007 Political Development Analytical and Normative Perspectives Gabriel A. Almond

Comparative Political Studies
http://cps.sagepub.com Political Development: Analytical and Normative Perspectives

Gabriel A. Almond Comparative Political Studies 1969; 1; 447 DOI: 10.1177/001041406900100401 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cps.sagepub.com
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POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
Analytical
and Normative
Perspectives
GABRIEL A. ALMOND
GABRIEL A. ALMOND is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. A past President of the American Political Science Association (1965-1966), Professor Almond is the co-author of Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966J and The Civil Culture (1963), as well as co-editor of The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960).
IS then need for impetuosity, confusion, and IF YOUTH be somewhat charitable in dealing with the theory of political developan excuse
error,
we
to
a special field of interest in political science it is hardly more than ten fifteen years old. It was the breakup of empire and the national explosion after World War II that provided the challenge. As political scientists moved into the unfamiliar ground of Asian and Middle Eastern traditionalism, African primitivism, and Latin American stagnation and instability, the approaches and vocabularies of the other social sciences thoroughly penetrated the field. It was not only the infancy of this new theoretical interest, the novelty of the problems, and the convergence in it of several different intellectual traditions and vocabularies, but perhaps even more, the powerful incentive somehow to come to grips with the problems of political development, which help account for its intellectual turgidity and much of the polemic that now engages people in it. It may be useful to dwell for a moment on the positive pay-offs of this new interest in political science. As we have observed the phenomena of the new and rapidly changing nations in recent years, and have sought to explain them and say something sensible about their future prospects, we have been drawn back to some of the fundamental questions of political theory. We have had to ask ourselves again what politics is; what are its varieties; what causes them to change; and how they affect and are affected by their environments.
ment. As
or
THE CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS As some of the pioneers in the study of the new nations moved into the field, it became clear that the existing conceptual schemes and vocabulary of political science would be inadequate to cope with problems of description and explanation of politically relevant patterns and processes. An Apter (1955, 1961) and 447
COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES
Coleman (1958) in Africa, a Pye (1962) and Riggs (1965) in Southeast Asia, a Ward (1959) in Japan, a Weiner (1962) and Frey (1965) in South Asia and in the Middle East, were compelled to reach into the cornucopias of sociological, anthropological, and psychological theory in order to describe the traditional and transitional phenomena they were observing, and to explain the difficulties being encountered by efforts to introduce modern political and legal institutions. Thus, as one goes through these writings, one encounters the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft dichotomy of Toennies, the concepts of traditionality, rationality, and charisma of Max Weber; the concept of functionality in Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown; the concepts of system and the pattern variables of Talcott Parsons; the notions of functional and structural requisites and prerequisites in Marion Levy; and other concepts and terms coming from
sociological theory. Psychology and psychoanalysis similarly entered into the conceptual schemes and vocabularies of some of the people working in this field; in particular, the work of Everett Hagen (1962), Lucian Pye (1962), and David McClelland (1961). The notions of servo-mechanism and feedback developed in cybernetics have entered into the conceptual vocabulary through the work of Karl Deutsch (1963) and David Easton (1965). More recently, as political scientists have sought to come to grips with the public policy aspects of political development, economic concepts have begun to effect our approaches and vocabularies. As in the biblical parable of the tower of Babel, political theory, like mankind in that primordial age, &dquo;had one language and few words&dquo; (Genesis 11:2). With this one language and few words, it had erected the &dquo;proud tower&dquo; of the supremacy of European and particularly Anglo-American institutions. And because of this great sin of pride, the Lord had come down, confused our language, and we could no longer understand one anothers speech (Genesis 11:7). It would seem to me that the principal challenge to political theory, at the present time, is to pull ourselves out of this conceptual confusion and find some common and acceptable ways of looking at the developmental aspects of political systems.
THE POLITICAL SYSTEM CONCEPT
Let me suggest some concepts on which I believe most of us can agree. First, the notion of a political system is probably here to stay. When David Eastons book, The Political System (1953), first appeared, I experienced one of those moments of intellectual liberation; when a concept comes along that gives ones thoughts an ordered structure. My early years as a practicing political scientist were in the great days of &dquo;separation of powers iconoclasm&dquo; when the &dquo;in&dquo; term
448
empirically oriented political scientists, who were studying &dquo;invisible government&dquo; or the informal aspects of politics, was the political process. The notion of political process, as it was expressed in the writings of such men as Pendleton Herring (1929), Elmer Schattschneider (1937), and Peter Odegard (1928), implied interaction and interdependence among the institutions and structures of politics, but the interdependence was treated bilaterally. One examined the relations between pressure groups and Congress, the bureaucracy, political parties and legislatures, or another might look at the relationships between the judiciary, and the legislative and executive processes. Process implied relationship and interaction, but not the full notions of multidirectional interaction and of equilibrium and disequilibrium which are implied in the
for the
concept of system.
The notion of system as elaborated in David Eastons first book simply for the acceptance of the view that the component parts of politics &dquo;tend to cohere and to be mutually related.... such phenomena form in other words a system which is part of the total social system and yet which, for purposes of analysis and research, is temporarily set apart&dquo; (1953). This was the notion that I was looking for, that somehow codified my own implicit paradigm of the interdependence of the components of politics. This concept made it possible for me to codify a substantial body of research which had been treating political, legislative, executive, administrative, and judicial actions, as interdependent elements in a broadly coherent process of conversion of demands into political system performances of one kind or another. This may sound quite tame and obvious these days, but I believe it
pressed
represented a genuine change in paradigm.

The concept of system
came
to David Easton via the work of Talcott Parsons.
Parsons system concept in elaborated form, first appears in his Toward a General Theory of Action (1951), which appeared a year or two before the publication of Eastons book. From that point on, my theoretical interests have diverged somewhat from those of David Eastons and Talcott Parsons, just as they have diverged from one another. While they have moved increasingly in the direction of theoretical formalization, drawing on general systems theory and
more
recently
on
cybernetics,
I have been
plowing a muddier course attempting

to the main currents of
to draw the notions of
system and function closer
empirical research in political science.

What I have in mind is that Eastons propositions about what goes on in the black box of the political system have been kept generically simple. He speaks of inputs of demand, and support and outputs (Easton, 1967), while I have been stuffing into the black box functional and structural categories which had developed in the creative decades of the empirical political research of the first half of the present century. In particular, I sought to bring up to date the classic 449
system-functional theory of separation of power doctrine by adding in the functions made visible and structurally separate as a consequence of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the emergence of popular suffrage, political parties, associational interest groups, and mass media of communication. Drawing on the notions of system and function it was possible to take another look at the substantial literature dealing with these themes and translate them into a structural-functional polemic; for this is essentially what it was. The empiricists were attacking the legalists on the grounds that their attributions of function to governmental structures bore little relation to reality and that there were fundamentally important structures which their separation of powers schemes didnt take into account at all. It is the generic model of a political system which, in my opinion, is most vulnerable to the criticisms which have been made of the application of systems concepts to the study of politics. As long as the model is kept simple and generic it is vulnerable to the criticism of Gouldner (1959) who argues that the use of organismic or mechanical system analogies creates an impression of close interdependence and reciprocity of the parts of the system and of a kind of equilibrium which it rarely, if ever, obtains in social reality. It is this generic concept of system which has also been vulnerable to the criticism that it is an essentially conservative and static model. Briefly, the model of political system that I have been advocating is one that stresses the coherence and interdependence of parts or variables, but which leaves provisional and as a coding device the identification of the variables, and leaves open the question of how coherent and how interdependent these parts or variables are. The variables which I have identified refer to generally observed phenomena that affect political systems. Thus, the functional variables of political socialization and recruitment, interest articulation, aggregation, communication, and the like, were names given to processes which had been widely treated in the literature, and about which there was a fund of theory and hypotheses as to how they affected or were affected by other variables in the political system. The exercise was indeed heuristic. But when we look down our noses at &dquo;heuristic&dquo; theory, we ought not to forget that without it we would
arrive at
no
&dquo;hard&dquo; theory, properly speaking.
PROBABILISTIC FUNCTIONALISM
system-functional model has been a probablistic one from the beginning. Thus, when I argued that the introduction of associational interest groups into a political system affects the operations of all of the other components of the political system, I was deliberately leaving open the question
own
My
450
of the extent to which and the ways in which such a change affected the other components. If one stays close to the historical record of mans experiments with politics and to the research regarding relationships among political phenomena, it is quite clear that we are not dealing with the relatively close meshing of structures and processes characteristic of machines and organisms. In other words, the more generic our notion of system and function is, the more likely is the analogy to political reality to be remote and even misleading. One can summarize this by saying that the theoretical tradition which moves in the direction of increased simplification and formalization confronts this danger of suggesting forms of relationship inappropriate to the phenomena under investigation. On the other hand, an approach to theory which moves quickly from models to concepts, to indicators, to the empirical study of relationships among variables, gives us some hope of relevance. I am not suggesting that formal and generic models are of no use whatever. What I am recommending is an approach which moves continually back and forth between formalization and empirical research. In this age of the uneven development of the sciences, it will often appear that a concept arising in physics, biology, psychology, sociology, or economics will have relevance to politics. But since these concepts are models of a particular kind of reality, they will carry with them the peculiar properties of that reality. The concepts may be versatile and powerfully suggestive, but their versatility is limited. Thus having stolen the notions of system and function from biology (via anthropology and sociology), the best strategy to follow is to examine interdependence and coherence of parts in real political systems, and then come up with a model or set of models more directly relevant to political
I favor a relatively informal approach to theory. Laying out the variables which interact in the processes of political conversion, or classifying political systems, might be compared to the first sketch of a geographer who makes a rough map from existing information before he gets down to the hard job of measuring the contours and features of the terrain. Those of us who advocate the course of low and middle level theorizing and reject general theorizing as a branch of metaphysics, are unaware or only partially aware of our own general theoretical orientation. No one can escape having one. We can only differ in the extent to which we make it explicit. I have favored an approach to general theory which might be viewed as a preliminary sketching operation frequently disciplined by contact with reality. I have suggested that the concept of system surely will survive as an analytical tool in political science. It has already been adopted as an assumption of interdependence of components and of coherence of parts in most of the subdisciplines of political science. One reads of the international political
phenomena. In general,
451
system; one reads of legislative systems; and of particular legislative committees systems. The separation of function and structure in the analysis of political phenomena similarly is here to stay. We take it so for granted that we forget that
as
generation ago the examination of political institutions and processes usually began with the assumption that there was a necessary relationship between
a
structural-functionalism which I find most that starts from the assumption that structures are usually, if not always, multifunctional, and that one of the principal tasks of empirical research on political systems is to ascertain what functions are being performed by what
useful is
one
structure and function. The notion of
structures.
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AS DEPENDENT AND INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

other notion has some prospect of survival. This is the in characterizing the properties of any political system we have to relate the interaction of three sets of variables. At another point I argued that
Perhaps
one
proposition that
Our
analytical framework has to enable us to relate three aspects of the functioning of political systems. We need functional categories in order to describe and compare political systems at the level of their performance-
as systems interacting with other systems in their domestic and international environments. We need functional categories which will enable us to describe and compare political systems according to their internal conversion processes. And finally we need functional categories in order to describe and compare political systems according to their maintenance and adaptive characteristics. Modern political theory will consist in good part of a logic which will enable us to relate changes in the performance of political systems to changes in internal process and conversion patterns and changes in recruitment and socialization patterns [Almond, 1967:
14] .
I would put this somewhat differently today, and suggest that a sound strategy of research on the theme of political development would have to look at interaction as it affects political development from a number of different perspectives. First, we might look at political development, treating the international and domestic environments as a set of independent variables, with the political system as a set of dependent variables. This is the perspective that is adopted by Barrington Moore in his Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (1966). The principal shortcoming of this creative work of scholarship is that he acts as though this is the only relevant perspective to take regarding political development. In other words, he views social stratification and social 452
the dominating causal factor in developmental processes. Another perspective which we would need to take involves viewing the political system as a set of independent variables and looking at its outputs into the domestic and international environments and their consequences as the dependent variables. This is the approach which has been adopted by Holt and Turner (1966) in their
as
class
pioneering study.
But these two research perspectives are not the only ones which we need to adopt. We have to examine the interaction of the structures and functions within the political system itself. Thus a set of changes in the social structure and culture of the society may affect socialization and recruitment processes to the various roles and institutions in the political system. They may also affect the flow of demands and supports into the political system and thereby set in process a pattern of changes in the conversion processes of the political system, e.g., an increased differentiation of roles, or a change in the culture of interaction within the political system. In other words, we have to be able to look at the specialized processes which take place within the political system alternatively as independent and dependent variables. Thus one can do research on the consequences of changing patterns of socialization for patterns of articulation and aggregation. Or turning it around, one can look at the effects of changes in the political infrastructure on patterns of socialization and recruitment. It is this kind of research which will tell us more about what kinds of systems political scientists are dealing with as compared with other kinds of social systems, organismic systems, or mechanical systems. These research strategies also should begin to move us in the direction of tested statements of probability of relations between variables which will gradually turn our heuristic macro-theories into proven propositions cumulated in an orderly way.
DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS AND TIME SERIES
Once
of
we
begin to break down these concepts of system and function into sets
we can devise indicators we are at the of a of beginnings process working out developmental patterns as empirical It would then become theory. possible, setting aside the question of the availof to the ability data, lay out development of specific political systems in terms of statistical series based on aggregate data: measures of change in social structure and in culture, measures of change in political socialization patterns, measures of change in recruitment to political roles, measures of change in the rates of demand, measures of change in the operation of interest groups, political parties and the media of communication, measures of change in the coalition making and bargaining processes in legislative bodies, measures of change in the
interacting variables for which
453
change
size and division of labor and function within the bureaucracy, measures of in the magnitudes and kinds of political outputs, and measures of change
in the domestic and international environment resulting from these outputs. We can foresee the development of a kind of polimetrics, although we should recognize that our problems of data availability and analysis will surely prove even more intractable than those which have confronted the economists. Nevertheless, we can be sure that substantial efforts will be directed toward solving these problems, since their solution promises so much by way of explaining why political systems developed in particular ways. Furthermore, we can observe how system and functional concepts constituted an essential stage in moving the study of political development to a more scientific level. For the system-functional assumption led us to look for the relevant sets of interacting variables. But there is another line of criticism of system-functional theories of political development which has to be confronted. In recent years the argument has been advanced that political systems theory leaves out the phenomena of leadership and problem-solving behavior; in other words, it tends to be a mechanistic model. The general tenor of this criticism both from the economists and political scientists is that the approach to political development via the notion of leadership and problem-solving models is a superior alternative to system-functional approaches. Again, I believe that there is much validity in this criticism. But when it suggests an approach to political development theory via the notion of leadership and problem solving as an alternative to system-functional concepts then I would suggest that it has gone too far. For system-functional concepts put us in the position of being able to account for the setting and process within which leaders make choices and seek to solve problems. From a developmental point of view the problem-solving behavior of leaders effects changes in this problem-solving context and process, in other words changes in the structure and culture of the system. Thus, the development of adequate theory in the field of political modernization has to be able to adopt both of these approaches and
strategies.
DEVELOPMENT AS PROBLEM SOLVING If one looks at the histories of specific political systems, it is quite clear that there are points in time which might be characterized as crisis periods, periods of greatly increased pressures for structural and cultural adaptation coming to bear on the political system, such as wars, revolutions, or threats of revolutions. For example, if we were to represent the historical experience of such countries as Britain, France, and Germany, in the form of sets of quantitative indicators such
454
I have sketched out above, these crisis points would be reflected in the form of large quantitative variations in the values of the variables, i.e., rapid increases in the rates of demand, rapid declines in the incidence and intensity of support, radical fluctuations in the relationships between the conversion processes, and sharp increases or decreases in the various categories of political system output. If we are to work out a theory of political development which can help us explain, predict, and contribute prudent notions of how to control the processes of political development, we need to look at these crises, or disequilibrium situations, not simply as a set of related shifts in the values of our indicators, but also as exercises in problem-solving on the part of political elites. Close examination of these crisis periods may give us answers to two essential questions. The first of these has to do with the constraints which limit the options of political leaders in different historical-cultural contexts and thus enter into the causation of development; and the second are the capacities for problem-solving behavior characteristic of the political elites of different political systems. To be able to build this approach into development theory we need to look at history as a universe of mans experiments with politics. If we adopt this point of view and examine this universe of political decisions rigorously, we may improve our own capacity for &dquo;experimentation&dquo; in political system problem-solving in the contemporary world. If changing a political system in preferred ways is dependent on our ability to anticipate how the system will respond to the changed values of one or more variables, then surely we need a system theory in order to be able to do this. If we want to be able to explain why political elites manipulated some variables rather than others in specific historical contexts, we shall have to be able to take into account the environmental constraints which limited their options; and the problem-solving propensities which affected their ability to perceive the options available to them or to select among them. Again, there is a growing effort among scholars to exploit historical data as a means of improving our theory of development. I have one or two notions which I would like to contribute to this impulse to exploit historical material and historical cases. Let us make the assumption that our data problems can be solved and that we can lay out the trends of development of the British, the French, the German, and other political systems in quantitative series which will show the relationships between environmental changes, system maintenance variables, system conversion variables, and political outputs or capabilities. At certain points in these statistical series for Britain (e.g., the Tudor Revolution, the Civil War, the Restoration, the Reform Act of 1832, etc.), we would observe substantial fluctuations in the relationships between these sets of variables. We might speak of these periods as critical choice points, periods of relatively acute disequilibria, during which political elites make significant
as
455
decisions. If we were to take the Reform Act of 1832 as an illustrative case, we would first have the job of describing the British political system of the eighteenth century (Ostrogorskis &dquo;Old Unity&dquo;) as a political system in relative equilibrium. If we had the quantitative data, we might be able to describe this equilibrium in terms of relatively stable rates of interaction between inputs, conversion processes, and outputs. When we come to examine the crisis surrounding the Reform Act we will have to translate environmental pressures into political issues, and translate conversion processes into conflicts over issues among different elements of the political elite, and into the problem-solving propensities of these elites. We would then have to follow through the system changes which result from this process of issue formulation and conflict resolution. For this we would turn to our statistical series again to observe the linkages between changes in the environmental and system variables. In the specific case of the Reform Act of 1832, the changes in the suffrage and the units of representation resulting from this decision precipitated a change in the size and the composition of the electorate. This in turn created opportunities for new types of political entrepreneurship or leadership (the party organizer, the demogogue) with skills in mobilizing and organizing large numbers of relatively uneducated electors. The activities of these demogogues and organizers would be reflected in increased rates of mobilization, affiliation, and participation. We would also have to observe the consequences of this decision on the kinds of demands that subsequently were brought to bear on the political system: demands to limit agricultural protection; demands to confront problems of welfare resulting from industrialization and urbanization; and demands of other strata on the population for access to the vote and political influence. In laying out this approach to the study of historical crises experienced by political systems and their consequences for political development, I have been applying to the political sphere an approach which Albert Hirschman has pioneered in the field of the economic development theory. In his Strategy of Economic Development (1958), he suggests that economic development may most usefully be viewed as a sequence of disequilibria; and that our ability to explain developmental processes is enhanced when we examine the way in which changes in any component of the economic system are linked &dquo;backward&dquo; to the supply side of the economy, or &dquo;forward&dquo; to the demand side of the economy. In order to apply Hirschmans notion of disequilibrium and linkage in the chain of political development, we need some model of the political system. Without it how can we develop hypotheses regarding linkages in the process of change? In his stimulating book, Journeys Toward Progress ( 1963), Hirschman also provides us with a model that may be of use to us in the analysis of political crisis and
&dquo;system-development&dquo;
456
specifies a simplified type of political situation in which one decision-makers, and in which it is possible to specify what the preference rankings of the various elite factions with respect to these issues are. He then tries to demonstrate the conditions under which problems are solved &dquo;reformistically&dquo; or &dquo;incrementally,&dquo; or through some revolutionary change in the political system. The principal value of Hirschmans &dquo;reformmongering&dquo; model is that it suggests how we might proceed in developing and applying a &dquo;crisis and problem-solving model&dquo; in the study of political development. While I do not wish to underemphasize the great difficulties that we would encounter in adapting Hirschmans notions to the study of political development, it appears to me that his work suggests the appropriate relationship between systems analysis and problem-solving analysis. It is quite evident that
problem-solving.
or
He
two issues confront the
we
need both.
My comments suggest that political development theory after having borrowed from sociological, anthropological, and psychological theory, now must turn to economic theory and methodology, and must learn how to utilize the enormous data bank of history in the development of a rigorous theory of political development. The incentives are very great indeed. If we observe the drift of political history in terms of interacting system and environmental variables treated wherever possible in quantitative terms, and if we view crises and systemic changes in the development of political systems in problem-solving terms, what is now a groping confusion in political science should gradually acquire some versatility in the explanation of the past, in forecasting the future, and advising policy-makers.
NORMATIVE PERSPECTIVES
The contemporary literature dealing with political development and modernization is concerned with the avoidance of three forms of error: unilinearity, teleology, and ethnocentrism. Most of us who contribute to this still somewhat turgid field of inquiry have violated these tabus. The eight properties referred to by Ward and Rustow (1964) as aspects of a modern polity, the &dquo;development syndrome&dquo; first formulated by Coleman (1965) and then adopted by some of my colleagues on the Committee on Comparative Politics (Pye, 1966), the criteria of political modernization suggested by La Palombara (1963), the four measures of effective institutionalization listed by Huntington (1967), the three major characteristics of political modernization listed by Claude Welch (1967), the criteria listed by David Apter (1967), and S. N. Eisenstadt (1966), and other trait lists, criteria, and definitions of political
457
development or modernization, reflect a remarkable consensus. If they come out with different numbers, this is principally the consequence of the level of generalization at which they are operating and the specificity or selectiveness of their definitions. Thus one can move quite logically from Colemans three-fold development syndrome to the Ward and Rustow eight-fold list of traits. Whether we call this set of trends a movement toward a &dquo;world culture,&dquo; a
or
&dquo;development syndrome,&dquo; &dquo;political modernization,&dquo; &dquo;political development,&dquo; &dquo;political change,&dquo; it seems quite evident that all of us have been writing
a
about movement in
particular direction.
HANG-UPS ABOUT EVALUATION
about unilinearity grows out of the resolve to avoid of our forefathers in political theory who, a generation ago, were sublimely confident that Anglo-American democracy and parliamentarism represented the highest attainment of mans political talents and that all other political systems would inevitably follow in this same direction. What we in effect have been trying to say is that there is a general trend in a broadly similar direction, but that the end products, insofar as we can foresee them, represent rather distinct variations on similar themes. If we are thinking of the broad direction of change, then I suppose we can conceive of this as a unilinear movement. If, on the other hand, we are examining more closely the way in which different cultural and structural starting points have interacted with a particular mode of impingement of the same set of cultural innovations, then we might wish to stress the multilinear pattern of political development. It is symptomatic of the primitive state of theoretical work in this field that we should be so anxious about the words we use and the definitions of our concepts. Biologists and psychologists speak of the growth and development of organisms, of human growth and development, assuming that the concept of development includes breakdowns, decay, decline, even the death of the organism. The literature on economic growth and development is not embarrassed by the fact that economies fluctuate in national product, that some stagnate, and some decline. We are not bound by the connotations of the words we use to label our concepts. These should be viewed as open terms which acquire content as we use them to order and explain reality. If we are talking about the direction of change, it would seem to be a fair summary of what we have all been saying that there is a common direction, but that the differing combinations of variables produce different routes in some broad and apparently common movement through time. And while we are still exorcising ourselves from the sins of our fathers who saw this trend of political change in too narrow
Our
particular anxiety
the
error
458
simple terms, we at the same time are trying to explicate a more realistic and empirically based notion of homogeneity of development. Hence, our theory is turgid and suffused with anxiety. We have to be quite instrumental and secular about these things. Concepts are intellectual instruments. Their test of utility lies in their ability to help us find our way in the real world.
and
teleological error carries an even graver risk to the salvation of our souls political scientists. For this brings us back to the very beginnings of the ideology of modernization. While the Enlightenment tended to reject dogmatic religion and the notion of any simple divine intervention and control over human affairs, a more diffuse belief in the realization of divine purpose through
as
The
human action and aspiration was quite common among the philosophes. Thus the triumph of reason with all that it meant in mans relation to the cosmos, to nature, and to his fellows, was viewed as in a sense a realization of divine purpose. Natural law notions have little resonance in contemporary political theory and political science. And yet implied in the ideas of a spreading &dquo;world culture&dquo; and &dquo;demonstration effect&dquo; is the proposition that confronted with similar stimuli and opportunities human beings seem to come up with very similar responses and solutions. It is the principal thesis of Marshall Hodgson that the great cultural innovations of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries gave a particular direction to human history. While there was much coercion in this process of cultural diffusion, surely much of this trend in the spread of these cultural innovations can only be accounted for by means of &dquo;demonstration effect.&dquo; The &dquo;late modernizers&dquo; such as the Germans, the Russians, and the Japanese, and the &dquo;late, late modernizers&dquo; such as the Chinese, the Indians, the Latin Americans and the Africans, wanted or want to modernize themselves because they perceived or perceive in science, in technology, in education and communication, in bureaucracy and political association, a set of ways of realizing human potentiality and capacity more effectively than their own traditional ways. Even the conservative and traditionalistic elites who seek to isolate themselves from this spreading world culture have to accept some part of it if they are to prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by the whole. Surely there is implied in the notion of modernization and development some teleological element, not that of divine purpose, but the pressure of human aspiration and choice toward a common set of goals employing similar instrumentalities. If this be teleology, then make the most of it. Finally, there is the error or ethnocentrism. No transgression has greater capacity to strike fear in the hearts of contemporary social scientists. The nineteenth and early twentieth century notion of progress and the view that progress was embodied in western civilization and particularly in its AngloAmerican variant remains in our memories as the great moral error of western political theory. The disappointment of these expectations of progress has also 459
constituted
proof
that
our
moral
error was
compounded by scientific
we
error.
Thus, all kinds of warning bells go off when

direction of
write and talk about the
change.
or even
We hesitate to
use
terms
such
as
&dquo;backward,&dquo; &dquo;un-
&dquo;underdeveloped.&dquo; Terms such as &dquo;westernization&dquo; and &dquo;democratization&dquo; are conceptual hot potatoes, since they are all bound up in memory with the naive arrogance of the political theory of Britain and America of a generation ago. s This relativistic hang-up interferes with our efforts to deal with developmental processes. An open-eyed reading of the history of the last few centuries makes it unambiguously clear that the principal components of the stream of change which we think of as modernization began in the west. Certainly Britain, France, and the Iberian peninsula were the principal centers
developed,&dquo;
from which these innovations diffused. At the present time it is even true that the process of diffusion continues to be one of westernization, although if one is focussing on the scientific and technological revolutions, the center seems to have shifted to the United States. But as far as political influences and innovations are concerned, the age of Western European-American dominance now seems to have passed. The pattern of diffusion is increasingly polycentric. I believe we can quite safely use notions such as westernization as long as we have in mind processes of diffusion susceptible to empirical study. To say that a particular institution or process or even general cultural trend started in one place at a particular period and then moved to other parts of the world does not in itself constitute a judgment of superiority or virtue. It is merely an important bit of information which helps us explain how and why political development took on particular proportions in different parts of the world. These concerns with avoiding the errors of past political theory can be summed up in the resolve to avoid being normative, evaluative, judgmental, and imputing superiority or inferiority to political systems. Can we really be serious about such a resolve? Surely we are deeply concerned with measuring and comparing the performance of political systems. The problem is not in comparing performance, but rather in the way we make such comparisons, and how we evaluate the differences that we discover.
MEASURING PERFORMANCE The problem of measuring performance is relatively simple for the economist. He finds it possible to sum up the productivity of an economy in a single figure of gross national product. He can also provide us with a set of figures on the various components which make up this gross national product and its distribution among different groups in the population.
460
Measuring performance is not the same thing as judging or evaluating performance, but it is impossible to judge or evaluate without measuring. One judges or evaluates according to norms or objectives of one kind or another. But in judging whether or not a political system is performing according to a given set of norms or standards it is not enough simply to come up with a set of performance measures. One must somehow relate these performance measures to the objectives and strategies of the political systems decision-makers, thereby evaluating the rationality and efficiency of elite behavior, and to the pressures and demands that are brought to bear on the system from its domestic and international environments, thereby taking into account the constraints that
limit the choices of elites.
Surely this capacity to measure and evaluate performance is one of the principal goals of political theory. Our conflicts and inhibitions about being normative and evaluative get in the way of this essential concern of political theory. Our resistance over measuring and evaluating performance is the consequence of, not only the past errors of political theory and our resolution to avoid repeating them, but also the very complexity of the problem of
measurement and evaluation.
in modern times, but surely in the past as well, the political has as the principal device available to societies for the effective served system attainment of collective goals. Threats from the international environment, failures of other institutions in the society, failures of the economy, the family, the community, the church, end up as demands on the political system. Hence, there is no single measure of the performance of a political system and the measurement problem seems to be complex almost to the point of impossibility. But to say that there is no single measure of performance is not the same thing as saying that it is impossible to cope with the problem of political measurement and evaluation.
Particularly
a moment a variety of ways of speaking about the of the political system. These categories of system performance which I shall be discussing, should not be viewed as a logically distinct and comprehensive set of categories for the measurement of performance, but rather as a kind of preliminary code for &dquo;pretesting&dquo; purposes. They are a set of coding categories preliminary to operationalizing and empirical research which might bring us closer to a reliable set of indicators of performance. No apologies should be needed for this kind of exercise, but we have become theoretically self-conscious, and I want to make it quite clear at this point, that this is an essentially heuristic exercise. The preliminary code which I am proposing is a way of beginning to think in rigorous terms about how political systems interact with their environments. me
Let
suggest for
performance
461
Regulative Performance
Surely one salient category of political system performance is the regulation of human behavior and social relationships. With the exception of quite primitive and undifferentiated political systems every political system engages in some set of regulatory activities-i.e., it punishes crime, it compels performance on contracts, and the like. Performance in this dimension differs from one political system to another according to (1) the number and kinds of actions regulated; (2) the intensity or the severity of the regulation; (3) the procedural limits on the regulatory activity. Each one of these subcategories can be translated into indicators, and through the use of scoring and scaling devices the subcategories of performance may be measured, and perhaps combined in some kind of overall &dquo;regulatory score.&dquo; Thus, it should be possible to measure regulative performance over time for a single political system, assuming the availability of information, and to compare one system with another according to these regulatory scores.
Extractive Performance
Another practically universal requirement of a political system is its ability to extract resources from its domestic and international environments: money, persons, services. The extractive performance of a political system can be measured according to the kinds of objects extracted, the amounts extracted, and the proportion extracted as compared with the available stores. Quite obviously we are involved here, as we were in the discussion of regulative performance, with a large number of indicators. To combine them into a single extractive performance score would surely be a difficult process. Nevertheless, the possibility is worth exploring. On the other hand, the notion of trying to combine regulative scores with extractive scores and arrive at some single meaningful number or proportion hardly seems to make any sense at all. If we could stop at this point and offer a measurement of political system performance in regulative and extractive terms, we would be dealing with a complex analytical and research problem, but one still not complicated enough to suit our needs. For in addition to these regulative and extractive criteria of performance, we cannot escape the measurement of participatory and distributive performance-essentially the performance criteria which have been introduced into the concept of political development in the last two centuries. Again we have somewhat complex dimensions of performance to describe.
goods,
462
Distributive Performance
Suppose we begin with the distributive dimension. We have to be able to say something relatively rigorous about what is being distributed-economic goods;
services such as education, health and sanitation; and other values such as status, prestige, and safety. We have to be able to say something about who the beneficiaries of these distributions are and who are not. It would be relevant in an effort to measure distributive performance to get some notion of what proportion of the total social product is being distributed by the political system in comparison with other social systems. Again, without minimizing the difficulties, it is at least conceivable that one could arrive at a set of distributive or welfare scores, perhaps even a combined distributive score. But just as we have difficulty adding our regulative score to our extractive score, we also have similar difficulty in the notion of combining our distributive score to the other
two.
There are two other aspects of political system performance which are of a different order than the three we have already discussed. One of these is the responsive performance of the political system, and the other has to do with the rates at which the political system is accumulating reserves of support, or consuming such reserves.
Responsive Performance
The measurement of political system responsiveness again involves a variety of indicators. It is not the same kind of category of performance as are the first three. The first three are measurable outputs of the political system entering into and affecting other social systems within the society and other societies in the international environment. What we are dealing with when we speak of responsive performance is a set of ratios of demands to outputs or responses. We are talking about a set of ratios since we should be concerned here with whose demands are being responded to in what proportion by the political system. But participation in and of itself tends to be a valued activity and may be viewed as a demand. And when a political system legitimates participatory activity on the part of different groups of the population, it may be said to be responding to these demands. Thus, such indicators as voting turnout, and other forms of participation in the activities of political parties and election campaigns, membership in politically oriented voluntary associations such as pressure groups, participation in demonstrations, writing letters to political officials, and the whole range of participatory activities, if legitimated, may be taken as components of a responsiveness score even though these participatory activities are not translated into other kinds of political system output such as regulation, extraction, and distribution.
463
I have no intention of making these measurements of performance seem easy. But in this day of large-scale research resources and sophisticated research technologies and methodologies, it is not unthinkable that the responsive performance of political systems can be measured with relative accuracy and that some meaningful overall score of responsive performance can be computed. Thus, it may become possible for us to make more rigorous comparisons in this area of performance for a particular political system over a period of time, or among a number of political systems.
Political
Capital Accumulation
A fifth category of political system performance has to do with its reserves (its capital), its performance in creating such reserves, or in consuming them. Elsewhere I have referred to this as the &dquo;symbolic capability&dquo; of the political system. Political systems differ one from the other, and the same systems differ over time to the extent of the reserves of support on which they can draw and on the rates with which such reserves are being accumulated or consumed. Such reserves may be accumulated instrumentally through a kind of favorable balance of &dquo;indulgence over deprivation&dquo; over a period of time. Thus, a successful or effective political system in foreign conquest, in the maintenance of peace, in the maintenance of internal order, in the growth of the economy and/or a favorable distribution of its product, creates loyalty, commitment, and support, on which the political system can draw in times of stress or threat, crop failures, famine, or depressions. Such reserves may also be affected by symbolic performances of one kind or another. Thus, political elites may review past accomplishments, triumphs and successes as a means of drawing on existing reserves of support or creating them. Promises of future performance may similarly create reserves of support in times of stress. Public monuments, parades, holidays, political rites and rituals, may also have this quality of creating reserves of support and commitment. The measurement of this process of creating or consuming reserves of support and commitment is complex. We know how to survey populations and get some indications of the distribution and intensity of loyalty and alienation. It is much more difficult and inherently more problematic to attempt reconstructions of reserves of support and commitment in the past. Even for contemporary political systems it is difficult to separate the processes which contribute to or deplete these reserves of political capital. And yet the behavior of political systems under stress, their ability to cope with crises, hinges to a considerable extent on the availability of these reserves. We shall have to come to grips with these problems of measuring political capital accumulation as well.
464
INCENTIVES FOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
Despite many difficulties, the incentives for moving toward greater rigor in the measurement of performance are very great indeed. We already observe the beginnings of efforts to solve these intellectual problems. The recent work of Neubauer (1966) and Dahl (1967), the Cross-Polity Survey (Banks and Textor, 1967). The World Handbook of Political Indicators (1966), Bertram Gross social accounts (1966), Andersons comparative analysis of the performance of Latin American political systems (1967), and recent work on American political performance (see Jacob and Vines, 1965), are illustrations of efforts to move in this direction. The data bank movement promises to facilitate these efforts at measuring the magnitudes of political system performance and their changes over time. What are the principal incentives that now seem to be directing the energies of an increasing number of political and social scientists to the problems of measuring system performance? I would argue that there are three principal incentives here and all of them have to do with improving our ability to evaluate political phenomena and processes. The first incentive which comes to mind is the development of what one might call a cost-effectiveness approach to the conversion process of political systems, and the structures and cultures which are associated with these processes. Let me illustrate. If we have good measures of the flow of inputs and outputs in political systems over a period of time, we should be able to relate cultural and structural changes in political systems to fluctuations in these rates of performance. Thus, as bureaucratic institutions develop and become rationalized, the volume of political output should increase and the cost per unit of political output should decrease. We should improve our ability to evaluate the efficiency of different organizational solutions to problems of resource extraction, regulation, and welfare distribution. On the side of political system responsiveness, we should be able to relate the development of extra-parliamentary party organization to an improved ratio of demands to outputs. Similarly, we should be in a position to relate increases in the organization of associational interest groups to an improved ratio of demands emanating from such groups to outputs. The increased spread and impact of the mass media of communication should similarly be associated with an increased mobilization of demand and an improved ratio of demand to output. Each one of these hypotheses assumes that &dquo;other things remain equal.&dquo; Formulating and testing hypotheses of these kinds should enable us to specify other significant variables which affect these relations between the cultural and structural characteristics of political institutions and the performance level of political systems. We shall discover that among the other variables which affect
465
these relations between institutions and performance are the size of the resource pool on which political systems draw, and the magnitude, intensity, and variety of demands being made on them from their environments. Moving in the direction of a cost-effectiveness political theory should enable us to take into account more systematically and rigorously these constraints on political system performance, and in particular its capacity to respond to demands. A second incentive for improving our ability to measure the performance of political systems is the development of an approach to political analysis which will enable us to say something cogent about the problem-solving performance of political elites. If we have good measures of the flow of demands and outputs and the magnitude of the systems political reserves, it should become possible to evaluate the decisions made by political elites using models of rational choice. Here the analytical procedures involve ascertaining the goals and policy objectives of elites and relating these to the actual performance level of the political system and to its potential. Are the policy goals of the political elites attainable given the available resources of the political system and competing demands for the uses of these resources? To what extent are the regulatory goals of the political elites consistent with their responsiveness goals? To what extent are their extractive goals of the political system realted to their welfare goals? What the measurement of political system performance has to offer to this form of political analysis is a substantial increment of rigor. It is one thing to argue from logical premises that one cannot distribute what one has not extracted or that the increased scope and intensity of regulation may reduce substantially the capacity for political participation. Empirical research can tell us something about how these conflicts can be resolved, and the variety of ways empirical political systems have confronted contradictions such as these, and their consequences. Finally, the improvements in the reliability of our data on political system performance should enable us to come to grips with the ethical properties of political systems. The incentive here is very great indeed. What I am suggesting is that we shall soon be moving on a substantial scale across the now forbidden boundary between so-called empirical and normative theory. We may not be far from a capacity to compute &dquo;justice&dquo; scores, &dquo;liberty&dquo; scores, &dquo;welfare&dquo; scores, and &dquo;adaptiveness&dquo; or &dquo;versatility&dquo; scores for political systems. Indeed, by the development of such scoring techniques, we should be able to compute the rates at which political systems historically or in the contemporary world have improved or deteriorated from an ethical point of view. Broadly speaking, the empirical basis for the evaluation of a political system can be viewed as a set of scores of performance according to standards specified by political elites, social scientists, or philosophers, and corrected for the constraints imposed by conditions in its environments. I am not arguing that
466
evaluation will consist solely of operations of this kind, but only that it is inescapable that evaluation will rely increasingly on rigorous measures of these kinds. The measurement of performance according to standards and values will not tell us which values to select, what priorities we ought to give them, nor will it enable us to invent new ways of evaluating political systems. But in relation to this last point, it may very well be that the empirical study of the normative performance of political systems will in itself generate a kind of value inventiveness and imaginativeness.
&dquo;ETHICAL&dquo; SCORES
It would be intriguing to beg the Sibyl to unroll her scroll a bit and let us peek into the future of our discipline, when empirical political theory has crossed the boundary and connected up with normative political theory. Simply for purposes of loosening up the imagination, let me speculate on how one might go about computing a &dquo;justice&dquo; score. I would suggest that a justice score would consist of a set of per capita rates of regulatory acts, over a period of time, emanating from a particular political system, weighted for the salience of the areas regulated and the severity of the regulation, and corrected for opportunities available to the objects of regulation to participate in the determination of the content, scope, and intensity of the regulatory rules, and for procedural protections in their enforcement. It is quite evident that different political theorists will have different approaches to the measurement of political performance according to definitions of justice. But once we have begun to handle measurement according to norms in this way, we will have substantially reduced the fuzziness of the ideological polemic about the nature of justice and the attribution of justice or lack of justice to particular political systems or classes of political systems. A &dquo;liberty&dquo; score might be defined as the adult per capita rates of participation in the recruitment of political elites and in the processes of making public policy, corrected for the range and salience of human behaviors and interactions not subject or rarely subject to governmental intervention, and further corrected for opportunities for procedural protection in the enforcement of regulations. A &dquo;welfare&dquo; score might be thought of as a measure or set of measures of the rates of distribution through the political system of various kinds of benefits among different groups in the population compared with measures of the resources available and of the needs of these various groups. Needless to say, each one of the terms which enter into the computation of such a measure or score would require further specification. At the present time, we have very little
467
a measurement problem as determining &dquo;needs.&dquo; And yet, would everyone agree that we cannot come to grips with the welfare propensities of a political system without systematically relating the distribution of benefits to the incidence of needs. Our contemporary war on poverty implies a set of norms of minimum welfare, and these in turn are based on what different groups demand; but increasingly we base these estimates of needs on what we think people ought to have, drawing on medical, psychological, social and political criteria. I list these &dquo;ethical&dquo; scores simply for illustrative purposes. One can conceive of other approaches to the scoring of political system performance involving ethical criteria. We would need an &dquo;adaptability&dquo; score which would enable us to compare the performance of political systems according to their versatility in responding to pressures of different kinds without significantly altering their institutions and processes. Surely in political development theory we cannot escape some ethical confrontation of what we might call &dquo;growth systems.&dquo; I have in mind political systems in which elites plough back &dquo;political earnings&dquo; in order to develop greater or new capacities, and in postponing the immediate distribution of benefits and limiting responsiveness in the interest of improved rates of future performance. At the present time, we evaluate systems such as these mainly by calling them names such as &dquo;authoritarian&dquo; or &dquo;totalitarian.&dquo; We are in the beginning stages of a discipline of &dquo;polimetrics&dquo; which will transform our structural, functional, and cultural approach to political development into measures of relations in probabilistic terms. We shall soon be able to build into our theory of political development, propositions about the relationships between structural and cultural changes to criteria of efficiency or cost effectiveness to criteria of the rationality or irrationality of elite problem-solving behavior, and to include trends in the attainment of ethical aspirations. We shall have to escape from the shadow of our forefathers in political theory, overcome our fears of repeating their mistakes, courageously accept these invitations to adventure in creative political theory, and take the risks of making mistakes of our own.
experience with such
468
REFERENCES
ALMOND, G. A. (1967) Political Theory and Political Science. New York: McGraw Hill. ANDERSON, C. W. (1967) Politics and Economic Change in Latin America. Princeton:
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D.
Van Nostrand. APTER, D. (1967) The Politics of Modernization. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. (1961) The Gold Coast in Transition. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. BANKS, A. and R. TEXTOR (1963) A Cross-Polity Survey. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. COLEMAN, (1965) Education and Political Development. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. (1958) Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. DAHL, R. A. (1967) The Evaluation of Political Systems. New York: McGraw Hill. DEUTSCH, K. (1963) The Nerves of Government. New York: Free Press. EASTON, D. (1967) An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems. World Politics. (1965) A Systems Analysis of Political Life. New York: Wiley. (1953) The Political System. New York: Alfred Knopf. EISENSTADT, S. N. (1966) Modernization: Protest and Change. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. FREY, W. (1965) The Turkish Political Elite. Cambridge: M.LT. Press. GOULDNER, W. (1959) "Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory." Symposium
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on Sociological Theory. New York: Harper-Row. GROSS, B. (1966) The State of the Nation: Social System Accounting. London: Tavistock. HAGEN, E. (1962) On the Theory of Social Change. Homewood, I11.: Dorsey. HERRING, P. (1929) Group Representation Before Congress. New York: McGraw Hill. HIRSCHMAN, A,(1963) Journeys Toward Progress. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. (1958) Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. HOLT, R. and J. TURNER (1966) The Political Basis of Economics. Princeton: D. Van
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Nostrand.
HUNTINGTON, S. P. (1967) Political Development and Political Decay. In Political

Modernization. Belmont: Wadsworth.
JACOB, H. and R. VINES (1965) Politics and the American States. Boston: Little, Brown. LA PALOMBARA, J. (1963) Bureaucracy and Political Development. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press.
McCLELLAND, D (1961) The Achieving Society. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand. MOORE, B. (1966) Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship. Boston: Beacon Press. NEUBAUER, D. (1966) On the Theory of Polyarchy: An Empirical Study of Democracy in Ten Countries." Unpub. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale Univ. ODEGARD, P. (1928) Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League. New York:
Columbia Univ. Press. T. and E. SHILS (1951) Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. PYE, L. W. (1966) Aspects of Political Development. Boston: Little, Brown. (1962) Politics, Personality and Nation Building. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. RIGGS, F. (1965) Thailand. Honolulu: East-West Center Press. RUSSETT, B. (1966) World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. SCHATTSCHNEIDER, E. (1937) Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. WARD, R. (1959) Village Japan. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. and D. A. RUSTOW (1964) Political Mobilization of Japan and Turkey. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. WEINER, M. (1962) The Politics of Scarcity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. WELCH, C., ed. (1967) Political Modernization. Belmont: Wadsworth.
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Comparative Political Studies

http://cps.sagepub.com Political Development: Analytical and Normative Perspectives

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES

represented a genuine change in paradigm.

to David Easton via the work of Talcott Parsons.

plowing a muddier course attempting

to draw the notions of

system and function closer

empirical research in political science.

&dquo;hard&dquo; theory, properly speaking.

structure and function. The notion of

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AS DEPENDENT AND INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS AND TIME SERIES

interacting variables for which

two issues confront the

Thus, all kinds of warning bells go off when

write and talk about the

INCENTIVES FOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

experience with such

HUNTINGTON, S. P. (1967) Political Development and Political Decay. In Political

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