal laws and are sensitive to principles of equality; governmental and general systemic capacity to manage public affairs, control controversy and cope with popular demands; and the structural differentiation, functional specificity, and integration of all participating institutions and organizations (Pye 1965a:13). This generic model served as a guide for case studies of political culture and political development, but was not held to exist in a pure form in any of the cases studied.
  Thirdly, ideas current in modernization theory shaped early descriptions of the 'non-Western political process'. Here, though, the influence of the revisionist theory of democracy was just as strongly to the fore. Kahin, Pauker and Pye listed seven 'distinctive characteristics of the political process in non-Western countries' which rendered politics both unstable and unpredictable; a high rate of recruitment of new elements in particular activity; a lack of consensus about the legitimate forms and purposes of political activities; a prevalence of charismatic leaders; a low degree of integration in the action of participants, particularly between village and national level; a high degree of substitutability of roles; a dearth of formally and explicitly organised interests; and a tendency for unorganized and generally inarticulate segments of society, such as peasants and urban masses, to involve themselves in politics in a discontinuous, sudden, erratic and often violent way (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1024-7). Similarly, Almond (1956) argued that 'pre-industrial political systems ' were characterized by a relatively low degree of structural differentiation and a high degree of substitutability of roles. He saw these characteristics reflected in unstable and fragmented parties, poorly developed bureaucracies and a tendency for political action to be spontaneous and violent.
  In 1958 Pye expanded the list he first proposed with Kahin and Pauker to 17 key features, in an effort to build a generalized model of the political process common in non-Western societies. His central assertion was that 'in non-Western societies the political sphere is not sharply differentiated from the spheres of social and personal relations', and that as a result 'the affective or expressive aspect of politics tends to override the problem-solving or public-policy aspect of politics' (Pye 1958: 469, 483). Organized interest groups were lacking; parties represented total ways of life rather than specific principles or policy objectives; oppositions tended to seek to overthrow the system rather than propose limited alternatives; there were few brokers between elites and masses; leaders generally represented communities rather than ideas; they tended to be charismatic; they enjoyed a high degree of freedom in determining strategy and tactics; and in the absence of differentiated publics they normally confined themselves to broad generalized statements on domestic issues, adopting clearly defined positions only on international issues. Cutting through the detail, a single key idea ran through these formulations: the non-Western political process was characterized by the absence of a separate and relatively autonomous public political sphere, and as a result policy-making was erratic, irrational and pervaded by private interests.
  The theorists of political development were picking up here on ideas that were common to modernization theory and to the revisionist theory of democracy. In broad terms, their mental picture of the 'non-Western political process' was the mirror image of the democratic system seen as appropriate by the revisionists. Where they drew upon modernization theory, they drew upon the broad ideas of structural differentiation, secularization and rationalization, but their primary concern was not so much with the contrast between traditional and modern practices as with sources of social and institutional control. It is, therefore, to the issue of social control that we should look in order to identify the relationship between modernization theory and political development theory. Significantly in this respect, the theorists of political development did not endorse the idea of a dichotomy between the traditional and the modern, nor did they argue for the wholesale modernization and Westernization of all aspects of life. Almond's very first full account of the functional approach offered an extended critique of modernization theory on this point. It argued that the difference between Western and non-Western political systems had generally being exaggerated: 'No political system, however modern, ever fully eliminates intermittency and traditionality. It can penetrate it, regulate it, translate its particularistic and diffuse impacts into the modern political language of interest articulation, public policy and regulation' (Almond 1960: 19). Citing evidence from behavioural research conducted in the United States which Showed That despite the modern communications industry individuals relied heavily in forming their opinions on face-to-face communication and advice from people they knew and trusted, Almond argued that all political systems are 'culturally mixed', in that 'certain kinds of practical structure which we have usually considered to be peculiar to the primitive are also to be found in modern political systems, and not as a marginal institutions, but having a high functional performance' (emphasis mine). Pointing out that this proposition 'brings into question certain applications of Parsonian social theory to the study of political systems', he argued that 'the "pattern variable" concept has led to an unfortunate theoretical polarization' (22–3). In line with this critique, he argued that in successful cases of gradual modernization significant elements of 'traditional political culture' had been infused with modern elements, and played a crucial stabilizing role. It followed that elements of existing political systems in the new states should also be retained if the aim was to achieve stability. This, as we have seen, was a point made by Schumpeter, and a central contention of the revisionist theory of democracy.
  The same argument pervaded The Civic Culture, which was both a contribution to revisionist theory and an early source of many key themes of political development theory. It opened with a reminder of the sorry history and precarious character of democracy in Western Europe, and the argument that while the diffusion of Western-style industrial technology and efficient bureaucracy was likely to be straightforward, 'what is problematical about the content of the emerging world culture is its political character' (Almond and Verba 1963: 4). In this context Almond and Verba identified a 'participation explosion' arising out of 'the almost universal pressure by previously subjected and isolated peoples for admission into the modern world' (3): such peoples were obliged to choose between democratic and totalitarian alternatives. But democracy was a matter not only of a set of institutions but also of an underlying political culture, and 'the transfer of the political culture of the Western democratic states to the emerging nations encounters serious difficulties' (5), for two main reasons: the inherently slow and difficult character of the process of cultural change, and the 'objective problems confronting these nations', in terms of 'archaic technologies and social systems'. The 'civic culture' was a solution to these problems precisely because it was 'not a modern culture but a mixed modernizing–traditional one (6) – it permitted change but moderated it.
  Pye's position was identical. He argued that 'the political in even the most economically and socially advanced societies is the preserve of the more traditional features of the society, and that all political systems must represent a blending of the historical and the contemporary (Pye 1963b: 16). A modern policy must mobilize its people for national efforts, widen participation, allow for the representation of a range of interests, and produce rational policies. It must also be 'capable of coping with change in the sense of being able to purposefully direct change and not just be buffeted by social forces' (18). But at the same time it must manage the tension between 'the universal standards of the nation state and the particularistic qualities of national identity', a tension stemming from 'the diffusion throughout the world of all aspects of modern life and … the needs of every particular culture constantly to reassert its unique identity (19). For these reasons, he argued,

it is clearly not possible to rely solely upon the distinctions between 'modern' and 'traditional', urban and rural, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which the social theorists have found useful in categorizing social and economic systems. The processes by which interests and values are expressed and then combined to give form and substance to political life represent all cases a fusion of those traits of behavior customarily identified as both 'modern' and 'traditional' (18).

Similar arguments abounded throughout Pye's work. As noted above, he argued that the driving force behind global change was a secular, rational, scientific and technological world culture which set standards which the new states were obliged to accept if they were to survive. However, he went on to to argue that this created a problem, 'since the diffusion of the world culture and weaken and destroy the structure of traditional societies but cannot so easily reconstitute a more modernized society' (18). In the individual this provoked psychological disruptions which could 'create deep feelings of ambivalence and uncertainty that can inhibit all effective action and stimulate widespread feelings of anxiety and alienation' (13). The answer to the dilemma this created was 'to relate to the parochial and the universal, to fuse basic components of the indigenous culture with the standards and practices of the modern world' (23). As argued in the opening essay in Political Culture and Political Development (1965):

The problems of development … involve less the gross elimination of old patterns and values and more the successful discovery of how traditions can contribute to, and not hamper, the realization of current national goals. Effective political development thus requires that a proper place be found for many traditional considerations in the more modern scheme of things (Pye 1965: 19).

The theorists of political development had in mind a 'generic form' of modernization and political development at the level of society, government, and the individual, but this did not lead them to argue that traditional elements should be eradicated from the political culture and the political system in the process of modernization. Rather, of all the fields of social activity that of politics was the one to which such ideas should not be applied:

Development in some field (sic) of human organization can be usefully conceived of as being the replacement of the particularistic norms, functionally diffuse relationships, and ascriptive considerations of tradition-based societies with the more universalistic, functionally specific, and achievement oriented patterns of action of more modern societies. In a political culture, however, there is a constant place for particularism, for diffuse identifications, and for attaching importance to nationality and place of birth (19; emphasis mine).

Pye echoed here Almond and Verba's argument for the civic culture as an amalgam of traditional and modern political orientations which might moderate the tensions inherent in the rapid and disruptive social change set in motion by modernization. Here as always, political development theory recommended not the wholesale modernization of political practices and systems, but the deliberate retention of traditional elements which might foster stability. In so doing, it echoed precisely Schumpeter's endorsement of 'just the right amount – not too much, not too little – of traditionalism' in parliamentary procedure and etiquette (Schumpeter 1970: 295). In other words, where political development theory marked out its differences with modernization theory, it did so precisely along lines already laid down by the revisionist theory of democracy.
  Significantly, too, this was precisely the perspective adopted by the only volume in the Studies in Political Development series which continued to speak in terms of 'modernization' rather than 'development': in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, Ward and Rustow noted the varying extent to which traditional features were amenable to modernization in particular historical cases, but suggested that 'with vision and intelligent management, some of the institutions and values of traditional societies can be so manipulated that they will reinforce rather than oppose the course of modernizing change (Ward and Rustow 1964b: 442). They concurred that no society was wholly modern, as all represented 'a mixture of modern and traditional elements', condemned as false the theory that modern and traditional elements stood in opposition to one another, 'and there was implicit in the social process some force which would ultimately lead to the purgation of traditional "survivals", leaving as a residue the purely "modern" society, and argued that in Japan in particular, 'the role of traditional attitudes and institutions in the modernization process has often been symbiotic rather than antagonistic' (444–5).
  Examined against this background, Huntington's contribution to the debate was less innovative than it sometimes appeared either to Huntington himself or to others. The substance of 'modernization revisionism' (Huntington 1971: 293–8) was fully anticipated in both the revisionist theory of democracy and political development theory, while quibbles over the definitions and use of the term 'political development' (298–305) obscured agreement on the character of politics in the new states and a shared conservative agenda. Despite his later boast to have 'quietly dropped' the term 'political development' (304, ft. 42), the diagnosis Huntington set out in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) was essentially the same as that reviewed above. He too regarded the extent to which the political sphere was differentiated from other spheres as crucial, and echoed Pye's emphasis upon structural differentiation and freedom from direct social control:

in a highly developed political system, political organizations have an integrity which they lack in less developed systems. In some measure, they are insulated from the impact of nonpolitical groups and procedures. In less developed political systems, they are highly vulnerable to outside influences (20).

This was the fundamental difference between the 'civic polities' of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union and the 'corrupt' or 'praetorian' polities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Civic polities were consensual political communities with effective political institutions which enjoyed high levels of legitimacy and recognizable and stable patterns of institutional authority appropriate for their level of participation', while corrupt polities were distinguished by 'the fragility and fleetingness of all forms of authority' (82). Corrupt or 'praetorian' polities were characterized by uncontrolled recruitment to political positions, the pursuit of personal and social purposes within 'public' institutions, the lack of civil associations and intermediary structures between leaders and masses, and the absence of consensus. In other words, Huntington's 'corrupt polity' was none other than Pye's 'non-Western political process', or Kornhauser's 'mass society'. It is significant, as we shall see, that Huntington chose to speak in terms of organizations and institutions rather than political culture. However, his argument concerning the impact of modernization was identical to that put forward by Almond, Verba and Pye. Social and economic change, and the associated processes of urbanization, industrialization, the spread of education and literacy and the expansion of the mass media

extend political consciousness, multiply political demands, broaden political participation. These changes undermine traditional sources of political authority and traditional political institutions; they enormously complicate the problems of creating new bases of political association and new political institutions combining legitimacy and effectiveness (5).

In this context, modernization

involves a change in the basic values of the society. In particular it means the gradual acceptance by groups within the society of universalistic and achievement-based norms, the emergence of loyalties and identifications of individuals and groups within the nation-state, and the spread of the assumption that citizens have equal rights against the state and equal obligations to the state (59–60).

This process breeds psychological disintegration, anomie, and instability, with which existing institutions are unable to cope. Huntington concludes that 'modernization and social mobilization … tend to produce political decay unless steps are taken to moderate or restrict its impact on political consciousness and political involvement' (86), bringing us to exactly the position argued by Almond and Pye above.
  Huntington's substitution of the term 'political decay' for 'political development' and his flair for the telling phrase should not be allowed to obscure the fact that his argument was precisely that made by political development theorists from the mid-1950s onwards. Equally, his claim that 'a basic and frequently overlooked distinction exists between political modernization defined as movement from a traditional to a modern polity and political modernization defined as the political aspects and political effects of social, economic, and cultural modernization' (35) simply repeated the message of earlier political development literature.
  Finally, Huntington concurred with Almond and Verba, and with Pye, in urging the retention of some elements of pre-modern systems. For example, he argued that 'corruption' should be retained in a modern political system. Citing Leys to the effect that many areas of public life in the United States have remained immune from reform, so that 'practices that in one sphere would be regarded as corrupt are almost taken for granted in another', he remarked approvingly that 'the development within a society of the ability to make this discrimination is a sign of its movement from modernization to modernity' (63). Corruption, he argued, 'provides immediate, specific, and concrete benefits to groups which might otherwise be thoroughly alienated from society'. It 'may thus be functional to the maintenance of a political system in the same way that reform is' (64). When judiciously applied, it may speed economic development and strengthen political parties – a combination of opportunities for personal gain through corruption at lower levels of bureaucracy with 'fairly strong national political institutions with socialize rising political leaders into a code of values stressing the public responsibilities of political leadership … may directly enhance the stability of the political system' (68). Once again, the argument picks up on one of the core ideas of the revisionist theory of democracy.
  It is clear from the foregoing that Almond, Huntington and Pye diagnosed the 'problem' of political development from a common perspective. They employed modernization theory to characterize the challenge facing new states; they saw the forces of modernization as posing problems of the level of the political system; and they wished to retain and strengthen elements of 'traditional' political culture, or find other means of control, in order to provide stability.
  The partial adoption of a modernization perspective did not lead to support for the wholesale dissemination of 'modern' values throughout the political system. Rather, the political system was required to absorb the pressure generated by the mismatch between modernization pressing in from outside, and pre-modern internal social and psychological attributes. By and large, this was to be achieved by retaining elements of 'traditional' political culture where possible, and by adopting policies or devising institutions which were capable of substituting new constraints for old ones where necessary. This was a reading of modernization theory which drew primarily on elements shared with the revisionist theory of democracy, and which emphasized social, political, and institutional control.

Comparative History and 'Crises of Development'

The efforts of the early theorists of political development were not confined to grand abstract theoretical exercises. They also sought to take account of the historical experience of political development, as they understood it, in Europe and the United States, and to apply the lessons they derived to the new states. Almond and Verba traced the development of the 'civic culture' in Britain as a result of a particular set of historical circumstances and events: early 'insular security'; separation from the Church of Rome and tolerance for religious diversity; the emergence of a thriving and self-confident merchant class; and the involvement of court and aristocracy in trade and commerce. As a consequence of this history, they argued, Britain

entered the industrial revolution with a political culture among its elites which made it possible to assimilate the gross and rapid changes in social structure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without sharp discontinuities … What emerged was a third culture, neither traditional nor modern but partaking of both; a pluralistic culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it. This was the civic culture. With this civic culture already consolidated, the working classes could enter into politics and, in a process of trial and error, find the language in which to couch their demands and the means to make them effective (Almond and Verba 1963: 7-8).

​  In contrast, difficulties arose in the political development of France, Germany and Italy as a consequence of the simultaneous presence of unsolved problems in such areas as national integration, international accommodation, political participation, and socio-economic distribution:

We may say of France, Germany and Italy in the last century that they were caught in the grips of cumulative revolutions, unable to solve any of them through appropriate systemic adaptations, in considerable part because of the simultaneity of their impact (Almond 1970: 167; emphasis in the original).

Here Almond identified four 'problems of political growth' – national integration, international accommodation, political participation and welfare distribution – and argued that 'the systemic characteristics of political systems – their structural, cultural and performance properties – are determined by the way in which these problems or challenges are encountered and experienced' (169).
  Such ideas were common place in the period. Almond acknowledged Neumann and Pye as sources, and attributed to successive summer workshops at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford in 1962 and 1963 the development and elaboration of the hypothesis that

the different structural and functional characteristics of European political systems could be explained by the ways in which they encountered a common set of developmental problems, in particular those of state building (i.e. centralization and penetration), nation building (national identity and cohesion), participation, and welfare. We thought that the different order or sequence in the confrontation of these problems and the different ways in which these problems were solved in particular national contexts, could explain the structural arrangements and performance characteristics of different types of political systems (Almond 1970: 21–2).

It would take eight years for the contributions to the 1963 workshop on crises in political development to reach publication ( Binder et. al. 1971). But in the meantime the core idea that the manner and sequence which a number of problems or crises of development were solved would shape the resulting political systems in significant ways became standard in the political development literature. Rostow and Ward introduced Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey with a critique of the static, equilibrium-oriented comparative method of The Politics of the Developing Areas, and argued that the efforts of former colonial or backward societies to achieve development, and the efforts of the West to help them to do so, would be greatly aided if regularities could be found in the developmental experiences of those countries which had been able to modernize, and if there were discernible stages or sequences of change through which all or some tend to pass' (Rustow and Ward 1964: 11). In the closing section of the final chapter of Political Culture and Political Development (1965), itself the product of the 1962 Stanford summer workshop, Verba moved directly from a discussion of prospects for change in key elements of critical culture to identify the five crises of national identity, integration, participation, penetration and distribution:

In general one can ask of all these problems whether they are once and for all resolved or whether they persist as continuing problems in a system. And does their solution or attempted solution involve a crisis? Related to this question is that of the phasing of the problems – do they all come at the same time, or are they resolved in some serial order? Lastly, it may well be that there are orders of resolution that have important effects on the political culture (Verba 1965: 559-60).

Verba's answer at this stage was that the sequencing in which they arose mattered, and that difficulty was greater if a number of them occurred simultaneously. And he concluded with the thought the new nations 'must create new political cultures before any of these problems are solved and, indeed, while they are attempting to solve all all of them at once' (560). Almond and Powell returned to the same issue at length in Comparative Politics: a Developmental Approach (1966), identifying four problems or challenges which might prompt a developmental response: state building (penetration and integration), nation building, participation and distribution, and arguing that 'relating system challenges to system responses is the way to explanation and prediction in the field of political development (Almond and Powell 1966: 37). Two years later, Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) offered a slightly different set of problem areas, but did no more than express the emerging consensus:

The modernization of Europe and North America was spread over several centuries; in general, one issue or one crisis was dealt with at a time. In the modernization of the non-Western parts of the world, however, the problems of the centralization of authority, national integration, social mobilization, economic development, political participation, social welfare have arisen not sequentially but simultaneously (46).

The fullest discussion of the crises of development is found in Crises and Sequences of Political Development. Although the volume was conceived in the early 1960s, as noted above, it was not published until 1971; it is perhaps this which has sometimes prompted the impression that the 'crises and sequences' approach originated in the 1970s. Here Binder and his collaborators – all central contributors to the political development literature – settled on five crises – of identity, legitimacy, participation, penetration and distribution – after initially including and eventually discarding a sixth, integration. In doing so, however, they merely arrived by a different route at the consensus view outlined in the previous section regarding the vulnerability of new states to the pressures of mass participation:

Countries that have clearly established their sense of national identity and achieve broad recognition of the legitimacy of their system of government before they are confronted with the demand for universal participation in public affairs are … significantly different from countries in which popular participation precedes either the legitimization of public institutions or the penetration of the governmental system into the mass of society (Binder et. al. 1971: ix).

The comparative historical model of political development suggested here was reflected in one early contribution to the Studies in Political Development series which engaged in a detailed comparison of historical cases, Political Modernisation in Japan and Turkey (Ward and Rustow, 1964), and further explored in a series of collections of case studies in the 1970s (Almond, Flanagan and Mundt 1973; Tilly 1975a; Grew 1978a). The essential ideas behind it were fully in place in the early 1960s, and they shared the core assumptions of the functional and cultural approaches influenced by modernization theory. And once again, the echoed a central claim of the revisionist theory of democracy, neatly summarized in Kornhauser's claim that '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' (Kornhauser 1960: 132).

Conclusion

If we are to understand the logical and ideological core of political development theory, the first requirement is to correct false impressions about its character and its trajectory. The accounts of commentators and of some of the protagonists themselves have produced a rather distorted official history. The central theme of this history, expressed in its most vulgar and synthetic form by Higgott, is that a first wave of theory-building unduly optimistic about the prospects for spreading Western democracy and associated with the ascendancy of Almand was replaced in the mid-1960s by a more pessimistic account, associated with Huntington and Pye, which turned from a concern with democracy to a concern with order. On this view, Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) is reckoned to have brought about a significant change in the character of the literature. This volume, along with two influential articles (Huntington 1965, 1971), is credited with having revised modernization theory. Adopting this interpretation, Higgott, echoed by others, claimed that Huntington's 'importance lay in his challenge to the prevailing idea of the unlinearity of modernization theory and in his stress on those issues that had been played down by earlier writers, especially the dislocations that arise in the modernisation process' (Higgott 1983: 18; also O'Brien 1972; Randall and Theobald 1985: 34–5). This broad shift, Higgott argued, was associated with a new concern with 'crises of development', and a general turn towards public policy (Higgott 1983: 15–21). This account is false on a number of counts, the first being that none of the political development theorists adopted a unilinear theory of modernization. As early as 1955, Kahin, Pauker and Pye noted 'the accumulation of overwhelming evidence proving that unilinear evolutionism was not defensible', and concluded that 'while we no longer expect to arrange social and political systems in an evolutionary sequence, we are vitally concerned with the patterns of political development in societies that have set as their goal the liberal democratic model of politics' (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1041). LaPalombara similarly objected to the term 'modernity' because it suggested 'a single, final state of affairs – a deterministic unilinear theory of political evolution' (LaPalombara 1963c: 38), while Almond and Powell prefaced their elaborate classification of political systems according to the criteria of structural differentiation and cultural secularization with the comment that

We will not repeat the naivety of Enlightenment theorists regarding the evolutionary progression in critical systems from traditional patterns to constitutional and democratic forms. Rather, we shall seek to argue that the earlier historical experience of political systems as well as the environmental challenges to which they are currently exposed affect their propensities for change and set limits on the way in which they can change (Almond and Powell 1966: 215).

Secondly, the theorists of political development saw the process of political change in the new states as problematic from the start; they were all overwhelmingly concerned with the dislocations it produced; and a concern with public policy was there from the outset precisely because the dissemination of Western democratic institutions was always viewed with apprehension. It is quite wrong, therefore, to talk off 'faith that the political institutions of liberal democracy could and should be imparted to the Third World (Higgott 1983: 9), or, as another summary account has it, of 'the early prevailing assumption … of a relatively unproblematic chain of causation from cultural modernization to economic development to democracy' (Randall and Theobald 1985: 13). Gendzier, in contrast, correctly identifies a pervasive 'fear of change' and relates it to a shared 'pessimistic mood about the relationship of mass society and democracy that dominated mainstream political theory' (Gendzier 1985: 109).
  Although every theorist of political development subscribed to a form of modernization theory, none expected the process of modernization to produce modernized political systems characterized by harmonious relationships between rational authority, differentiated structures, and mass participation, or Western political institutions which would foster democracy and guarantee stability. Rather, each saw modernization as a global social and economic phenomenon creating problems with which theories and policies of political development would have to deal. And in formulating their theories and policies, they were strongly influenced by a shared set of conservative and elitest values drawn from a variety of sources among which the behavioural approach was dominant. These centred on a single imperative: the need to contain the demands for mass participation to which modernization gave rise. And as we have seen, they echoed in general and in detail the principal arguments of the revisionist theory of democracy which was taking shape in the period.
​  In this context, the adoption of the term 'political development' was not primarily inspired by theoretical concerns. Rather, it was an attempt to enter the policy arena and simultaneously to build a strong institutional position within political science. Whether or not Riggs (1981: 307) is right to suggest that the term was adopted at the direct invitation of the Ford Foundation, it carried the suggestion that interventionist Western policies should seek to 'develop' desirable political practices and institutions in the non-Western world, rather than that there was an inherent dynamic of progress in the global process of political change. In these circumstances, it was as disingenuous of Pye to affect to wish to rid the concept of its contaminating public policy connections as it was for Huntington to pose the shift from 'development' to 'change' at the level of theory. Such moves, necessary if the protocols of disinterested scholarship were to be observed, glossed over the fact that political development was inherently, from the start, every bit as much a matter of public relations and public policy as it was of social theory.
  The fact is that the theorists of political development were always sure about what they wanted, but unsure either of how to achieve it, or how to conceptualize the theoretical issues involved. They wanted to see stable pro-Western political systems in the new states of the Third World, and they assumed that stability could not be achieved without some genuine extension of political participation to the majority of their populations. But they felt strongly that social conditions in the new states made it impossible to extend participation on Western lines without risking the weakening of Western influence and a fatal loss of control by pro-Western elites where they existed. While this perception of the central problem remained constant, they would prove remarkably flexible in the perspectives from which they sought to address it, resorting in in turn to functional, cultural, institutional and comparative historical approaches.
  If they made little progress in their central programmatic goal, it was because all their early explorations down these various roads seem to lead to the same conclusion – that the new states lacked the attributes that had produced political stability in the West. This quickly prompted a pragmatic shift away from grand theory to intervention in the promotion of institutional change, first reflected in the idea of a 'doctrine for political development' rather than a 'theory of political development'. It would take two decades however, for the 'doctrine for political development' to triumph and it would do so only after the comprehensive failure and abandonment of the search for a parallel 'theory of political development'. This trajectory would demonstrate that the roots of political development lay much more in the imperatives of committed international public policy that in those of disinterested political theory. It would also prompt the conclusion that whether by luck or by judgement, political development theory has been spectacularly successful in terms of its central policy objectives. Were this not so, of course, there would be little purpose in exhuming the remains of a series of painful catastrophes in what was repeatedly proclaimed as an effort in theory-building in the social sciences.
  Against this background of a unity of ideological vision and purpose over time, and the apparent realization of that vision in the wave of democratization across the Third World, the following four chapters examine the functional, cultural, institutional and comparative historical approaches in in turn. In each chapter exposition of major contributions is followed by an analysis of the fundamental issues raised, and a limited critique intended to explain the evolution of the body of literature under discussion, and its place within the literature as a whole. These chapters largely record episodes of failure in the effort to build a 'theory of political development'. The remaining chapters then extend the range of the critique.

​