The political system was thus perceived as a legitimate set of interrelated
structures for maintaining order and responding to the changing pressures
of the environment. Those structures would in part be regulative and coer-
cive, concerned with the suppression of dissent. They would also be distrib-
utive, shifting resources between sectors of society. Extractive structures
would draw resources from society through such means as taxation.
The idea of structuresas sets of interrelated roles that make up the polit-
ical process enables the functionalists to identify how functions could be
performed without preconceived ideas associating particular functions with
corresponding structures. So a legislature, for example, was a set of interre-
lated roles performing the function of making legally binding rules.
Functionalists developed the concept of cultureto bring into the frame-
work of political analysis the idea that all societies contain discernible
attitudes and dispositions towards politics. Parson’s pattern variables are
utilized in political development theory, sometimes to dichotomize tradi-
tional and modern systems of politics, as in F. W. Riggs’ (1957) models
of Agraria and Industria, and sometimes to demonstrate a ‘dualism’ of polit-
ical structure found in all societies, as in Almond’s distinction between
primary and secondary structures in societies where primitive or pre-
modern political structures persist in modern political systems (Almond,
1960, p. 23).
A society in crisis is often a society in which the dominant political cul-
ture is being undermined by competing sets of beliefs. It can no longer sus-
tain the level of support needed by the political system for it to survive. The
political culture thus consists of values about how politics should actually
be conducted, and how the processes of government should be carried on.
The legitimacy adhering to the structures and processes of government is
expressed through a society’s political culture. The obligations that are the
consequence of that legitimacy relate to the rules of the political system.
In any given society there may well be different political cultures that
give rise to conflict. One of the problems of becoming modern was seen in
cultural terms as a problem of persuading people to accept the boundaries of
the nation-state as legitimate when those boundaries had their origins in
alien rule. The processes of government might also lack legitimacy if they
were based on unacceptable forms of authority again derived from an alien
source. Adaptation to forms of democracy inherited from outside may also
be difficult. This is frequently referred to as the problem of political inte-
gration, a major source of political instability in Third World societies.
The ‘problem’ of political integration will be returned to in Chapter 9 when
different explanations for nationalism and secession are considered.
54 Understanding Third World Politics