So originally developmentalists offered no theory of change. Huntington
points out that The Politics of the Developing Areas, for example, does not
deal with development. It, and similarly inspired works, employ concepts to
compare systems presumed to be at different stages of development. But
there is no explanation of a dynamic process. Later work, such as that by
Almond and Powell (1966) and Pye (1966) identified the key changes that
occur as a society becomes more developed politically, associating political
development with social modernization: greater political equality, govern-
mental capacity and institutional differentiation (Pye, 1966, pp. 31–48);
subsystem autonony, cultural secularization and structural differentiation
(Almond and Powell, 1966); rationalization, national integration, democra-
tization and mobilization (Huntington, 1965, pp. 387–8). Even then, how-
ever, ‘the stress was on the elaboration of models of different types of
political system, not different types of change from one system to another’
(Huntington, 1971, p. 307).
The problem was that political development was taken as given.
Meanings had then to be attached to the concept. Hence the proliferation of
definitions and ‘conceptual entropy’. No account is given of the forces that
must, for the developmentalist’s approach to work, be driving societies
along the development path. The lack of agreement on what ‘political devel-
opment’ actually meant made it impossible to posit a theoryof change
(Eckstein, 1982, p. 466; Cammack, 1997, pp. 28–30).
This difficulty is closely related to the emphasis placed on system main-
tenance and the capacity of societies to achieve equilibrium in the patterns
of social interaction. Change therefore appears unnatural. Forces placing
the system under stress have to be compensated for by other forces restor-
ing stability. Such a conceptual framework is of little use in analysing devel-
opment from one state to another (Huntington, 1971, p. 308).
When the shortcomings of political development theory in solving the
problem of explaining political change were eventually acknowledged, the-
orists abandoned the attempt to predict the direction of change, concentrat-
ing instead on relationships between specific variables indicative of
development identified by different theorists as particularly significant. For
example, Huntington focused on the causes of political stability in any
society, however ‘developed’, claiming the key variables to be levels of
political participation and political institutionalization (Huntington, 1965,
1968). Other theorists of change also focused on the destabilizing effects of
developments within the political system, but the important point is, as
Huntington points out, they were not dependent on definitions of ‘modern-
ization’, ‘tradition’ or ‘development’. The central question became: what
70 Understanding Third World Politics