'Political Development' and the Developing World

The analysis of the comparative historical approach completes our review of the major texts which sought to advance a theory of political development in the 1960s and 1970s. It might have been assumed at the outset that the developing world would be the central concern of the literature, but this has turned out not to be the case. On the contrary, one of its most striking characteristics is that it was not exclusively or even primarily concerned with developing states at all. In fact, the more the effort to produce a theory of political development came to the fore, the more attention shifted away from them, and towards Europe and the United States. With this in mind, this chapter reflects on the literature as a whole, drawing attention to some of its most significant characteristics and asking in particular what it did have to say about the developing world. It returns to the notion of the 'non-Western political process' and assesses both its relationship to other elements of political development theory, and the way in which it informed analyses of the developing countries which were given extended treatment in the literature.
  It is a peculiar fact about the literature and political development which we have reviewed but the only volume devoted entirely to case studies from the 'Third World', The Politics of the Developing Areas (Almond and Coleman 1960), appeared before the political development approach proper was clearly defined, as part of a projected functional approach which was intended to have universal validity. What is more, it appeared when the functional approach itself was at an early stage and, as we saw in Chapter 3, there was little interaction between the theoretical project outlined in Almond's introduction, and the majority of the area contributions. By the time that functionalism was worked out in a more elaborate form, in Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Almond and Powell 1966), the focus of its attention had shifted sharply away from the developing countries caught in transition between tradition and modernity, towards a contrast between the simplest and most complex societies, and a dominant concern with the different types of modernity represented by 'democratic' and 'totalitarian' states. In the meantime, The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba 1963) offered detailed analysis of Britain, Germany, Italy and the United States alongside Mexico, while Political Culture and Political Development (Pye and Verba 1965) adopted a global perspective, offering case studies of England, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union alongside those of Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Mexico (again) and Turkey. This mixing of 'Third World' and other cases was also a feature of the other early volumes in the Studies in Political Development series.
  In the 1970s, as we saw in the previous chapter, the shift away from developing societies was even more marked. Although the attempt to arrive at a crises and sequences model of political development began with a focus which ranged similarly across the developed and developing world, albeit at a level of relative abstraction from specific cases (Binder et al. 1971), it generated sets of case studies devoted exclusively to Europe (Tilly 1975a) and to Europe and the United States (Grew 1978a). In the intervening period. Almond headed, in Crisis, Choice and Change, an effort at historical inquiry in which India and Mexico featured alongside Britain, France, Germany and Japan (Almond, Flanagan and Mundt 1973).
   To the extent that the developing world did remain an object of study in the literature, it continued to be addressed within the terms of the 'non-Western political process' as defined in the 1950s, with its emphasis upon the deficiencies peculiar to the 'new states' emerging from recent colonial rule. Theorists of political development relied for their understanding of politics in the developing world on a set of ideas proposed in the 1950s in advance of either theoretical work or detailed investigations of developing societies themselves. These were interpreted in the light of propositions drawn from a revisionist theory of democracy which was primarily inspired by the twentieth-century experience of Europe and the United States. The successive attempts that were made to build theories of political development on this basis proceeded with little direct reference to the particular conditions of the developing world. Developing states were judged in accordance with preconceptions about their empirical circumstances derived unaltered from the idea of the 'non-Western political process', and found wanting.
  As a result, the pragmatic 'doctrine for political development' advocating responsible elite leadership in the developing world was anchored from start to finish in the space between the revisionist theory of democracy on the one hand and the opposite image of the non-Western political process on the other. It emerged alongside but separate from the various theories of political development proposed, and it did not depend upon any of them for its validation. In sum, the marginalization of the experience of the states of the developing world from the effort to theorize political development ran parallel to the growing breach between theory and doctrine.
  The developing countries were seen throughout, then, in terms of the assumed features of the non-Western political process, rather than in terms of any new perspective thrown up by the successive attempts to theorize political development. We should ask, therefore, to what extent this notion was capable of a capturing the character and circumstances of the developing countries in the post-war period. As an examination of the way in which the case of Latin America was treated in the literature will show, it had serious limitations. Although the area contained by far the largest block of independent 'Third World' states in period after the Second World War, it scarcely figured in the output of theorists of political development between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s. Given its long history of political independence, and its relatively advanced levels of urbanization and economic development, it did not fit at all easily into the framework of ideas proposed for the 'non-Western political process'. At the same time, close examination of its experience raised issues of class politics and international political economy similar to those to which Tilly would eventually draw attention for Europe. Examination of successive treatments of Latin America and of the individual case of Mexico in the literature will reveal that these issues were noted, skirted and suppressed, and suggest that continued reliance on the ideas summarized in the notion of the non-Western political process required their suppression.
  Finally, the separate pursuit of a theory of political development which increasingly discounted the experience of the developing world and of a pragmatic doctrine for political development primarily addressed to the issue of achieving political stability in the developing world was reflected in the separation of the issue of democracy (for the 'Western' world) from that of leadership (for the 'developing' world). While the question of democracy remained central to the theory of political development, it was quickly declared to be an inappropriate form of politics for the developing states to adopt under existing circumstances. Emphasis was placed in their case upon the need for responsible elite leadership, pending the emergence of circumstances which might allow democratization to proceed. The marginal status of the developing world in political development theory, the rift between theory and doctrine, and the equivocal attitude towards democratization in the developing world were therefore intimately linked in the political development literature. This chapter explores links, examining in turn in its principal sections the persistent influence of the ideas central to the 'non-Western political process,' the significance of the matter in which Latin America and the individual case of Mexico within it were addressed, and the consequences for the elevation of elite leadership over democracy in the developing world. A brief detour to the curious case of the Philippines after consideration of Mexico will identify some of the most instructive confusions in the literature, with particular relevance for the failure either to address the implications of colonial rule, or to bring together into a single coherent analysis the various aspects of the revisionist theory of democracy on the one hand and the principal components of the 'non-Western political process' on the other.

The Non-Western Political Process

The marginal importance assigned to the developing world in the political development literature reflected its basic ideas and assumptions. As we saw in chapter 2, the theorists of political development in the United States were primarily concerned the prospects for political stability in Europe in the wake of the Second World War, and in the emerging 'Third World' in the wake of decolonization. Their concerns in these areas were unified by two related perspectives: the tendency to interpret the issues in the light of a presumed universal conflict between East and West, and the assumption that the United States, with new-found economic superiority and freedom from ties of formal empire, could and should take the lead in promoting a new global political order. This combination of circumstances produced a tendency to focus on areas of the Third World in a broad global context, and to direct attention to the issues of decolonization and overt East-West confrontation. At the same time, the influence of modernization theory prompted the analysis of the particular condition of the developing world in terms codified as the 'non-Western political process'. The approach emphasized the strength of non-Western cultural traditions and the distinctive socio-political features of village society, and was primarily derived from the perceived experience of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The seminal early article written by East and South-East Asian specialists Kahin, Pauker and Pye spoke of societies 'developing out of a past in which their governmental activities were limited primarily to the actions of traditional autocratic rulers or the few practitioners of colonial rule', and pointed to a legacy of 'restricted participation in the making of political decisions, at least above the village level' (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1024). Pye's later summary and more systematic view of the non-Western political process (Pye 1958) reinforced the picture of a form of politics shaped by sudden transition to political independence, deep ethnic and communal differences, and sharp conflicts between 'Western' and 'non-Western' value systems. To the extent that specific references were made, the focus throughout was on such cases as Burma, China, Malaya and Indonesia. The assertion the politics of such countries could not be understood in terms of a policy formulation approach appropriate to developed Western states was central to the conception of the non-Western political process: the political sphere was seen as permeated by social and personal relations, and therefore by affective or expressive concerns rather than issues of policy; as a result 'interests' as known in the West were not represented either by interest groups, which were absent, or by parties, which reflected 'ways of life' rather than principles or policy objectives; leaders represented communities rather than ideas, and failed to adopt clear positions on domestic issues; representation was based on community rather than class, and policy-making as understood in the political process in the West was non-existent – such as it was, it was erratic, irrational, and pervaded by communal and personal interests.
  One consequence of this vision of the non-Western political process was the neglect of the nature of the historical and contemporary links between the economies of the developing world and those of the developed world, most dramatically reflected in Pye's assertion that there were no structural impediments to rapid social and economic development in Burma, and that the causes of the lack of progress must therefore be 'cultural' or psychological. Another was the failure to pursue the hypothesis that the policy-making process was shaped by the clash of organized social forces seeking to install their representatives in power in order to pursue determinate projects explicable in terms of domestic and international political and economic circumstances. These were persistent features of the literature. As we saw in the previous chapter, Ward and Rustow we're unusual in turning their attention directly upon the case of late-developing societies and focusing on the context of Western imperialist expansion, and even then they classified this aspect of geopolitics as a given which could not be affected by policy, and went on to advocate the responsible leadership central to the doctrine for political development. As a general rule in the literature, as Tilly pointed out, issues relating to the past and present character of the international political economy were simply ignored. As noted above, these failings, which permeated the literature, were most transparent in the case of Latin America.

The Case of Latin America

In part, the relative lack of detailed attention to Latin America in the political development literature may be explained, albeit somewhat circuitously, by the fact that none of the major contributors to political development theory had a specialist knowledge of the area. Almond and Verba almost invariably focused their attention on Europe and the United States, despite the brief cross-border raid into Mexico in The Civic Culture, to which I return below. Coleman and Pye had extensive specialist knowledge of Sub-Saharan Africa and East and South-East Asia respectively. For these and other reasons, detailed consideration of Latin American cases in the political development literature was restricted to the essay on the region in The Politics of the Developing Areas (Blanksten 1960), a short piece on Brazil in a collection on Education and Political Development (Bonilla 1965), an essay on political parties in Latin America (Scott 1966), and three different treatments of Mexico: its inclusion in The Civic Culture, the essay by Scott in Political Culture and Political Development (Scott 1965), and the essay on Cardenas by Cornelius in the collection edited by Almond, Flanagan and Mundt (Cornelius 1973). In addition, a brief discussion drawing on Scott appeared in Comparative Politics: a Developmental Approach (Almond and Powell 1966: 266-71), and the treatment of Mexico in The Civic Culture gave rise to a response (Craig and Cornelius 1980) published in The Civic Culture Revisited (Almond and Verba 1980.
  Clearly, the relatively minor role played by Latin American specialists in the analysis of political development is not an explanation of itself. Rather, it directs attention to the need to explain the failure to conceive of the issues in a way which identified the full consideration of Latin American experience as central to the theoretical effort undertaken.
  It proved difficult from the start to encapsulate the Latin American experience within the confines of the non-Western political process. The insignificance in Latin America of religious and other cultural traditions falling entirely outside the 'Western' experience limited the extent to which the area could be seen as culturally distinct, while the long history of political independence and relatively advanced urban and commercial development made it difficult to approach it in terms of conflict between the forces of modernity on the one hand and traditional institutions and 'village' culture on the other. The problems created by the attempt to approach Latin America within the analytical framework derived from this generalized picture of the 'non-Western world' were demonstrated in the Politics of the Developing Areas. As noted above, Blanksten contributed a lengthy account of Latin American politics. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, the Latin American cases did not fit the analytical framework within which the book was conceived, and as a result they were unceremoniously excluded from the typology of political regimes in the developing world offered in Coleman's conclusion to the volume as a whole. In the process, insights into the specific features shaping the politics of Latin American states were first recognized, then suppressed.
  In his opening pages, Blanksten identified four key characteristics of the economies of the region: under-development, the disproportionately large role of land, the salience of the production of raw materials and particularly minerals for export, and the leading role of foreign companies and capital (Blanksten 1960: 458-9).  At the same time, he argued that the timing and character of political independence in the region set it apart from the 'non-Western' world:

In the so-called 'non-Western' areas, nationalist movements frequently accompany struggles for political independence from colonial powers. Most of Latin America not only has been independent since the 1820s, but acquired that status more as an outcome of international politics than through internal movements within colonies fighting for national identification (493).

  On this basis he claimed that there was little functional role for nationalism in the independence period, and little evidence in the present day of the broad-based nationalist movements typical of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Such 'nationalist' movements as existed, he argued, reflected a class rather than a national perspective, whether of the indigenous lower classes or, in the case of neo-fascist movements, of the white and creole elite. He also contended that 'whites', 'mestizos' and 'indians' should be seen as the basic classes of the region rather than as a 'races' or 'castes', as movement between them was possible if not easy and as they reflected the distribution of political power that separated the rulers from the ruled. In other words, Blanksten argued clearly that the idea of a 'non-Western political process' revolving around communal politics and anti-colonial nationalism within which it was inappropriate to speak of 'class' politics, did not fit the Latin American case.
  Having laid out this promising framework, which seemed to identify precisely the issues which would facilitate an analysis of Latin America in the light of its history of insertion in an emerging international economy and its social and political implications, Blanksten abruptly changed tack. He did not pursue either the issue of the character of class politics in the region, or the implications of the form of incorporation into the global economy sketched out in his opening pages. Instead, he fell back regardless onto the general framework of modernization theory, arguing that 'in Latin America, the rural civilization is non-Western and the urban civilisation is Western (470), and identifying economic development as the motor which would eventually transform the traditional countryside. Despite his identification of features which gave the region a distinct character, his analysis of the standard elements addressed within the functional approach – political processes of recruitment, communication, interest articulation, interest aggregation and rule making, rule application and rule adjudication – was conducted in terms of this dichotomy between tradition and modernity. As a result, the idea that the Latin American countryside and social and political relationships within it might in fact have been shaped by the thoroughly modern process of export-led development was lost to view. Blanksten gave numerous pointers to quite significant historical and structural contrasts between between Latin America and the other regions from whose experience the shaping ideas of political development theory were drawn, but in the end still addressed the region within the framework proposed by the exponents of the 'non-Western political process'. As a result, he did not explore on its own terms the logic in the contemporary period of broad nationalist movements responding to the collapse of export-led development in the 1930s, and the 'economic imperialism' emanating from the United States. This meant in turn that he failed to grasp the logic of the political ideologies of class compromise and state-led developmentalism characteristic of the region after 1930, and to identify the distinctive 'economic nationalism' characteristic of the region in the period. It is symptomatic of this failing that he dismissed Vargas and Peron as the peddlers of 'spurious ideologies' based upon a superficial borrowing of vocabulary and slogans in which the leaders themselves did not believe (492), where an analysis in tune with the factors he had introduced at the outset would have sought to relate their politics to the regional and global political economy of the post-war period. Despite its promising beginnings, then, his account still revolved around the 'fundamentally authoritarian political tradition of the area' (525), the continuing power of the Roman Catholic Church, the prevalence of personalism, and the routine neglect of constitutional norms.
  At this point, political development theory was still an infant industry. But no further comprehensive attempt would be made to address the specificity of Latin American political development throughout its trajectory. Instead, the region was either ignored, or incorporated within analytical frameworks which took little account of its character. The only other general essay covering the whole of Latin America was Scott's contribution on parties and policy-making in Political Parties and Political Development (1966). This too addressed the region from within the functional perspective, omitting even an initial gesture of recognition of the specificity of regional social and economic structures, and confirming the failure to relate political processes and institutions to domestic and international political economy. Scott organised his analysis around the two features central to the non-Western political process – the absence of an autonomous public sphere, and the irrational nature of the policy-making process. Most Latin American states, he argued, lacked the internal political structures which would permit 'prompt and adequate representation of new and developing interests produced by proliferating change', while their policy-making processes were marked by 'confusion, immobilism, and a tendency to supply symbolic, affective decisions rather than positions of concrete and positive action' (Scott 1966: 331). The functions of executives, legislatures and parties were not effectively separated; within the political system authority resided in the executive (or in constituent parts of the bureaucracy); and the executive dominated not a political party proper but 'a personalistic following that calls itself a political party'. Most important, the executive itself did not enjoy genuine authority over social groups:

The political style of many Latin American countries places a larger share of public policy determination under the control of what might be called 'private governments' – chambers of commerce and industry, bankers' associations, commercial agriculturalists' groups, even labor unions. Decisions concerning their particular interests may never reach the formal units of government or, if they do, may be presented as accomplished facts to be ratified rather than considered in terms of general welfare. Where this occurs, the role of political parties as such is negligible, and all of the traditional panoply of nominations, elections, and congressional maneuvering by party blocs has little real significance for the policy-making process (332).

  Neither parties nor executives, then, played a central role in policy-making. Echoing Blanksten, Scott attributed this situation to the virtual absence in Latin America of 'mass parties of national integration', and explained it not by reference to specific patterns of regional economic and social development, but by a broad-brush picture of modernization, recast in terms of the emerging categories of the 'five crises' approach.

Evolution from a pattern of traditional values, subsistence agriculture, and primarily local orientation toward a system of more nearly universal values reflecting in industrial technology, a national society, and an absorptive central government with increasingly specialized functions seems to evoke similar problems in every country. These crises – of foreign relations, legitimacy, integration, participation, and distribution – appear to affect every people as they pass through the process of nation building (333).

  Scott's analytical framework dissociated the character of political parties and political systems in Latin America from the specific social and economic circumstances from which they arose, again obliterating the record of protracted export-led development, and presented them as victims of the generic problem of a cumulative 'crisis of development'. Then, in a move characteristic of the whole literature, the failure to identify the links between patterns of social and economic change and political developments was transposed into an assertion of the observed 'proliferation of development crises' was 'artificial and unhealthy' as it reflected an external rather than an internal dynamic:

Insofar as crises appear in less developed countries, such as most of those of Latin America, not as a natural result of social and economic change but artificially induced by observation of foreign models, the environmental conditions under which effective control devices might evolve do not obtain (334).

  It is essential to grasp the structure and implications of this contorted form of argument. At the outset, the character of specific Latin American patterns of social and economic change was ignored. Then an externally derived analysis was imposed upon the region. Finally, the fictitious account of the dynamics of politics and policy-making thus identified was used as evidence that the observed phenomena were not the 'natural result of social and economic change'. In essence, this turned the failure to understand the specific dynamics of social and economic change in the region into the claim that such dynamics had little explanatory power.
  Finally, Scott's summary of the adverse 'environmental conditions' which prevented the emergence of 'effective control devices' reflected arguments for elite-controlled incorporation of the masses into politics familiar from Political Culture and Political Development (Pye and Verba 1965). They were: insufficient physical and psychological integration to attain either optimum economic output or a national society; masses who demanded political participation and the distribution of material benefits but were unready to assume the political responsibilities and the work discipline such rights entailed; and traditional governing elites unable to accept the loss of social status and political influence that would accompany basic structural change. The only solution, short of the government 'putting down the challenging elements which precipitate the crises', was the creation of 'some omnibus political structure which can seek to resolve certain of the developmental crises while holding others in abeyance' (334). This conclusion, forced by the framework of ideas within which Scott was operating, led him to advocate 'integrating-nationalizing parties' as the best hope for bridging the gap between traditional and modern sectors of society. Such parties would be able to perform the dual function of integrating the masses into the nation and legitimizing the activities of a central government for them'. In their absence, however, the political systems of Latin America were badly overloaded, and decision-making authority fell upon 'already burdened executive agencies or into the hands of "private governments" with little or no responsibility to society as a whole' (335). The most common type of party was 'a carry-over of old style coteries of privileged notables who hide behind a façade of apparently democratic political structures and practices', and its members were both psychologically and organizationally unprepared for change, and 'unwilling, perhaps even unable emotionally, to share political power and material wealth with the emergent masses (338–9).
  Scott's account of politics in Latin America faithfully reflected the broad assumptions of the literature of the period regarding the pathological character of the non-Western political process, and the absence of an autonomous public political sphere and of parties able to provide channels of communication between responsible elites and appropriately socialized masses. It did so, however, by interpreting aspects of the politics of the region such as the incapacity of elite-dominated parties to secure popular support as consequences of psychological or organizational failings, rather than of specific features of domestic and international political economy. And as we shall see in the following section, Scott and others approached the specific case of Mexico, the only Latin American country to receive extended and detailed consideration within the political development literature, in similar terms.

The Case of Mexico

As noted above, the political development literature offered successive treatments of Mexico over the period between 1963 and 1980. But in each of the versions offered, as in the treatment of the region by Blanksten and Scott, insights into the specific dynamics of its political development were distorted or suppressed in favour of the core assumptions and values of political development theory and its distorted perception of the non-western political process.
  The first version of Mexico came in The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba 1963). As we saw in Chapter 4, the study focused on the orientation of individuals to political objects, and took little direct account of the history or contemporary socio-political structure of the countries from which data was drawn. Its approach was shaped by the assumption that Britain and the USA were 'civic cultures', and on the contrast between these two cases and the more troubled continental European cases of West Germany and Italy (itself a late substitute for France). Although Mexico was introduced at the last minute in place of Sweden, the switch prompted no reconsideration of the analytical framework. On the basis of the survey conducted for them in Mexico, Almond and Verba interpreted its political culture as marked by the contradictory elements of alienation and aspiration: low expectations of government output alongside pride in the presidency and the revolution, and high self-evaluations of civic competence alongside low indicators of actual involvement (Almond and Verba 1963: 414-15). The typical Mexican, as they saw it, was an alienated subject, and an aspiring citizen. As noted in chapter 4, their approach was subsequently questioned by Craig and Cornelius (1980). Misinterpretations resulting from deficiencies of phrasing and translation in the survey cast doubt upon the validity of both the alleged strong aspirational component in Mexican political culture, and symbolic attachment to the values of the revolution, while the classification of Mexico as a defective democracy overlooked the highly controlled nature of the political system, the success with which citizen input was limited, channelled and manipulated, and the functionality of a low sense of political competence for the stability of the system. Craig and Cornelius argued, against this view, that it was an effective authoritarian system.  
  The marginal significance attached to the developing world in political development theory was strikingly illustrated by the lack of interest shown by Almond and Verba, in The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), in the critique of their inclusion and treatment of Mexico. Almond's opening chapter simply confirmed his overwhelming concern with classical and contemporary social, psychological and political theory, and the absence of any consideration of the specifics of developing societies in general, let alone of Mexico in particular, in the framing or reconsideration of the research. He acknowledged a debt to Schumpter as the source of his notion of successful democracy in the contrast between Britain and the United States on the one hand, and France, Germany and Italy on the other (Almond 1980: 21-2), but made virtually no reference to Mexico, except to note in passing that it was included at the last minute because Sweden 'had no survey organization with experience in political research' (22). Verba's conclusion was similarly cavalier, remarkably making no reference to the critique offered, or to Mexico, or even to the problematic of democracy in developing countries. Throughout, there was no indication that either author attached significance to the Mexican case or felt any concern over the issues it might have raised.
  Long before the Craig and Cornelius critique of Almond and Verba's version of Mexico was published, an account with similar emphases appeared in Political Culture and Political Development (Pye and Verba 1965). As will be recalled, the functional scheme of analysis was dropped in this volume, and the emphasis turned to the need for elite authority over non-elites (itself a principal component of the 'civic culture' argument), and to the ways in which this could be secured, where it did not exist, by the overt manipulation of political attitudes. Emphasis shifted, for the developing countries, from democracy to elite leadership. Within this framework, Scott presented Mexico as a case of successful modernization, but one in which change in the political system have not kept pace with modernization overall: government remained in the hands of a small group, the strength of centralizing authority hampered the emergence of pluralism, and the success of the single dominant party and the presidency in providing stability through political structures managed by the state blocked the development of a participant or 'civic' political system. This was a more realistic picture of the national Mexican political system than that presented by Almond and Verba. However, it was still approached and explained in terms of the 'political culture' framework which they proposed, rather than in terms of the dynamics of revolutionary and post-revolutionary politics. Scott (1965) justified authoritarian structures in terms of the supposed personal traits of the Mexican population, simply replacing the picture of an 'aspiration' to civic culture with an apologia for elite domination behind a semi-democratic for façade. He explained this in terms of 'basic factors inherent in the Mexican psyche and reinforced by the socialization process' (354), among them the anomie growing out of a lack of self-esteem produced by the difficulties of resolving the personal identity problem' (337), the 'sense of stoic fatalism' deriving from the efforts of the Catholic Church, and the yearning among displaced peasant folk for the 'sweet and simple dependency of their earliest years' (355). In these circumstances, he remarked, 'the social and political mechanisms for enforcing self-adjusting and peaceful compromise among the contending interests of the society are not quite strong enough to act automatically, so the ruling group provides the ultimate sanction to require cooperation' (380). A more consistent approach on the parts of Scott himself and the editors of the volume would have explored the strong parallels between the Mexican case and the record of elite management of political attitudes in Germany, but Scott avoided the issue by reverting to a stereotypical explanation for Mexican authoritarianism, while Verba typically made nothing of it at all, including only three passing references to Mexico in his concluding chapter.
  The most detailed investigation of Mexican political development was offered in the extended essay by Cornelius in Almond, Flanagan and Mundt's Crisis, Choice and Change (1973). Unlike Scott, Cornelius focused on competing political projects, examining successive developmental strategies in terms of their policy content and the social coalitions behind them. He contrasted the pro-capitalist orientation of the preceding regimes, dominated by former president Calles and stressing class harmony, private enterprise, and foreign investment, with the orientation of the Cardenas regime to 'class struggle, collectivism, and state involvement in social and economic development' (Cornelius 1973: 420). However, none of this analysis affected the overall interpretation of the Mexican case, all the way in which it was addressed by., and stressing class harmony, private and enterprise, and foreign investment, with the orientation of the Cardenas resume two class struggle, collectivism, and state involvement in social and economic development (Cornelius 1973: 420). However, none of this analysis affected the overall interpretation of the Mexican case, or the way in which it was addressed by Almond and Mundt in their analytical conclusion. Cornelius himself offered an interpretation which shifted the emphasis away from issues of political economy to leadership and choice, announcing at the outset that 'this exemplary case of large-scale elite-initiated structural and performance change' demonstrated above all the importance of choice, chance, political skill, and creativity in developmental causation' (393, 483). Cardenas was depicted as having secured profound social and economic reforms not by responding to pressures from outside government, but by taking initiatives of his own in advance of such pressure, 'creating effective demand for new policies and programmes within the society at large, as well as within the revolutionary family'. The Cardenas regime thus offered a dramatic example of the importance of 'creative leadership':

In some episodes examined in this book, 'political skill' or propensities for effective political leadership may constitute no more than a residual variable explaining fairly minor discrepancies between controlled resources and political outcomes. In Mexico under Cardenas, the 'skill factor' is all-pervasive, a key determinant not only of coalition formation but of demand and resource creation as well (394–5).

The Mexican case, then, was explained in the end entirely in terms of creative leadership, and it was this rather than the political economy of Mexican development which was stressed in comparative discussion elsewhere in the collection.
  Overall, the successive versions of Mexico examined here either ignored issues of domestic and international political economy altogether, or raised and then suppressed them. At the same time, they shifted their perspective on the character of the political system, identifying Mexico first as a defective democracy, then as a successful authoritarian regime. This shift was accompanied, by the time Cornelius collaborated with Almond to contribute a chapter to Crisis, Choice and Change, with the identification of leadership as the key variable in the explanation of Mexican political development. These shifts reflected a general trend in the literature as a whole, at least as far as the developing world was concerned.

A Brief Detour to the Philippines

Put simply, the theorists of political development failed to understand Mexico, because the perspective within which they viewed it was incapable of identifying either the essential elements of its political economy or the systemic logic of its political process. The way in which the case of the Philippines was treated in the literature reveals precisely the same weakness: various elements of its politics were identified in accordance with perspectives prevailing within the political development literature, but the logic of the whole was not grasped. The Philippine case, like that of Mexico, reveals the inability of political development theory to understand the supposed objects of its inquiry, the countries of the developing world.
​  This failure was striking in the presentation of the Philippines in Education and Political Development (Coleman 1965) as a case, like the USSR and Japan, in which successful educational policy had proved able to 'build a national political culture congruent with and supportive of existing political institutions, and 'contain or avoid the politically destabilizing consequences of an unemployed educated class' (Coleman 1965d: 225). The case study by Landé on which Coleman drew for evidence provided a fervent endorsement of the US colonial policy of indoctrination in the values of a free society, and the crucial role still played by US Jesuits at the Ateneo (university) in inculcating in the sons of the Filipino elite the spirit of capitalism which Max Weber associated with the protestant ethic' (Landé 1965: 328). Landé's central theme, an approving account of the pluralism of Filipino society, emphasized the absence of a 'small cohesive, self-conscious elite group which ... regards itself, and accepted as being, especially qualified to govern the nation'. He described politics in the country under US occupation as having taken the form of 'an amiable, profitable, and socially undisruptive competition for office among the gentry' (341, 348). At this point, a significant gap began to open up between Landé's account on the one hand, and the general precepts of the doctrine for political development (and Coleman's development syndrome) on the other. As Landé saw it, the consequence of gentry politics in the Philippines was that in contemporary politics patronage was prevalent, and the state enjoyed no authority over society. The gentry had 'refused to cooperate with what sometimes appeared to be centrally directed attempts to restrict to terminate the game' (338), there was no elite administrative corps, parties were weak, and politicians were obliged to bow to pressure from interest groups. Only a degree of tenderness to the Philippines as the offspring of US colonial rule could explain explain Coleman's ability to overlook the extent to which the Philippine case as described transgressed the two central principles of the authority of elites and insulation of the political system from social pressure which were cardinal features of political development theory and of the doctrine for political development. In more general terms, the failure here was the same as in the case of Mexico – an inability to grasp the connections between the various factors identified, and to understand the political system in terms of its own own systemic logic.

Political Development, Liberal Democracy and Leadership

Although the suppression of issues relating to domestic and international political economy and the assimilation of the area to the generic 'non-Western political process' were most transparent in the treatment of Latin America, they were common to the whole of the developing world. There is an intimate connection in the political development literature between the initial perception of the developing world as unprepared for Western-style liberal democracy, its marginalization from the theoretical debates of the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of a pragmatic doctrine for political development, and the attachment of central importance to elite leadership rather than democratization. In terms of policy preferences, the most significant reflection of this syndrome is that enthusiasm for the adoption in the developing world of competitive party systems and alternation in power was weak in early contributions such as The Politics of the Developing Areas, The Civic Culture, and Politics, Personality and Nation Building, and absent in such products of the mid-1960s as Political Culture and Political Development, Political Parties and Political Development, and Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. In terms of the relationship between policy preferences and theory, its most significant aspect is that the attempts to theorize political development repeatedly broke down when the developing world was addressed, and that the issue of elite leadership was consistently invoked precisely at the point at which they broke down. In view of the common but false perception that political development theory was initially positive regarding the prospects for the introduction of democracy in the developing world, it is necessary to set the record straight, and reflect upon the implications for the political development literature as both doctrine and theory.
  Scepticism regarding the immediate prospects for liberal democracy was expressed throughout The Politics of the Developing Areas. Pye began his essay on South-East Asia by remarking that although the leaders of the new states in the area had committed their peoples to the task of establishing representative institutions of government, 'the possibility of failure is great, and leaders and citizens can be troubled with self-doubts. Already the tendency toward more authoritarian practices is widespread: for example, armies are coming to play roles that were originally reserved for democratic politicians (Pye 1960: 66). He argued, as always, that the prevalence of authoritarian rule reflected the lack of elite unity and elite control of mass participation, and the particular danger that the irrational masses, motivated to participate in politics not by particular policy concerns but by feelings of restlessness and insecurity arising out of the disruption of traditional ways of life, were an easy prey to such deviant movements as communism. His conclusion, not surprisingly consistent with his broader view of the non-Western political process, was not that the establishment of democracy was likely, but that it was essential to develop 'receptive and integrating political processes' because 'the alternative. ... is the growth of various authoritarian movements and particularly Communism (152). Coleman saw a power in Sub-Saharan Africa rapidly gravitating into the hands of entirely new social groups unaccustomed to its exercise, leading to generalized instability, unpredictability regarding political authority, and 'fear and despair among groups less favored, or among those clearly destined for displacement' (Coleman 1960a: 312). Rustow argued in the same vein that the prospects for liberal constitutionalism in the Near East 'looked for brighter fifty years ago than they do today' (Rustow 1960: 420), and that even among its dedicated supporters it frequently served 'as a self-interested posture of those temporarily out of power rather than as a vehicle for systematic articulation of organized interests (422). Blanksten saw the process of national unification in Latin America as consisting of 'an expansion of the hold of the upper class ... upon the rest of the country, which gradually becomes subject to the greater control, influence, and cultural direction of the ruling group' (Blanksten 1960: 259), and, as we saw above, identified the integrative function in the region with 'a strongly authoritarian political tradition' (530). Weiner, on South Asia, expressed the measured view that 'the growth of mass communication, political parties, popular elections, interest groups, and literacy do not ensure that all the new values will prosper or even that national unity is likely to result. They only indicate that political awareness is likely to grow' (Weiner 1960: 244). He then gave an emphatic statement of the importance of appropriate leadership:

Much depends upon the extent to which there is leadership in all segments of society, in government, political parties, trade unions, business, peasant association, newspapers, etc., which supports the leading institutions and emerging values and is committed to their preservation by ties of interest, ideology or organization. The kinds of leadership which emerge, the values and élan which they share, and their relationship to the groups they lead may be as decisive in the success or failure of these countries as the policies pursued by governments (245).

  A similar spirit informed Politics, Personality and Nation Building. Pye spoke there of the need for 'a doctrine of democratic development,' but argued that the stress on democratic ideals rather than methods of democratic nation building was counterproductive, as it led to the rejection of the idea that unstable countries 'need not, indeed should not, necessarily conform to our methods but should follow practices more in tune with their own traditions' (Pye 1962: 6). He noted that over the previous decade there had been 'a secular (sic) trend from optimism to pessimism, from an expectation of democratic performance to an acceptance of authoritarian ways' (8), and declared that the enormity of the problems of nation building appeared to 'make the development of practical guides for action dependent on the expansion of knowledge about the mysteries of social, economic and political change, (10). And as we saw in Chapter 4, he concluded that the best response would be the training of a new elite of rational bureaucrats, rather than an immediate adoption of democratic institutions.
   In The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba adopted a similar point of view. Although they presented the political systems of Britain and the United States as approaching the ideal, they attached little weight to either competitive party politics, or alternation in power as central requirements of democracy, and they conspicuously refrained from advocating their adoption in the 'emerging nations'. Competition and alternation in power were addressed within the general context of elite control, and the need for a competitive party system was qualified:

For a system (designed to turn power over to a particular elite for a limited period of time) to work, there must obviously be more than one party (or at least some competing elite group with the potentiality of gaining power) to make the choice among elites meaningful (Almond and Verba 1963: 477; emphasis mine).

  This broad assertion was given little weight in the overall argument, and did not lead either to specific recommendations for the early broadening of political competition, or to the application of such criteria for the classification of regimes as democratic. Italy and Mexico were classified as democracies despite the dominance of the Italian Christian Democrats and the continuity of the Mexican PRI in power (in part through blatant fraud to which passing reference was made) since the 1920s. And in their conclusion Almond and Verba remarked, after rehearsing the many obstacles to the emergence of 'civic cultures' in new states that.

we cannot properly sit in judgement of those leaders who concentrate their resources on the development of social overhead capital, industrialization, and agricultural improvement, and who suppress disruptive movements or fail to cultivate democratic tendencies (504).

  Against this background, the pragmatic tolerance of authoritarian rule which permeated the Studies in Political Development series cannot be seen as a decisive change of direction. Rather, what was significant about the doctrine for political development was its explicit abandonment of the criterion of democracy in favour of leadership, with particular reference to the developing world. In line with this shift, a lack of enthusiasm for genuinely competitive democratic politics permeated Political Culture, and Political Development. While Pye identified elite leadership as the key criterion, and Verba oriented his whole analysis to the issue of elite control, the absence of any overt concern for competitive democracy was most apparent in the selection of 'emerging nation' case studies and the attitudes adopted towards the prospect for competitive democracy in them. The emerging nations chosen for detailed examination – Egypt, Ethiopia, India and Mexico – differed quite markedly in the nature of the governing regime, but they had in common the achievement of political stability without any semblance of alternation in power. And in each case the focus of discussion was the question of stability, rather than the question of democracy. Indeed, where the issue was raised directly, clear arguments were made in favour of the continuation of elite control by whatever means necessary, and against further democratization.
  In the case of Mexico, for example, Scott not only described the elite as unified and generally free from non-elite pressure, but strongly endorsed the situation as appropriate. As noted above, he approved of coercive measures on the part of the ruling elite on the grounds that the social and political mechanisms for enforcing a compromise among the contending interests of the society were not quite strong enough to act automatically. In the fullness of time, he argued, the 'mediatory class' (of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, supervisors, priests and junior officers) would become part of the governing class and transmit appropriate values to the masses of the population:

When this occurs, the one real unsolved problem with the Mexican Revolution's modernizing function may be solved, and the elites may be able to mobilize more completely the support of the non-elites in their attempts to integrate the nation and to provide a responsible and representative government (Scott 1965:381).

  For the time being, however, democracy was formal and partial rather than real, as a limited process of rationalization had taken place 'without loss of that hard core of authority needed to control the disruptive tendencies still operating in the Mexican political environment' (388). There was little likelihood that 'the government's opponents would be allowed to win political control if they should capture a larger share of the votes' (389), but he charitably concluded the political structures which provided stability in the face of cultural fragmentation 'almost had to be those of authoritarian centralization', and that while 'sizable numbers of the populace are just moving from the parochial into the subject political sub-culture, and most of them reject authority, enforced legitimization continues to be necessary' (394). Against this background, it is not surprising that Scott's essay on Latin America, contributed to Political Parties and Political Development, proposed the 'Mexican solution' for the region as a whole.
  The same spirit informed Binder's description of Egypt as 'a modernizing autocracy dominated by a bureaucratically oriented elite' (Binder 1965: 448), for which democracy represented a possible future, but not a realistic option at present. Binder acknowledged that the new Egyptian elite had rejected orthodox parliamentarism and multi-partyism in favour of a mobilizational system, and ventured no further to suggest while 'there is some chance for the transformation of the present dominant political culture into one that will sustain a democratic welfare state', it would require first that the intellectual elite, business groups and rural notables are admitted to real influence by the military-bureaucratic political elite', and then that the political pyramid of which they would form the base 'be gradually extended to other groups as conditions permit' (449). Here as elsewhere the spirit informing the Studies in Political Development series was that of the programme offered by Lerner in Communications and Political Development – the prospect of democracy at some point in the future if elites could be appropriately groomed and masses appropriately socialized in the meantime.
   Against this background, there is a certain pattern to Almond's recurrent difficulties with the application of the theory of political development to the developing world. We noted above that, with Verba, he abandoned his defence of the civic culture in order to endorse leaders who suppressed disruptive movements and failed to adopt democratic practices. Equally, in his attempt to expand the functional approach, with Powell, the theoretical exposition broke off when developing countries came up for consideration, giving away to a focus on 'leadership strategies' and the suggestion that state and nation building should initially be stressed over participation and welfare (Almond and Powell 1966: 325-31). In both cases, the attempt to advance and apply the theory of political development was dropped in favour of pragmatic attention to the untheorized variable of leadership.
  Almond found himself in the same bind for the third time, this time in the company of Flanagan and Mundt, in Crisis, Choice and Change. As we saw in the previous chapter, leadership theory was one of four approaches brought together in the eclectic method pursued in the studies carried out, but the method centred on the identification and ordering of logically possible coalitions under structural constraints, while the leadership variable was treated impressionistically, as to deal with it systematically 'would call for another major research undertaking' (Almond and Mundt 1973: 621). As in Almond's earlier forays into comparative politics, the variable of leadership proved most useful in dealing with the developing country cases of India and Mexico. We have already seen how Cornelius abstracted away from a 'political economy' analysis in the case of Mexico in order to attribute a privileged role to creative leadership. His choice was heartily endorsed by the joint editors with an Alice-in-Wonderland logic which echoed the tergiversations which allowed Scott to misread internal dynamics as external and hence pathological. While other cases were explained in terms of the 'constraints, pressures and opportunities' identified in the chosen crisis period, the Mexican case defied explanation in such terms:

Mexico in 1935 provides us the truly exceptional case in which the range for choice suggested by our coalition analysis is narrowed to a single outcome – which did not occur! The 'rational' outcome at that time, based on considerations of resources and issue distances, would have been an alliance of Callistas with the revolutionary generals, which would have required a coup against Cardenas (634–5).

Paradoxically, this outcome was taken not as evidence that the method of analysis adopted was deficient, but as proof of the leadership qualities of Cardenas! Claiming that the 'best measure of Cardenas's leadership ability is the fact that his coalition choice in late June 1935 was outside the preferred set of outcomes', Almond and Mundt concluded 'with some confidence that a willingness to take risks, a resoluteness in policy direction, and Cardenas's skill in resource mobilization form a large part of the explanation of the reformist outcome of the Mexican case' (637). As elsewhere, the initial failure to understand prompted the designation of the case as exceptional, and unintelligible in rational terms, a step which itself perpetuated the myth that the logic of such cases could not be grasped by approaches which worked for 'rational' modern systems.
  Curiously, the case study of India, contributed by Headrick after Rajni Kothari had withdrawn from the project due to disagreement over the projected approach and the method of analysis, followed exactly the same trajectory, first offering a 'political economy' explanation for the events analysed, then switching attention to 'leadership' variables which were taken up with great enthusiasm by the joint editors. Headrick began by admitting that as his study was one of structural continuity and political containment rather than structural shifts and political change, it had proved difficult to fit it into the analytical framework provided by the editors. Hence, he explained, 'we adopt the common framework, but our study lacks a precise fit with some of its assumptions, and we strain both the framework and our analysis in the process, we hope to the benefit of both' (Headrick 1973: 561). He then identified a Westernized political elite within the Congress movement with a strong propensity to subordinate internal disagreements to a preference for consensus, its strength derived from an institutionalized network of leaders and followers rather than from hereditary or charismatic authority (565).
  Following Kothari, Headrick traced the ability of this elite to sustain consensus to four factors: the dominant position of the pragmatic 'governmental' wing within the Congress party, the reciprocity of relations between the centre and the states, the skilful manipulation of a non-doctrinaire left-of-centre ideology, and the pursuit of a foreign policy based on non-alignment, tolerance and coexistence. He then turned to an analysis of crises in the areas of language policy and agriculture and food supply against the background of the death of Nehru in 1964. The resolution of the first was attributed to prime minister Shastri, whose leadership style 'was a variable of greater weight than coalition propensity, resource distribution, and policy preferences' (582). On the second, Headrick described a shift in control over policy from the centre to a responsibility shared with the states, and the adoption of a new agricultural policy in 1965 which sought to boost private farmer output through subsidized high-yield varieties and fertilizers. In sum, 'a welfare-oriented policy was replaced by a production-oriented one' (593). This outcome placed a new coalition at the heart of agricultural policy, in a defeat for the central planners, and a victory for producers in the grain surplus states. In Headrick's estimation, it favoured farmers with sufficient land and capital to adopt the new inputs quickly, and boost private production, but would 'result in a substantial increase in landless labourers, a growing insecurity among tenants, and great disparities in distributing the benefits of the agricultural process' (599). Even while thus identifying conflicting class coalitions and policy alternatives, he still attributed the resolution of the crisis to the government's ability to play one group off against another, and oddly described the outcome as one of continuity which illustrated 'the strong preference for consensus solutions over clear decisions' (597). As in the case of the language issue, he adopted the phrase 'coalition of the whole' to reflect the consensual outcome. Almond and Mundt echoed this point in their conclusion, declaring the focus on coalition sequence irrelevant to the Indian case, and omitting it from the otherwise comprehensive table of such sequences (Almond and Mundt 1973: 631–3). They then described the case as one of persistence rather than change, in which nation-building or nation-maintaining crises prompted a coalition of the whole or its functional equivalent – the 'disaggregation of issues and the deconcentration of decision sites' (635). In the process, the detailed account of a specific process of policy change in which one set of interests imposed itself over another was entirely lost from view. In both 'developing world' cases, India and Mexico, political economy explanations involving conflicting class coalitions and clear policy shifts were clearly identified, then ditched in favour of alternatives which simultaneously removed the cases from the theoretical frameworks applied elsewhere and gave heightened emphasis to the single untheorized variable of leadership.

Conclusion

There was a fundamental continuity in the treatment of the developing world in the political development literature from the first version of the 'non-Western political process' through to the discussion of India and Mexico in Crisis, Choice and Change. The theorists of political development never wavered in their conviction that the political process in the non-Western world was fundamentally irrational, that elites did not enjoy sufficient control over mass behaviour, and that the full introduction of competitive liberal democracy was premature. This conviction was reflected at an early stage in the pragmatic doctrine which emphasized the need for responsible leadership rather than democracy.
  As the preceding discussion reveals, the invocation of leadership as an explanatory variable and the pragmatic resort to calls for responsible leadership were constant features of the analysis of politics in the developing world. The manner in which the issue of leadership was deployed is particularly revealing of the fault lines within political development theory. First, it was consistently invoked precisely when the theoretical framework employed to examine other (developed world) cases of political development either broke down or was deliberately abandoned. Second, despite its long pedigree in the literature, it was never itself placed in a developed theoretical framework. One early discussion in relation to Japan and Turkey stressed its importance, but concluded by describing the 'specific contribution of a different variety of leadership' to Japan's earlier start and more rapid progress of political modernization as 'elusive' (Ward and Rustow 1964b: 455). Nearly a decade later, Almond credited Rustow with having given prominence to the theme, noted that he was 'a bit uncertain on the place of leadership in the theory of political development' (Almond 1973: 17), and cheerfully confessed that he and his colleagues had treated it impressionistically, as a residual variable. Resort to the question of leadership served simultaneously to cover the inadequacy of existing theory and to provide a basis for the continued propagation of the pragmatic doctrine for political development. In telling examples of the bankruptcy to which political development theory was reduced by these expedients, Scott and Almond were driven to interpret the failure of their chosen approach to illuminate the internal dynamics of Latin American and Mexican politics respectively as proof of the perversity of the political process in question, rather than of the deficiency of the approach adopted. Third, the invocation of the 'non-Western political process' and leadership as explanatory variables involved the suppression of available and clearly articulated explanations grounded in domestic and international political economy, thus detaching political change in the developing world entirely from the structural and socio-economic context in which it arose. In this respect it is significant that while Almond and Mundt made an effort to link policy alternatives and eventual choices to contending interests, coalitions and structural constraints in their European cases, they refused to do the same for India and Mexico although the case studies presented to them provided a clear basis for doing so
​  In sum, the developing world was systematically marginalized and excluded from the political development literature as it evolved through the 1960s and 1970s. The theorists of political development either turned their attention away from the developing world entirely, or addressed it under a special dispensation, granted by themselves, which allowed them to suspend their own norms of rational inquiry in order to maintain the useful fiction that 'non-Western politics' was itself irrational. It was then possible to abandon the quest for the theory, lament the general unreadiness of the developing world for liberal democracy, and reduce the doctrine for political development to the single issue leadership, in isolation from underlying issues of domestic or international political economy. As we shall see in the following chapter, the same abdication from the quest for theory and emphasis on responsible leadership is central to the doctrine for political development today.