Political Development

The origin of the term ‘Political Development’ can be traced back to the 1950’s when a large number of
American political scientists were attempting to study the political dynamics of the newly emerging
countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Huge amounts of statistical and quantitative data on the
social, political, economic and demographic aspects of these nations were collected to analyse their
attitudes, values and behaviour patterns.
The concept of political development is derived from the liberal tradition of the West. It projects Western
liberal democracy as the model of a developed society. Since it is also regarded as the modern society,
development is sometimes described as modernization, and political development is conceived as political
modernization. In short, modernization stands for the process of transition of a society from traditional
values and institutions to modern ways of life. Generally traditional values and institutions are regarded
as fit for an agrarian economy and society whereas modern ways of life are regarded as fit for industrial
and technology based society. It is believed that only the modern system is capable of fulfilling the needs
and aspirations of the modern man.
Sharing the concern of other social scientists with the great dichotomy of modernity and tradition and the
grand process of modernization, political scientists in the 1960s began to pursue more actively their
interests in what was variously called political modernization or political development. Their starting point
was the concepts of tradition and modernity; eventually this essentially comparative and static focus gave
way to a more dynamic and development oriented set of concerns. This shift can be clearly seen in the
work of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Committee on Comparative Politics and particularly
of Gabriel Almond, its chairman and intellectual leader during the 1950s and early 1960s.
The volume which undoubtedly played the major role in first focusing the attention of political scientists
on developmental problems was The Politics of the Developing Areas, edited by Almond and James S.
Coleman and published in 1960 under the sponsorship of the Comparative Politics Committee and the
Princeton Center for International Studies.
The bulk of the book consisted of descriptions and analyses in terms of a common format of politics in
five developing areas. The principal intellectual impact of the book, however, came from the introduction
by Almond and, to a lesser degree, the conclusion by Coleman. This impact was very largely the result of
their application to the politics of non-Western countries of a general concept of the political system.
Almond used this framework to distinguish between developed and under-developed or developing
political systems. Developed political systems are characteristic of modern societies and under-developed
ones of traditional societies. Almond’s concepts of traditionalist and of modernity or, as he seemed to
prefer, rationality are described in Parson as the terms derived from the central stream of sociological
analysis. Almond’s distinctive contribution in this respect, however, was the insistence that all political
systems are culturally mixed, combining elements of modernity and tradition. All political systems, the
developed Western ones as well as the less developed non-Western ones, are transitional systems. He was
appropriately critical of some sociological theorists for promoting an unfortunate theoretical polarization
in not recognizing this dualistic quality of political systems.
This book is concerned with the analysis of the political systems of societies which are presumed to be
developing (or modernizing) and the comparison of those systems with the political systems presumed to
exist in modern societies. Its key categories are system, role, culture, structure, function and socialization.
With the possible exception of socialization, no one of these refers to a dynamic process.
They are categories essential to the comparative analysis of political systems; they are not oriented to the
change and development of political systems. Almond posited a number of functions which must be
performed in any political system and then compared systems in terms of the structures which perform
those functions. What we have done, he said, is to separate political function from political structure.
Almond also argued, we need dualistic models rather than monistic ones, and developmental as well as
equilibrium models if we are to understand differences precisely and grapple effectively with the processes
of political change.
In this work, Almond and his associates presented the elements of a dualistic model of the political system,
but they did not attempt to present a developmental model which would contribute to the understanding
of the processes of political change. For Almond that task came six years later with another major
theoretical work co-authored with C. Bingham Powell. Unlike the earlier volume, this book was concerned
with political dynamics and focused explicitly on political development as a subject and as a concept.
Almond and Powell argued that political development is the response of the political system to changes
in its societal or international environments and, in particular, the response of the system to the challenges
of State building, nation building, participation and distribution. Political development itself was thought
of primarily in terms of political modernization. The three criteria of political development were held to
be, structural differentiation, subsystem autonomy, and cultural secularizing factor. Almond, thus came
face to face with the problem which was gripping many other political scientists at that time: What is
political development?
In 1965 Lucian W. Pye compiled a fairly comprehensive listing of ten meanings which had been attributed
to the concept of political development:
 The political prerequisite of economic development
 The politics typical of industrial societies
 Political modernization
 The operation of a nation state
 Administrative and legal development
 Mass mobilization and participation
 The building of democracy
 Stability and orderly change
 Mobilization and power
 One aspect of a multidimensional process of social change
In a noble effort at synthesis, Pye attempted to summarize the most prevalent common themes on political
development as involving movement toward: increasing equality among individuals in relation to the
political system; increasing capacity of the political system in relation to its environments; and increasing
differentiation of institutions and structures within the political system. These three dimensions, he argued,
are to be found lying at the heart of the development process. In a similar vein, another effort to generalize
about definitions of political development found four of recurring concepts: rationalization, national
integration, democratization, and mobilization or participation.
This quest for political development, in John Montgomery’s phrase, necessarily led political scientists to
grapple with three more general issues. First, what was the relationship between political development
and political modernization? The tendency was to think of political development as virtually identical
with political modernization.
Political development was one element of the modernization syndrome. Political scientists might disagree
as to what types of change constituted political development, but whatever they did choose was almost
invariably thought of as a part of the more general process of modernization. The principal dissent from
this point of view came in 1965 from Samuel P. Huntington, who argued that it was highly desirable to
distinguish between political development and modernization. The identification of the two, he said,
limited too drastically the applicability of the concept of political development in both time and space. It
became restricted to a particular phase of historical evolution, and hence, it was impossible to talk about
the political development of the Greek City-State or of the Roman Empire. In addition, political
development as political modernization made the former a rather confusing complex concept, tended to
reduce its empirical relevance, and made it difficult if not impossible to conceive of its reversibility, i.e.,
to talk about political decay.
A second issue which political scientists had to deal with in their definitional efforts was whether political
development was a unitary or a complex concept.
Since so many people had so many ideas as to what constituted political development, the prevalent
tendency was to think of it as a complex concept. This tendency was explained or, perhaps, rationalized
by Pye on the grounds that the multifunction character of politics means that no single scale can be used
for measuring the degree of political development. Hence, most scholars used several dimensions: Pye
himself, as indicated above, suggested three; Almond also had three; Ward and Rustow, eight; Emerson,
five; Eisenstadt, four. This all seems very reasonable, since political development clearly would appear to
be a complex process. Yet, obviously also, this approach can lead to difficulties. What are the relationships
among the component elements of political development? Thus, although Pye argued that equality,
capacity and differentiation constitute the development syndrome, he also had to admit that these do not
necessarily fit easily together. On the contrary, historically the tendency has usually been that there are
acute tensions between the demands for equality, the requirements for capacity, and the processes of
greater differentiation.
In a similar vein, Almond argued that there is a tendency for role differentiation, subsystem autonomy and
secularization to vary together, but that the relation between each pair of these three variables is not a
necessary and invariant one. Almond, indeed, presented a two-way matrix with secularization and
differentiation on one axis and subsystem autonomy on the other. He found some type of political system
to occupy each of the nine boxes in his matrix. The question thus necessarily arises:
What does political development mean if it can mean everything? On the other hand, if political
development is defined as a unitary concept, the tendency is either to define it narrowly as Huntington,
for instance, did in identifying it exclusively with institutionalization and thus to rob it of many of the
connotations and the richness usually associated with it, or to define it very generally, as for instance
Alfred Diamant did which in effect, masks a complex concept under a unitary label.
A third problem in the definitional quest concerned the extent to which political development was a
descriptive concept or a teleological one. If it was the former, it presumably referred either to a single
process or to a group of processes which could be defined, in terms of their inherent characteristics, as
processes. If it was a teleological concept, on the other hand, it was conceived as movement toward a
particular goal. It was defined not in terms of its content but in terms of its direction.
As in the more general case of modernization, the goals of political development were, of course, valued
positively. The definition of political development in terms of goals would not have created difficulties if
there were clear cut criteria and reasonably accurate indices (e.g., the political equivalent of per capita
Gross National Product) to measure progress toward those goals. In the absence of these, however, there
was a strong tendency to assume that, since both scholarly analyst and, presumably, the political actors he
was analysing, wanted political development, it was therefore occurring. The result was that almost
anything that happens in the developing countries coups, ethnic struggles, and revolutionary wars becomes
part of the process of development, however contradictory or retrogressive this may appear on the surface.
These definitional problems raised very real questions about the usefulness of political development as a
concept. Referring to Pye’s list of ten definitions, Rustow argued that this is obviously at least ‘nine’ too
many. In truth, however, one should go one step further. If there are ten definitions of political
development, there are ten too many, and the concept is, in all likelihood, superfluous and dysfunctional.
In the social sciences, concepts are useful if they perform an aggregating function, that is, if they provide
an umbrella for a number of sub-concepts which do share something in common. Modernization is, in this
sense, an umbrella concept.
Or, concepts are useful because they perform a distinguishing function, that is, because they help to
separate out two or more forms of something which would otherwise be thought of as undifferentiated. In
this sense, manifest functions and latent functions are distinguishing concepts.
Political development in general is of dubious usefulness in either of these ways. To the extent that
political development is thought of as an umbrella concept encompassing a multiplicity of different
processes, as in the Almond and Pye cases discussed earlier, these processes often turn out to have little
in common except the label which is attached to them. No one has yet been able to say of the various
elements subsumed under the label political development what Lerner, at a different level, was able to say
about the broader processes subsumed under the label modernization: that they went together because in
some historical sense, they had to go together. Instead, it is clear that the elements included in most
complex definitions of political development do not have to go together and, in fact, often do not. In
addition, if political development involves differentiation, subsystem autonomy, and secularization, as
Almond suggests, do not the really interesting and important questions concern the relations among these
three, as Almond himself implies in his conclusion?
The use of the term political development may thus foster a misleading sense of coherence and
compatibility among other processes and obscure crucial questions from discussion. To the extent, on the
other hand, that political development is identified with a single, specific process, e.g., political
institutionalization, its redundancy is all the more obvious. What is to be gained analytically by calling
something which has a good name by a second name? As either an aggregating concept or a distinguishing
concept, in short, political development is superfluous.
The popularity of the concept of political development among political scientists stems perhaps from the
feeling that they should have a political equivalent to economic development. In this respect, political
science finds itself in a familiar ambiguous methodological position between its two neighboring
disciplines. In terms of the scope of its subject matter, political science is narrower than sociology but
broader than economics. In terms of the agreement within the discipline on goals, political scientists have
more shared values than sociologists, but fewer than economists.
Sociology is comprehensive in scope, economics is focused in its goals; political science is not quite one
or the other. The eclecticism and diffuseness of sociological theory are excused by the extent of its subject.
The narrowness and parochialism of economics are excused by the precision and elegance of its theory.
In this situation, it is quite natural for political scientists to borrow concepts from sociologists and to
imitate concepts of economists. The sociological concept of modernization is, quite properly, extended
and applied to political analysis. The concept of political development is created in the image of economic
development. In terms of choosing its models, one might generalize, a discipline will usually tend to copy
the more structured and scientific of its neighbouring disciplines. This leads to difficulties comparable to
those normally associated with the phrase misplaced concreteness.
Economists, it will be said, do differ over what they mean by economic development and how one
measures it. These differences, however, shrink to insignificance in comparison to the difficulties which
political scientists have with the term political development. If, on the other hand, political scientists had
modelled themselves on the sociologists and talked about political change in imitation of social change
rather than political development in imitation of economic development, they might have avoided many
of the definitional and teleological problems in which they found themselves.
Characteristics of Political Development
Different writers have advanced different models of political development. Of these two are particularly
important which are based on similar thinking. The first model advanced by James S. Coleman and Lucian
Pye conceived of political development as political modernization. In its view a modern political system
is more efficient than a traditional political system in the same way as the modem industrial system is
more efficient than traditional non-mechanized agriculture. Traditional political system was primarily
concerned with the collection of taxes, law and order and defence but modern political system also plays
an active role in improving the quality of life of its citizens apart from performing its traditional functions.
Under traditional political system, people were not involved in politics; government simply exercised
power over them. But under modern political system, people are closely associated with politics. They do
convey their demands and opinions to government. They do express their support or opposition to
government policies and decisions. Government broadly relies on legitimacy of its acts in order to secure
the support and cooperation of the people. This model identifies three characteristics of political
modernization:
 Differentiation
 Equality
 Capacity
Taken together they comprise development syndrome. Differentiation refers to the process of progressive
separation and specialization of roles, institutional spheres and associations within the political system,
e.g., the separation of occupational roles from kinship, of legal norms from religion, of administration
from politics.
Equality is regarded the ethos of modernity. It implies the notion of universal adult citizenship, legal
equality of all citizens and the psychic equality of opportunity for all to gain excellence according to their
respective talents and efforts. The subjects of traditional society become citizens of modern society.
Modern political system encourages people’s participation in the process of governance. This results in
the greater respect for law. Capacity in this sense denotes the increased capacity of political system for
the management of public affairs, control of disputes and coping up with the new demands of the people.
The second model of political development was advanced by Gabriel Almond and G. B. Powell. Based
on the structural functional analysis of political system, this model identifies three characteristics of
political development:
  Structural differentiation
 Secularization of culture
 Expansion of capabilities
Structural differentiation implies the evolution of distinct structures and organs or institutions for the
performance of different functions of political system. It operates at two levels:
 At input level, it envisages the emergence of suitable nongovernmental structures for performing
the functions of political socialization (family, school, peer groups, etc.,), interest articulation
(interest groups), interest aggregation (political parties) and political communication (media of
mass communication)
 At output level, it stipulates separation of powers between different governmental organs for
performing the functions of rule making (legislature), rule application (executive) and rule
adjudication (judiciary).
Secularization of culture denotes the process by which people gradually adopt more rational, empirical
and analytical outlook in their political thinking and action. In particular, it requires transition from lower
to higher levels of political culture, i.e., from parochial to subject, and from subject to participant political
culture Expansion of capabilities implies an increase in four types of capabilities of political system:
 Regulative capability (the capability of legitimate coercion to control the behaviour of individuals
and groups)
 Extractive capability (the capability to appropriate the natural and human resources of society and
international environment)
 Distributive capability (the capability to distribute various benefits of individuals and groups)
 Responsive capability (the capability to respond to the demands coming from society and
international environment
A balanced development requires that regulative and extractive capabilities of political system are suitably
matched with its distributive and responsive capabilities.
Table 4.1 Characteristics of Political Development—Comparative Study
Political modernization model as enunciated by Political development model as enunciated by
James Coleman and Lucian Pye Gabriel Almond and G.B. Powell
Differentiation: The process of progressive Structural Differentiation: The emergence of
separation and specialization of roles, institutional
specific structures for the performance of specific
spheres and associations within political system functions both at input and output levels
Equality: Universal citizenship, legal equality and
Secularization of Culture: Adoption of more
equality of opportunity national, empirical and analytical outlook leading
to political participations as equal citizens
Capacity: Greater efficiency to fulfill needs and Expansion of capabilities: Balancing of
aspirations of the people regulative and extractive capabilities of political
system with its distributive and responsive
capabilities

If developing societies are able to develop these characteristics in their political systems, they are likely
to prove more efficient in their political functioning. But each of these countries must combine these
requisites with its own genius. Because of their large size, complex and multicultural character combined
with the heritage of communitarian sentiment, they should, not be reduced to competitive market societies
in the name of their political development.