reflect the technology available as well as the type of social organization
that had developed.
Societies then have to transmit their dominant political values from gen-
eration to generation. All societies have ways of conveying to the younger
generation what they ought to believe about political obligation, authority
and the rightful exercise of power. How the function of political socializa-
tionis performed varies considerably from one society to another. The rela-
tive prevalence of the family, educational institutions, or other associations
will differ from society to society.
Finally, individuals have to be recruited into roles and offices. Processes of
political succession have to be devised – election, inheritance, merit, physi-
cal might, and other principles by which people are recruited into political
roles and perhaps permanent offices. The function of political recruitment
requires some kind of routinization in both traditional and modern societies.
The roles that perform the universal functions regardless of structure have to
be filled by acceptable methods. These clearly change over time.
Political change
The functionalists were trying to do more than just provide a new language
for identifying the universal features of political systems. They were trying
to provide a framework for understanding change. In practice the function-
alists were more concerned with the characteristics of societies in some
process of transition, rather than with the elaboration of models for ‘simple’
or ‘primitive’ societies. Their major areas of interest were the new nation
states emerging on the international scene into which virtually all traditional
societies had been more or less fully incorporated, usually through the oper-
ation of colonialism. Comparative politics was redesigned to explain the
effects of the interactions between the traditional structures and cultures of
communities incorporated into these new states that had been produced by
colonialism and nationalistic reactions to it.
The most important change for the political functionalists was the associ-
ation of increasingly specialized structures with single functions in modern
societies. Political change is seen as the movement away from traditional
politics towards the modern political system. Change takes place in both
structure and culture.
Structures, it was argued, become more specialized and differentiated as
societies become more modern. This is an application of those parts of mod-
ernization theory that postulate the growing differentiation, specialization
56 Understanding Third World Politics