and affects the general capabilities of the system in its domestic and foreign
environments’ (Almond, 1965, p. 185). If the change is dysfunctional to the
system ‘the dysfunctional component is disciplined by regulatory mecha-
nisms, and the equilibrium of the system is re-established’ (p. 185). Political
systems tend towards equilibrium. Institutions preserve their character or at
most change slowly.
Structure and function
Social structures are sets of roles performed by individual members of the
set. Roles are distinguished from persons. When roles are performed in a
particular set they constitute a social structure. Individuals thus make up
numerous different structures. A member of the role set of the family con-
tributes to that structure as well as to the other structures to which they con-
tribute roles – at work, in religious ceremonies, in the interpretation and
enforcement of law and custom, in community associations, in political
organizations, and so on. In pre-modern societies age may determine which
set an individual contributes to. Age-grades then become an important
structure for the performance of social functions.
The relationship between structure and function gave rise to the label
‘structural functionalism’ because the theory addressed the key question of
how functions are performed for the social organism (Moore, 1979). This
was an extremely influential theory for a while that, ironically, was all but
abandoned by sociologists outside the USA when it was taken up by
American political scientists in their efforts to devise a means of comparing
all known political systems. Political science’s need was for a theoretical
framework that could cope with a bewildering variety of exotic political sys-
tems that could not be accommodated within existing modes of comparison
(Eulau, 1963; Holt and Turner, 1972; O’Brien, 1972; Varma, 1980, p. 58).
Structural functionalism was intended to provide such a comparative
framework of analysis to explain how very unfamiliar political behaviour
performed familiar political functions. In non-Western societies unfamiliar
structures were performing functions needed in all political systems. New
concepts were required to understand such phenomena. The concepts of
contemporary political science were not, it was decided, equipped for the
task. Western political science up to this point had been based on the com-
parison of institutions and, even more restrictedly, institutions found in the
developed industrialized societies and their processes of democratization.
Modernization and Political Development 51