Development, Political

Political development gained recognition as a sub-field of comparative politics in the 1960s. This entry describes its roots in modernization theory and dependency theory, examines broad themes in its subsequent evolution, and concludes with a look at the role of area studies in the discipline today.

Prior to the 1960s, comparative politics had tended to focus on the forms of government that prevailed in the advanced industrial world, that is, Europe and the former Soviet Union. But with the break up of Europe's empires following World War II and the entry of numerous postcolonial states into the global political system, an increasing number of scholars chose instead to focus on what became known as the developing world. Figure 1 shows the age composition of the states that became independent in different periods and captures the size of the new group of nations in the past 66 years: 120 out of 194, that is, almost two thirds.

The study of political development was foreshadowed by studies of nationalism. Initially, scholars treated the subject as a branch of contemporary history: The rise of nationalism in the postwar world seemed to resemble the rise of nationalism in Europe, be it in 19th-century Germany, Greece, or Italy, or in Central and Eastern Europe following the conference in Versailles. But many soon recognized that politics in the newly developed nations differed from that in the developed. They found it necessary to address new themes: economic growth, the rise of industry, and the marginalization of agriculture as well as the politics that accompanied these transformations.

While diverse intellectually, those making early contributions to the field tended to subscribe to what became known as “modernization” theory. Modernization theory constituted a claim that the breakdown of the previous agrarian and traditional order made people available for political mobilization. Increasing levels of urbanization, literacy, and income, its proponents argued, bore a close relationship with the rise of political participation. They posited sociological and social psychological mechanisms—the desire for community and the impact of anomie, for example—to link [Page 645]economic and social change to the growth of mass movements. Drawing on the work of area specialists, several stressed the manner in which nationalist politicians harnessed the political energies of voluntary associations and in particular groups formed in town by recent migrants from the countryside. Rather than being highly organized and disciplined electoral machines, some nationalist parties, these specialists found, were but loose assemblages of these organizations—something that lent credibility to the reasoning of the modernization theorists.

Figure 1 Date of Independence: Four Periods

The following is a key question faced by students of the developing nations: What kind of polities would emerge in the developing world? Given the bipolar structure of power in the postwar era, this question was equivalent to asking whether these nations would favor democracy or totalitarianism. When Seymour Martin Lipset reported a systematic relationship between the level of per capita income and the level of democracy in a cross-sectional regression of nation-states, the answer seemed clear. Given that higher levels of urbanization and literacy covary with higher levels of income and that—as Lipset found—higher levels of income correlate with democracy, then the developing world, as it modernized, was destined to be democratic.

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