political stability. Outside the Marxist tradition, instability is seen as
deviancy, a slip on the path to progress. It is an aberration that has to be
explained. In the Marxist tradition, instability is accepted as inevitable in
the progression of history. Class conflict is an unavoidable stage in the
movement of society towards its end-state. Crisis is the inevitable conse-
quence of the contradictions of economic development.
Consequently some would argue that it is not possible to handle the con-
cept in a scientific way at all. An analytical obsession with instability simply
indicates a preference for the regime that is under threat. Understanding a
particular type of political change, especially one that often entails violence,
loss of life and severe economic dislocation, has to be based on an objective
analysis of the conditions leading to such change. This is not easy when there
are so many values at stake when political instability is experienced.
Secondly, there is the question of whether the analysis should be con-
cerned with stable government or stable democraticgovernment. Interest
has not concentrated exclusively on the travails of democracy. Whereas the
attention of political science focused on the preconditions of stable democ-
racy in the 1950s and early 1960s, interest shifted in the 1960s and 1970s to
a concern with political order, whether in democracies or other types of
regime. In the 1970s US political science in particular concentrated more on
the prerequisites of order and control, rather than pluralism and democracy,
revealing a strong ideological impulse (Leys, 1982).
Concern for the maintenance of regimes and élites, political order and
stability in policy-making arose from changing political realities in the
Third World, the pessimism which developed during the first Development
Decade, and perceptions of continuing external influence over supposedly
independent nation-states and sovereign governments. Attention concen-
trated on the policy-making capabilities of national élites, their ability to
bargain with foreign interests, and the need for centralized government.
Successful governmental interventions were seen to be obstructed by com-
petition between national and local élites and passive traditionalism. High
rates of growth were seen as requiring authoritarianism, democracies appar-
ently having relatively poor economic records both in terms of growth and
distribution (Higgott, 1983, pp. 19–39; Huntington, 1987). However, cross-
national quantitative studies indicate that coercion provokes rather than
deters political violence, especially if the repression is not total but permits
some political mobilization by opposition groups (Muller and Seligson,
1987). So authoritarianism cannot guarantee stability.
Stability is still sometimes seen as an end in itself, if not regardless of the
regime involved, then at least with grudging respect for what can be achieved
Instability and Revolution 221