Democratization ISSN: 1351-0347 (Print) 1743-890X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdem20 Political development theory and the dissemination of democracy Paul Cammack To cite this article: Paul Cammack (1994) Political development theory and the dissemination of democracy, Democratization, 1:2, 353-374, DOI: 10.1080/13510349408403398 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510349408403398 Published online: 26 Sep 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 331 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fdem20 Download by: [The University of Manchester Library] Date: 04 May 2016, At: 00:13 Political Development Theory and the Dissemination of Democracy Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 PAUL CAMMACK The relationship between political development theory and the dissemination of democracy is a curious one. In the period when political development theory was most influential, efforts to disseminate democracy throughout the Third World in line with its core values were notably unsuccessful. It later went into eclipse as a consequence of the failure of successive efforts at theory-building, from functional, cultural and comparative historical perspectives respectively. Despite this double failure, its core ideas have re-emerged as a dominant force in recent democratization literature. This article outlines the core ideas of the literature, in which conservative elitism rather than modernization theory provides the unifying thread. It then traces the failure of political development theory as theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence thereafter of a politics of pragmatism in which the core values of conservative elitism survive intact. Finally, it suggests some of the reasons for its renewed ascendancy. One of the aspirations which lay behind the attempt pursued from the early 1960s onwards to produce a theory of political development was the hope that it might provide a basis for the dissemination of Western democracy throughout the 'new states' of the developing world. By the mid-1960s contributors to the theory-building effort such as Almond, Coleman, Powell, Pye, and Verba had arrived, after some false starts, at what they felt was an appropriate model of democratization for 'nonWestern states' to pursue. However, they made little further progress. Successive attempts to place the theory itself on a sound footing did not prosper, while the examination of the developing societies themselves suggested that there was a basic incompatibility between the cultural, historical and social requirements for democracy, and the condition of the developing world. As a result, the internationalization of democracy remained a long-term goal, but theorists of political development did not advocate the immediate dissemination of Western liberal democratic institutions. By the late 1970s three attempts to build a theory of political development - on functional, cultural and comparative historical bases respectively - had ended in failure, and political development theory, Paul Cammack is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester. Democratization, Vol.1, No.3, Autumn 1994, pp.353-374 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 354 DEMOCRATIZATION under heavy attack from competing approaches and from within, appeared to be moribund, with no practical or theoretical resources to offer. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that from the mid-1980s on, when a new project for the dissemination of democracy began to take shape in political science and public policy communities primarily in the United States, it was based squarely upon the principles and precepts set out in the 1960s by the theorists of political development. The purpose of this essay is to explore the conjunction of theoretical failure and practical success reflected in this chain of events. After sketching the origins and trajectory of political development theory, it identifies the set of ideas which underlay it, and describes the democratization model which took shape in the mid-1960s. It then examines two obstacles which initially prevented theorists of political development in the period from devising a successful project for the dissemination of democracy - the finding that conditions in the developing world were not appropriate for the model of democratization devised, and the failure to arrive at a satisfactory theory of political development itself. Finally, it examines the rebirth of the political development democratization project as a blueprint for the dissemination of democracy in the 1990s.' Origins and Trajectory The concerted effort to build a theory of political development had its roots in the founding in the United States in 1954 of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics. Chaired first by Gabriel Almond and then by Lucian Pye, the committee promoted and sponsored a variety of comparative work on both Western and 'non-Western' states. The ideas around which its work would centre were first addressed in a number of position papers.2 These were followed by numerous individual, joint and collective works, the majority published either in the Princeton University Press series of Studies in Political Development or in the Little, Brown Series in Comparative Politics, which had Almond, Coleman and Pye as series editors. Between 1963 and 1966 studies were published in the Princeton series on the specific issue and policy areas of communications, bureaucracy, education, culture, and parties, along with a collection on political modernization in Japan and Turkey.' During the same period Almond and Verba published The Civic Culture outside the Studies in Political Development series,4 and successive efforts were made to develop a functional framework for analysis.5 Three comparative historical collections addressing the 'crisis' model of development, drawing on work also begun in the early 1960s, appeared in the 1970s, along with a volume edited by historical sociologist Charles Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 355 Tilly, published in the Studies in Political Development series, but of a different character to the main political development effort." At the same time Huntington, outside the political development 'school' but central to its trajectory, made three significant critical interventions on the themes of political decay, order and change.7 By the mid-1970s political development theory appeared to have run out of steam, and to be giving way to competing approaches. In the late 1980s, however, its architects regained their prominence. Between 1988 and 1994 Huntington, Pye and Verba each became President of the American Political Science Association, and a spate of publications declared the enduring vitality of the political development approach and its relevance to contemporary processes of democratization." Political development theory was back, and it took the form of a political project for the dissemination of democracy as first elaborated in the 1960s. Core Ideas The core idea of political development theory was that the pressure for mass participation in the 'new states' was both irresistible, and likely to outrun the capacity of governments to channel and control it. Theorists of political development feared that the new states would prove unable to cope with pressure for change, and sought to devise appropriate policies to contain and control the upsurge of participation which they thought was inevitable. They saw modernization as unavoidable, and in the long run desirable, but driven forward in the new states more by external forces than by internal evolution. The new states, as traditional or transitional societies, lacked the attributes of modernity yet were exposed to its destabilizing influence as the global effects of modernization impacted upon political structures and attitudes which were unprepared for them. In these circumstances, enormous practical and theoretical efforts were needed if dangerous instability was to be avoided. They were eager to discover, in Pye's words, 'how democratic values and modern political institutions can be most readily transferred to new environments', but this was not seen as an easy enterprise.1' Furthermore, the task was made urgent by the pressure of demands for greater participation across the Third World, and by the powerful challenge from Marxist-Leninism. It was to be achieved, if at all, by limiting the political consequences of social and economic modernization. The context in which the theory of political development emerged, then, was one in which the identification of widespread aspirations for participation, global competition for political loyalty, and a resulting need to promote the adoption of Western institutions, coexisted with an awareness 356 DEMOCRATIZATION Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 of the difficulty of establishing such institutions in states which had not experienced the institutional and social developments which had preceded them in the West. The root problem, as perceived in the 1950s, lay in unresolved cultural conflicts arising out of the uneven impact of Western influence on traditional societies which were facing abrupt processes of change."' As Pye later put it, with his customary brutal frankness: people in the new countries aspire to have things which are in no way consistent with their fundamental cultural patterns; . . . politically, they want their societies quickly to possess all the attributes of the modern nation-state. The time has clearly arrived for those who value free institutions to face up to the very real problems of the appropriate strategies and doctrines which might facilitate the process of nation building in the new countries." In responding to this challenge Pye and others aspired not only to understand but also to influence the politics of those states by direct academic intervention on behalf of foreign elites and US interests abroad. Pye urged students of international communication 'to shift their emphasis from . . . the problems of communicating the policies and the image of the United States to the emerging countries to the problems of domestic communications within these countries',i: while Almond and Verba offered the balanced blend of participation and deference to elite and governmental authority which made up the 'civic culture' as a solution to 'the central question of public policy in the next decades'." At the same time, the theorists of political development were as concerned to contribute to new theory as they were to address the issue of international public policy. In this area the most significant influence was not modernization theory, but the 'behavioural revolution', which began at the University of Chicago, where Almond had been a graduate student for a decade before the Second World War. When the theorists of political development offered policy advice on mass participation they drew directly on the findings of behavioural analyses of politics in the United States, which revealed that the average citizen had little interest in politics, little knowledge of the issues raised at election time, a weak commitment to voting, and virtually no record of political participation of any other kind. These findings led the behaviourists to question the relevance of the idea of the citizen in a liberal democracy as a 'rational activist', and to expect and endorse as appropriate a lower level of involvement.14 The theorists of political development quickly embraced this new empirical and normative orthodoxy as they turned their attention to the Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 357 new states, and when they endorsed the idea of the adoption in the new states of the institutions of Western democracy, they advocated not unbridled activism, but rather the limited and elite-led pattern of participation understood to be the norm in the United States. Influences from other principal sources - the theory of modernization as drawn from Weber by Parsons and Shils, anthropological approaches to political culture, and the concept of the 'political system' developed by Easton were combined in various manners within the framework provided by the empirical findings and elitist bias of behaviourism. The constant element was an insistence that the transfer of democratic institutions to the Third World was inherently problematic, and it was therefore essential to identify and build in mechanisms which would enhance governmental and elite authority from the start. It was this that conferred unity upon the basic set of ideas which underlay political development theory: that the global and domestic forces of modernization were too strong to be resisted; that established national political cultures were deeply embedded, and resistant to rapid change; that political systems had their own internal coherence and logic; that elites and masses (leaders and citizens) had different characteristics and roles; and that in the ideal citizen activism was tempered by the influence of traditional, non-political ties and the acceptance of governmental and elite authority. Within the analytical framework provided by behaviourism and cold war conservatism, political development theory drew upon modernization theory, but at the same time it engaged in a critical dialogue with it. Almond, Pye and Huntington all drew upon the idea of modernization as a long-term process of rationalization, secularization and structural differentiation, and compared 'Western' and 'non-Western' political systems in ways which contrasted 'modern' and 'traditional' patterns of behaviour. However, they emphatically rejected the polarization of the characteristics of tradition and modernity, and the suggestion that political development either implied or required the modernization of all aspects of politics. Almond's first full account of the functional approach, published in 1960, was founded on an extended critique of modernization theory. It argued that all political systems were mixed, and that 'certain kinds of political structure which we have usually considered to be peculiar to the primitive are also to be found in modern political systems, and not as marginal institutions, but having a high functional performance'." Pye similarly argued that in dealing with central problems of the political process it was not possible to rely upon 'the distinctions between "modern" and "traditional", urban and rural, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which the social theorists have found useful in categorizing social Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 358 DEMOCRATIZATION and economic systems', as 'the processes by which interests and values are expressed and then combined to give form and substance to political life represent in all cases a fusion of those traits of behavior customarily identified as both "modern" and "traditional"'."1 For all the differences he claimed between himself and the political development theorists, Huntington took a similar view, arguing that 'modernization and social mobilization . . . tend to produce political decay unless steps are taken to moderate or restrict its impact on political consciousness and political involvement'." In their diagnosis of the 'problem' of political development, Almond, Huntington and Pye shared a common perspective. They availed themselves of modernization theory in order to characterize the challenge facing new states; they saw the forces of modernization as posing problems at the level of the political system; and they wished to retain and strengthen elements of 'traditional' political culture, or introduce other means of control, in order to provide stability. The adoption of a modernization perspective did not lead to support for the wholesale dissemination of 'modern' values throughout the political system. Rather, the political system was required to absorb the pressures generated by the mismatch between modernization pressing in from outside, and pre-modern internal social and psychological attributes. By and large, this was to be achieved by retaining elements of 'traditional' political culture where possible, and by adopting policies or devising institutions which were capable of substituting new constraints for old ones where necessary. In sum, none of the protagonists of political development theory adopted a unilinear theory of modernization. They saw the process as problematic from the start; they were all primarily concerned with the dislocations it produced, and directly concerned with public policy in the developing world as a result, precisely because the dissemination of Western democratic institutions was always viewed with apprehension. It is quite wrong, therefore, to talk at this point of 'faith that the political institutions of liberal democracy could and should be imparted to the Third World',1" or of 'the early prevailing assumption . . . of a relatively unproblematic chain of causation from cultural modernisation to economic development to democracy'.'1" Every theorist of political development subscribed to a form of modernization theory, but none expected the process of modernization to produce modernized political systems characterized by harmonious relations between rational authority, differentiated structures, and mass participation, or Western political institutions which would foster democracy and guarantee stability. Rather, each saw modernization as a global Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 359 social and economic phenomenon creating problems with which theories and policies of political development would have to deal. And in formulating their theories and policies, they were strongly influenced by a shared set of conservative values drawn from a variety of sources among which the behavioural approach was dominant. These centred on a single imperative: the need to contain and control the demands for mass participation to which modernization gave rise. These views led to the promotion of a model of democratization and of democracy founded upon elite leadership, conscious efforts to limit the expectations and demands of the masses, and the fostering of political cultures in which 'modern' and 'traditional' elements were judiciously blended. The first requirement was that the public political sphere should be insulated from direct social pressure. For Almond, a core idea of the functional approach was that the necessary degree of institutional autonomy required good boundary maintenance between the polity and society, and between the particular structures within the political system itself.. Otherwise societies would be plagued by 'frequent eruptions of unprocessed claims without controlled direction into the political system'.3I This was to be avoided not simply by the presence of interest groups, political parties, and mass media of some kind, but by specific types of these institutions: associational interest groups, secular, pragmatic, bargaining parties, and free and neutral mass media such as typified the homogeneous political cultures of the United Kingdom, the old Commonwealth and the United States.21 Huntington was equally insistent upon the need for such institutional autonomy: political institutionalization, in the sense of autonomy, means the development of political organizations and procedures that are not simply expressions of the interests of particular social groups. A political organization that is the instrument of a social group family, clan, class-lacks autonomy and institutionalization.22 In a developed political system, Huntington argued, 'the autonomy of the system is protected by mechanisms that restrict and moderate the impact of new groups', and 'the political system assimilates new social forces without sacrificing its institutional integrity'.23 He envisaged a three-stage process of political modernization in which power was first concentrated in the hands of a modernizing elite, then expanded to admit new groups, and finally dispersed (at some indeterminate point in the future) to allow a degree of pluralism similar to that endorsed by Almond. The second requirement for democratization was that elites should enjoy authority over non-elites. This was the central theme of The Civic 360 DEMOCRATIZATION Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 Culture, in which the 'civic culture' itself, with its fusion of modern and traditional elements, was endorsed as being 'appropriate for maintaining a stable and effective democratic process'.24 In a smoothly functioning civic culture, elites could be both authoritative, and responsive to citizen demands: On the one hand, a democratic government must govern; it must have power and leadership and make decisions. On the other hand, it must be responsible to its citizens. For if democracy means anything it means that in some way governmental elites must respond to the desires and demands of citizens.25 The model democracy, then, as described by political development theorists in the 1960s, was one in which authoritative elites inhabited an insulated and autonomous public political sphere, and were sufficiently responsive to the limited demands of appropriately socialized masses to enjoy their support and hence maintain stability. However, such situations proved to be sufficiently rare in the developing world to raise doubts as to the practical significance of the model democracy which they described. The Lack of Readiness of the Developing World When the theorists of political development turned their attention to the politics of the 'new states' in the 1950s, the situation they discerned was the polar opposite to the ideal of an autonomous public political sphere, elite authority, and a citizenry inspired by civic consciousness. Kahin, Pauker and Pye listed seven 'distinctive characteristics of the political process in non-Western countries' which rendered politics both unstable and unpredictable: a high rate of recruitment of new elements into political activity; a lack of consensus about the legitimate forms and purposes of political activities; a prevalence of charismatic leaders; a low degree of integration in the action of participants, particularly between village and national level; a high degree of substitutability of roles; a dearth of formally and explicitly organized interests; and a tendency for unorganized and generally inarticulate segments of society, such as peasants and urban masses, to involve themselves in politics in a discontinuous, sudden, erratic and often violent way.2" In 1958 Pye expanded the list he first proposed with Kahin and Pauker to 17 key features, in an effort to build a generalized model of the political process common to non-Western societies. Its central assertion was that 'in non-Western societies the political sphere is not sharply differentiated Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 361 from the spheres of social and personal relations', and that as a result 'the affective or expressive aspect of politics tends to override the problemsolving or public-policy aspect of politics'.27 These broad characteristics were reflected in a number of ways in political institutions, activity and leadership. Organized interest groups were lacking; parties represented total ways of life rather than specific principles or policy objectives; oppositions tended to be seen as seeking to overthrow the system rather than proposing limited alternatives; there were few 'brokers' between elites and masses; leaders generally represented communities rather than ideas; they tended to be charismatic; they enjoyed a high degree of freedom in determining strategy and tactics; and in the absence of differentiated publics they normally confined themselves to broad generalized statements on domestic issues, adopting clearly defined positions only on international issues. Cutting through the detail, two key ideas ran through these formulations: first, the 'non-Western political process' was characterized by the absence of a separate and relatively autonomous public political sphere, and as a result policy-making was erratic, irrational, and pervaded by private interests; and second, elites in the developing world were failing to control mass political activity and channel it into appropriate areas. Despite Huntington's later boast to have 'quietly dropped' the term 'political development',2" the substance of the diagnosis set out in Political Order in Changing Societies was essentially the same. He did not so much drop it as redefine it in institutional terms. He regarded the extent to which the political sphere was differentiated from other spheres as making the fundamental difference between the 'civic polities' of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union and the 'corrupt' or 'praetorian' polities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Civic polities were consensual political communities with effective political institutions enjoying high levels of legitimacy and 'recognizable and stable patterns of institutional authority appropriate for their level of participation', while corrupt or 'praetorian' polities were distinguished by 'the fragility and fleetingness of all forms of authority V uncontrolled recruitment to political positions, the pursuit of personal and social purposes within 'public' institutions, the lack of both intermediary structures between leaders and masses and civil associations, and the absence of consensus. In other words, Huntington's 'corrupt polity' was none other than Pye's 'non-Western political process'. For all the theorists of political development, the developing areas lacked the essential social, structural and institutional prerequisites for stable democracy, and it was with this finding before them that they set about the attempt to build a theory of political development. 362 DEMOCRATIZATION Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 The Failure of Political Development Theory In the 1960s and 1970s, three separate attempts were made to produce a theory of political development, from functional, cultural and comparative historical principles respectively. Each attempt ended in failure and abandonment. And throughout the period covered by these endeavours the initial object of enquiry - the political process in the developing world and the prospects for the internationalization of democracy - steadily receded from view as attention turned increasingly to the developed countries themselves. At the end of this period, therefore, the prospects for a viable theory of political development addressed to the developing states of the Third World seemed remote. Functionalism The basic idea behind the functional approach, stated in the opening pages of The Politics of Developing Areas, was a simple one: all political systems perform the same core set of functions, although these functions may be performed by different structures from one society to the next."' This first sketch of the approach was followed by a more elaborate version six years later. Judging the framework of analysis presented in The Politics of Developing Areas (the identification of the seven core functions of political socialization and recruitment, interest articulation, interest aggregation, and political communication, rule-making, rule application and rule adjudication) to be excessively static. Almond and Powell attempted to produce a more dynamic model in Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. Here they introduced the idea of the capabilities of political systems and their development over time, defined the functions of political socialization and recruitment as developmental processes, and redefined the remaining six functions as conversion processes internal to the political system. They argued that within this framework political development could be explained and predicted by relating system challenges to system responses, and would be expressed in the dimensions of structural differentiation and cultural secularization. Despite the energy devoted to theory development, the results were meagre. The case studies of regions of the developing world in The Politics of Developing Areas made no effort to apply the full functional framework, while Coleman's conclusion, as he admitted, consisted largely of an attempt to classify independent Third World states in accordance with a typology of political systems." In Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach the focus shifted dramatically away from the new states, towards contrasts between primitive and modern systems, POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 363 Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 and between one modern system and another. In their conclusion, Almond and Powell dealt at length with comparisons between Britain, France and the United States, and between Western states and the Soviet Union. When they turned their attention to the 'premobilized modern systems' which characterized the new states, they argued that any classification was provisional, thereby admitting the failure of the theory to cope with such cases: When one calls a political system at this stage of development 'democratic' or 'authoritarian' one refers not to a functioning political system, but rather to what might be thought of as a 'stance' at the beginning of a developmental process, and one that may change quickly and without much prior warning.'2 The effort to produce a functional theory of political development ended, therefore, with a concentration on the politics of the developed countries, and a recognition that the framework devised could not cope with the politics of the developing countries themselves. Political Culture Efforts to produce a theory of political development from the perspective of political culture proved no more successful. They began with Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture, which set out to use modern quantitative survey methods and analysis to identify the attitudinal underpinnings of successful democracies, and devise ways of diffusing them through other cultures: If we are to come closer to understanding the problems of the diffusion of democratic culture, we have to be able to specify the content of what has to be diffused, to develop appropriate measures for it, to discover its quantitative incidence and demographic distribution in countries with a wide range of experience with democracy. With such knowledge we can speculate intelligently about 'how much of what' must be present in a country before democratic institutions take root in congruent attitudes and expectations.11 The elaborate analytical framework identified parochial, subject and participant orientations and allegiant, apathetic and alienated political cultures, and prefaced a detailed examination of the cases of Britain, Germany, Italy, Mexico (a last-minute replacement for Sweden) and the United States. At its conclusion, however, Almond and Verba found themselves in an impasse. They were obliged to acknowledge that the problem of how to create a civic culture in new nations took them 'well Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 364 DEMOCRATIZATION beyond the scope' of their data, as 'a slow political development may foster a civic culture, but what the new nations of the world lack is the time for this gradual development'.u The theory of the 'civic culture' had not produced a theory of political development; on the contrary, it suggested that such a theory was impossible. No further sustained attempt was made to develop a formal theory of political development out of a theory of political culture. In 1965 Pye and Verba's edited collection on Political Culture and Political Development in the Princeton series dropped the idea of using a systematic quantitative approach. Pye suggested that 'it seemed best to emphasize more the existing richness of area studies than the potential advantages of systematic schemata for defining and classifying political cultures'.15 The 'civic culture' as a model or a goal was also abandoned, with Verba arguing that 'the types of political attitudes that developed within the older democracies may be neither feasible nor the most useful to late-comers to the democratic scene . . . What led to stable democracy in an earlier age may be less relevant today'."" The attempt to identify universal attitudinal correlates of stable democracy now gave way to a focus on elite-mass relations and conscious manipulation and control. Verba argued that in countries as different as Germany, Egypt and India, 'with a great deal of sophistication and with a great deal of self-consciousness, elites . . . have taken upon themselves the task of remaking the basic belief systems in their nations as part of their overall task of nation building'." The German model of post-war reconstruction of the polity was adopted in place of the supposedly consensual but now historically obsolete British model, and the whole of the analysis flowed directly from the assumption that the objective of political elites was to manipulate the political beliefs of the masses in order to win their commitment to elite rule. The attempt to find a basis for a universal theory of political development had collapsed again, this time into a restatement of elite theory. Comparative History The failure of attempts to produce functional and cultural theories of political development led by different routes to the comparative historical approach, sketched out in the early 1960s, but emerging as the dominant line of enquiry only in the 1970s. This approach focused on common crises arising from a shared 'development syndrome', and contrasting patterns of development arising from the varying sequences in which these crises were encountered and resolved. It began to take shape in workshops held in 1962 and 1963, and figured as a minor theme in the work of Almond, Powell, Verba and Huntington thereafter, but did not emerge fully as a Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 365 distinctive approach for nearly a decade, when Binder, Coleman, LaPalombara, Pye, Verba and Weiner jointly published Crises and Sequences in Political Development in 1971. This collection, seen as an exercise in 'collective theory building in the social sciences', was complemented in 1978 by Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States, a set of detailed historical case studies edited by Grew. In its final form, the 'crises' approach centred on the five crises of identity, legitimation, penetration, participation and distribution, and attention centred on the question of whether the different crises were encountered and resolved in a sequence over time, or whether they recurred, or coincided in time. In the 1971 collection Coleman attempted to relate the 'crises' of development to the 'development syndrome', described in terms of capacity, differentiation, and equality,1" while Verba spoke of a continuing but as yet unmet need to develop 'a coherent and interdependent set of propositions' and 'testable hypotheses'.w The approach subsequently gave rise to a number of historical investigations, particularly in the 1978 collection, but failed, once again, to provide a sound basis for a theory of political development. Summing up the efforts in the first volume, Verba commented that 'the relationship between the notions of equality, capacity and differentiation on the one hand and the five crises of development on the other is not completely clear'.4" Opting for the term 'problem area' rather than crisis, he confessed that while the five problem areas identified seemed to be important, he could 'find no clear logical structure among them nor any warrant for considering the list exhaustive'.41 • The crises model fared no better at the hands of the historians who applied it to country case studies in the 1978 volume. By this time the focus had shifted entirely, as it did in the effort to construct a functional model, to Europe and the United States. Reflecting on the enterprise from the perspective of the group of historians who had undertaken the project, Grew reported that his collaborators 'recognized that they were not dealing with anything so grand as an integrated social scientific theory, tightly woven with prescribed regularities and predicted causes', opined that the crises 'are really five categories of crucial social and political relationships that invite discussion of who shares in what way iti what aspects of politics at any given time', and concluded that 'for the most part we have written as if the Committee's aim had merely been to provide a framework for comparative analysis of European political history'.42 He reported scepticism with the Committee's idea that political change had a direction towards greater equality, capacity and differentiation, Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 366 DEMOCRATIZATION declaring that he and his collaborators made little use of the categories, 'have not found the empirical measures of them we once imagined',43 and came to the conclusion that the specified crises threw little light on the connections between politics on the one hand, and geography, economic and military competition, the effect of foreign influences, the role of ideas, social structure, economic organization and culture on the other. In addition, he noted, the concept of political crisis itself had proved impossible to relate to developmental change. In a wry comment on the project he concluded that 'the quantitative indicators we do not have in forms that facilitate comparison will provide analytical power only when combined with theories not yet elaborated'.** Overall, he reported that 'the concept of "crises" being "resolved" has faded; one is merely looking at problems that at a given time are (or seem) more pressing'.4' Whatever else it may have achieved, then, the five crises model did not lead to a workable theory of political development. In summary, three different efforts to find a basis for a robust theory of political development were pursued in the 1960s and 1970s, and each of the three ended with the major protagonists admitting that their efforts left them without one. Given this record, the interim assessment offered by Almond and Mundt in 1973, after close on 20 years of vain pursuit, may stand as an epitaph for the entire exercise: The reader in search of hard theory, of hypotheses deduced from axioms and subjected to rigorous tests of proof, will find little comfort in this analytical framework and our collection of case studies. If anything, our study demonstrates the high costs of moving prematurely and without the benefit of theoretical imagination and historical knowledge into an imitation of hard science.46 As we shall see, however, the failure of efforts to produce theory to live up to expectations had the perverse effect of reinforcing the core ideas at the heart of the political development project, and prompting their condensation into policy advice. From Theoretical Bankruptcy to the Politics of Pragmatism As we have seen, the attempts to produce functional and cultural theories of political development in the 1960s succeeded only in persuading their authors that the developing countries were as resistant to theoretical encapsulation as they were to democracy. In these circumstances, Almond, Verba, and their collaborators were reduced to restating the character of the dilemma at the heart of the challenge of political development, and POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 367 Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 seeking to devise responses that would meet the interests of local elites and their Western allies. What emerged was a politics of pragmatism that left no space for democracy. As a result, the commitment of the theorists of political development to the internationalization of democracy soon withered. As early as 1963, Almond and Verba concluded in The Civic Culture, 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.47 The outcome, in both Political Culture and Political Development and Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach, was that the discussion of the developing countries was disconnected from the question of democracy, while 'prudential rules' for survival were offered for the guidance of elites. Introducing Political Culture and Political Development, Pye calmly announced the adoption of different analytical perspectives for 'more advanced' and 'less developed' countries respectively, arguing that while in the former 'the principal issue becomes one of whether democracy will survive', in the latter 'there is a fundamental crisis of leadership . . . and attention is directed more to the elite cultures'.4* Emphasis was placed upon the establishment of elite authority over nonelites, rather than the introduction of democratic institutions, and positive or negative lessons in the art of establishing elite authority were drawn from individual country case studies. Ward held out Japan as an example of successful elite-led modernization in which a unified and progressive elite had overseen a gradual process of change, deliberately cultivating national symbols, and using the school system as 'an active agency of political indoctrination'.49 Overall, Ward argued, 'the general policy of early governments was to give as little as possible as slowly as possible in terms of institutions which would make effective even limited popular participation in the political decision-making process',5" while the Liberal-Democratic party continued to exploit 'traditional control devices' centred on personal clientelism to secure the loyalty and electoral support of the rural population. Judged against such criteria, the Egyptian, Mexican and Turkish elites were held to have done well, while those of India and Ethiopia had been respectively too 'modern' and too 'traditional' to strike the right balance. Verba's conclusion took up the same general theme, but moved from the need for elites to devote themselves to 'the task of remaking the basic belief systems in their nations' to identify the core of the problem facing Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 368 DEMOCRATIZATION such elites.51 Given the absolute requirement for elite control, 'if nonelites do not in some way identify with and have confidence in political elites, the elites will have to exact obedience by more forceful and perhaps more destabilizing means'.52 But elite attempts to mobilize the population and to build legitimacy were likely to aggravate demands upon the government. The result was a problem of overload, as 'expectations of social improvement involve expectations that this will be accomplished through the activities of the government'.53 In the conclusion to Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach, Almond and Powell similarly abandoned the pursuit of democratic theory, and advanced a step further in the creation of a set of prudential rules for aspiring elites. There, the attempt to sketch out the possibilities for a theory of political change was abandoned before the case of 'premobilized modern systems' was addressed, and Almond and Powell turned instead to the advocacy of strategies of leadership, or 'political investment strategies'. Returning to the dilemma facing the leaders of new states in the context of the explosion of participation and 'the image of the modern and democratic state which, given the social and cultural conditions of their societies, is unattainable in the immediate future',54 and noting the appeal of the Marxist-Leninist alternative, they now offered specific pragmatic advice to rulers in new states. They should stress state and nation-building in the first stages over participation and welfare; preserve a limited degree of pluralism in order to keep options open; make compensatory investments to cope with the disruptive consequences of the modernization process; and pursue complementary investment strategies in education, industrialization, family structure and organization, and urban and community planning. Long before the effort to create a convincing theory of political development entered its final death throes in the 1970s, its exponents had stepped aside from any commitment either to democracy itself or to the development of theory, and fallen back on their core belief in the need for elite leadership and the containment of popular demands. The Democratization Model Reborn At the beginning of the quest for a theory of political development the desire to offer relevant policy advice went hand in hand with the desire to contribute to the theoretical development of political science. By the mid1960s, however, the theorists of political development had detached the question of pragmatic policy guidance for elites in new states from the effort at theory-building. Elites in the developing countries in the same Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 369 period regularly found themselves unable to secure their interests through democracy, and opted, to borrow a form of words from Verba, to exact obedience by more forceful means. They did so with the enthusiastic backing of Western governments and the tacit and sometimes overt support of the theorists of political development. The literature on democratization that has proliferated over the last decade takes up where the literature of the 1960s left off. Devoid of theoretical ambition, and overwhelmingly concerned with pragmatic policy advice to aspiring political leaders, it faithfully reproduces, in its general orientation and in matters of detail, the conservative elitism which typified the approach of the political development theorists of the 1960s. The journals are now thick with the advocacy of 'political crafting' or 'political engineering', statements of ideological commitment to democracy have replaced searches for theoretical understanding, and old campaigners and new recruits have mustered in equal numbers to the flag. Huntington has encapsulated current wisdom into no fewer than 27 'guidelines for democratizes' that effectively codify the installation of competitive elitism, prominent among them the injunctions to 'keep expectations low as to how far change can go,' 'encourage development of a responsible, moderate opposition party', 'cultivate generals', 'mobilize supporters in the United States', and 'resist the demands of leaders and groups on your side that either delay the negotiating process or threaten the core interest of your negotiating partner'." Pye has cheerfully admitted, a propos of the once heady dreams of the behavioural revolution, that 'our findings have appallingly short half-lives', and found solace in the discipline's 'sensitivity to problems and developments in the real world of public affairs'.* Diamond, Linz and Lipset similarly concede that there is no sign of 'a single, all-encompassing theory, and that it will be some time (if ever) before the field produces one', and console themselves with the observation that the dearth of acceptable theory about democracy is counterbalanced by a gratifyingly large amount of empirical evidence of it.57 Against this backdrop the model of democracy they endorse - the sharp separation of politics and economics, the gradual extension of mass participation under elite control, and the central importance of appropriate leadership, institutionalized parties, and organized associational groups - could have been taken (and often is taken) point by point from the literature reviewed above. There are two significant differences, even so, between the literatures of the 1960s and the present. Where once theory and public policy were meant to be mutually supportive, the celebration of policy relevance and success now makes up for confessed 370 DEMOCRATIZATION theoretical failure. And where the theorists of the 1960s found themselves in an impasse in which they could formulate a model of democracy but felt inhibited from recommending its implementation, those of today are avid exponents of the dissemination of democracy. Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 Conclusion It remains, then, to address this teasing conundrum. How is it that while the effort to build a theory of political development pursued under the auspices of the New York SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics experienced successive failures and ended in apparently comprehensive defeat in the 1970s, its central ideas live on in current approaches to democracy and political development? Four reasons suggest themselves. First, political development theory had a central concern with the problematic character of mass participation in the developing world that was always independent from attempts to produce a suitable theoretical framework through which to sanctify it. The same central concern remains paramount today. Second, it addressed this concern from a consistent analytical perspective which has survived intact. Central to this analytical perspective was a constant emphasis upon the need for an autonomous political sphere insulated from popular pressure, and for elite leadership and control. Third, the major obstacles to conservative democratization in the developing world which were identified in the 1950s and 1960s have been reduced or eliminated, making it possible for the policy goals of the political development theorists to be promoted with some success. Finally, the question of the failure of political development theory may be by no means as simple as it appears at first sight. It is possible to discern the half-emergence of a coherent theory informing the changing discourse on political development, but it is a theory of contained representative democracy in a capitalist society which can maintain a set of efficacious normative fictions only if it does not speak its name. From the start, political development theory addressed the issue of political participation in the developing world from the perspective of the interests of the leading capitalist states of the West. It did so, too, in the light of the emphasis emerging within the behavioural approach upon the need for and the normative acceptability of elite control and relatively limited popular participation. Its consistent message was that popular participation could and should be strictly controlled and the demands of the majority deflected and contained by institutional constraints and elite control if stable democracy was to be achieved. Hence its constant programme: institutional autonomy and elite dominance. Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 371 The democratic institutions of the West were not valued so much for their own sake as for the stability they might potentially deliver. However, in the 1950s and 1960s the circle could never be squared, as every line of research that was pursued suggested that there were real obstacles to the achievement of the objective of pro-Western political stability through the export of Western political models. Political development theorists were perfectly aware of these obstacles, which were identified over and over again as the main elements of the international political economy of the post-war world: the global confrontation between capitalism and socialism, the expectation throughout the world that the state should play an interventionist role in remedying social deprivation and inequality, and the enormous pressure for a swift response to social needs of populations throughout the developing world. Despite being aware of them, however, they were capable of doing little more than recognizing them as apparently insoluble problems. The relevance and the apparent realism of the agenda of political development theory today arises from the simple fact- again interminably celebrated in the literature - that these key elements of international political economy have been reversed. The socialist alternative appears to have been removed from the agenda; the tendency towards increasing state intervention has been reversed; and the expectations of the majority populations of the world have been effectively lowered, both by internal failure and by international pressure. From the perspective of the global situation, it is now possible to conceive of conservative democratization of the kind envisaged by the theorists of political development without it appearing immediately as an impossible dream. From the perspective of Western elites and interests, the political project at the heart of political development theory is today more consistent, more coherent, and more realizable than it ever was in the days when such efforts were expended to develop a theory of political development. In these circumstances of immediate practical opportunity, the apparently comprehensive failure of efforts to theorize political development is genuinely of little moment. It should be noted, though, that the mainspring driving political development theory throughout has been an implicit if barely understood theory of political stability in capitalist society. Functional theory rightly centred upon the need for an autonomous political sphere, but lost its way as a result of its effort to theorize this need, which is specific to capitalist society, as part of a project for a universal theory of politics. The political culture approach centred its attention on the question of elite supremacy over non-elites, but interpreted the question of legitimacy as an effect of individual psychic orientations to political objects, rather than as a Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 372 DEMOCRATIZATION necessary part of bourgeois hegemony, and therefore social rather than cultural-psychological in its character and dynamics. Finally, the comparative historical approach brought together in its focus on identity, legitimacy, penetration, participation and distribution all the elements required for an examination of the themes of nationbuilding and state-building, and a theory of the state and politics in capitalist society, but, having abandoned the systemic approach that was the only redeeming feature of functionalism, was unable to arrive at an integrated understanding. A benevolent observer would take the view that these meanderings were the product of genuine confusion. But the failure to relate the character of contemporary political systems to the structural characteristics of capitalism and its current state of evolution as a global system also serves its purpose. NOTES 1. For an application of these ideas to Latin America, to which this article may be seen as prefatory, see Paul Cammack, 'Democratization and Citizenship in Latin America', in Geraint Parry and Michael Moran (eds.), Democracy and Democratization (London: Macmillan, 1994). 2. See for example Gabriel A. Almond, Taylor Cole and Roy C. Macridis. 'A Suggested Research Strategy in Western European Government and Politics', American Political Science Review, Vol.49, No.4 (1955), pp. 1042-49; George McT. Kahin, Guy Pauker and Lucian W. Pye, 'Comparative Politics in Non-Western Countries', American Political Science Review, Voi.49, No.4 (1955), pp. 1022-41; Gabriel A. Almond, 'Comparative Political Systems', Journal of Politics, Vol. 18, No.3 (1956), pp.391-409; and Lucian W. Pye, 'The Non-Western Political Process', Journal of Politics, Vol.20, No.3 (1958), pp.468-86. 3. Lucian W. Pye (ed.), Communications and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); Joseph LaPalombara (ed.), Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); James S. Coleman (ed.), Education and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner (eds.), Parties and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 4. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). 5. Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman (eds.), The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, I960); Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr.. Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1966). 6. Leonard Binder, James S. Coleman, Joseph LaPalombara, Lucian W. Pye, Sidney Verba and Myron Weiner, Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Gabriel A. Almond, Scott C. Flanagan, and Robert J. Mundt (eds.), Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973); Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Raymond Grew (ed.), Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND DEMOCRACY 373 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 7. Samuel P. Huntington, 'Political Development and Political Decay', World Politics, Vol.17, No.3 (1965), pp.386-430; Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); and 'The Change to Change: Modernization, Development and Politics', Comparative Politics, Vol.3, No.3 (1971), pp.283-322. 8. See, for example, Myron Weiner, 'Empirical Democratic Theory and the Transition from Authoritarianism to Democracy', PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol.20, No.4 (1987), pp.861-66; Gabriel A. Almond, 'Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science', PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol.21, No.4 (1988), pp.828-42; Samuel P. Huntington, 'One Soul at a Time: Political Science and Political Reform', American Political Science Review, Vol.82, No.1 (1988), pp.3-10; Lucian W. Pye, 'Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism', American Political Science Review, Vol.84, No.l (1990), pp.3-19; Gabriel A. Almond, Scott C. Flanagan and Robert J. Mundt, 'Crisis, Choice, and Change in Retrospect', Government and Opposition, Vol.27, No.3 (1992), pp.345-67. 9. Lucian W. Pye, 'Introduction: Political Culture and Political Development', in Pye and Verba,pp.3-26,p.5. 10. Kahin, Pauker and Pye, p.1023. 11. Pye, Communications, pp. 12-13. 12. Ibid., p.14. 13. Almond and Verba, p.3. 14. Ibid., pp.31-2. 15. Gabriel A. Almond, 'Introduction: A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics', in Almond and Coleman, pp.3-64, p.20 (emphasis added). 16. Pye, Communications, p.18. 17. Huntington, Political Order, p.86. 18. Richard Higgott, Political Development Theory: The Contemporary Debate (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983), p.9. 19. Vicky Randall and Robin Theobald, Political Change and Underdevelopment: A Critical Introduction to Third World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 13. 20. Almond, 'A Functional Approach', p.35. 21. Ibid., p.46. 22. Huntington, Political Order, p.20. 23. lbid., pp.21-2. 24. Almond and Verba, p.493. 25. Ibid., p.476. 26. Kahin, Pauker and Pye, pp.1024-327. 27. Pye, 'Non-Western Political Process', pp.469, 483. 28. Huntington, 'Change to Change', fn.42, p.304. 29. Huntington, Political Order, p.82. 30. Almond, 'Functional Approach', p.11. 31. James S. Coleman, 'Conclusion: The Political Systems of the Developing Areas', in Almond and Coleman, pp.532-76, esp. p.576. 32. Almond and Powell, pp.313-14. 33. Almond and Verba, pp.9-10. 34. Ibid., pp.500-501. 35. Pye and Verba, p.13. 36. Sidney Verba, 'Germany: The Remaking of Political Culture', in Pye and Verba, PoliticalCulture,pp.130-70, p.134. 37. Sidney Verba, 'Comparative Political Culture', in Pye and Verba, Political Culture, pp.512-60, pp.520-21. 38. James S. Coleman, 'The Development Syndrome: Differentiation-Equality-Capacity', in Binder et al., Crises and Sequences, pp.73-100. 39. Sidney Verba, 'Sequences and Development', in Binder et al., Crises and Sequences, pp.283-316, pp.282, 316. 40. Ibid., p.291, fn.7. Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 00:13 04 May 2016 374 DEMOCRATIZATION 41. Ibid., p.299. 42. Raymond Grew, 'The Crises and their Sequences', in Grew, Crises of Political Development pp.3-40, pp.8-9. 43. Ibid., p.9. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p.l4. 46. Gabriel A. Almond and Robert J. Mundt, 'Crisis, Choice, and Change: Some Tentative Conclusions', in Almond, Flanagan and Mundt, Crisis, Choice, and Change, pp.61949, p.619. 47. Almond and Verba, p.504. 48. Pye, 'Political Culture and Political Development', p. 15. 49. Robert E. Ward, 'Japan: The Continuity of Modernization', in Pye and Verba, Political Culture, pp.27-82, p.45. 50. Ibid., p.76. 51. Verba, 'Comparative Political Culture', p.521. 52. Ibid., p.536. 53. Ibid., p.539. 54. Almond and Powell, p.327. 55. Samuel P. Huntington, 'How Countries Democratize', Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, No.4 (1991-2), pp.579-616; pp.601-2, 607-8, 616. 56. Pye, 'Political Science', pp.4-5. 57. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol.4: Latin America (London: Adamantine Press, 1989), p.xiv.