Once again biology provided the required insight:
The problem of developing categories to compare the conversion
processes of different kinds of political systems is not unlike the problem
of comparative anatomy and physiology. Surely the anatomical structure
of a unicellular organism differs radically from that of a vertebrate,
but something like the functions which in the vertebrate are performed by
a specialised nervous system, a gasto-intestinal tract, are performed
in the amoeba by intermittent adaptations of its single cell. (Almond,
1965, p. 195)By analogy, complex political systems have specialized structures for
performing distinctive tasks to enable political inputs to be converted into
outputs while simple ones do not.
Functionalism became the political interpretation of modernization
theory in order to find a way of addressing societies that were rapidly
achieving the status of nation states with apparently modern political insti-
tutions such as legislatures, parties, constitutions, and executives grafted on
to structures that were totally unfamiliar to most Western observers other
than anthropologists. It was understood that those unfamiliar structures
were performing key political functions. The functionalists therefore aban-
doned comparative methods based on structures in favour of one based on
functions. If structures were persisted with, the cultural context of contem-
porary political institutions in new states would be incomprehensible. The
analytical tools would be totally inappropriate. The search for constitutions,
parties, pressure groups, legislatures and bureaucracies would be fruitless in
societies whose government did not depend on such structures.
A set of functions has to be performed in all societies no matter how com-
plex or simple, industrialized or agrarian. The task is to establish what these
are and then seek out the structures that perform them in different societies.
Comparative politics could no longer prejudge the question of structures. If
communities are found to enforce their rules not by courts, police forces, pris-
ons and the other institutions of the state but by contests between the injured
parties, tempered by public opinion within lineages, as in the Nuer of the
southern Sudan, it should not be assumed that such societies were disorgan-
ized, chaotic or without the means of governing themselves. They might be
societies without Governments but they were not societies without govern-
ment or regular ways of performing necessary political functions. Structures
existed to perform those functions. Familiar legislative structures might not
exist to make legally binding rules but other social structures would exist to
perform this function of articulating rules, perhaps by age-groups.
52 Understanding Third World Politics