in land but also have alternative sources of wealth and reasonable levels of
income (Russett, 1964; Huntington, 1968). This relates to the economic
backwardness argument that poor countries cannot produce enough wealth
to satisfy all needs, whereas richer countries satisfy basic needs and make
the standard of living of the poorest reasonable and not too insecure.
However, other studies using political violence as an indicator of insta-
bility and land ownership as a measure of inequality have shown that while
maldistribution of land ownership, including high levels of landlessness,
have preceded revolutionary violence in Nicaragua and El Salvador, other
countries in the same region (Cost Rica and Panama) with similar inequali-
ties remained relatively non-violent and stable. Agrarian inequality may not
act independently but simply be part of inequality in the overall distribution
of income (Muller and Seligson, 1987, p. 443). How land inequality is
measured is also an important consideration, since landlessness, rather than
the distribution of land among the landed population, might be a better pre-
dictor of instability, since high levels of landlessness preceded political vio-
lence and even revolution in Mexico (1911), China (1941), Cuba (1959) and
Bolivia (1952). However, extensive cross-national multivariate analysis has
revealed the relationship between landlessness and political violence to be
statistically insignificant (Muller et al., 1989, pp. 577–8).
The converse argument is that stable countries have relatively egalitarian
distributions of income. But it has to be recognized that the hypothesis
would seem to be falsified by inegalitarian societies that have nevertheless
experienced considerable stability. India would be a case in point, fre-
quently cited as a stable democracy, at least in Third World terms. It obvi-
ously depends on how stability is measured.
Evidently not all inequality is threatening to the status quo. Gender
inequality is the most visible example of this. Discrimination against women
in politics (and in other walks of life) is the defining characteristic of gender
relations in the Third World (as in most other countries). Women’s citizen-
ship is limited. A study of 43 countries covering three-quarters of the world’s
population found that ‘in no country do women have political status equal to
men’s’ (Chowdhury and Nelson, 1994, p. 3). The management of the family
and household falls disproportionately on women at the expense of political
participation.
Women are grossly underrepresented in political institutions and
organizations, especially political parties. Only in the Caribbean and the
Seychelles do women occupy more than 20 per cent of ministerial posts at
Cabinet level. The proportion is less than 5 per cent in Asia and the Pacific.
In only 11 developing countries do women occupy 20 per cent or more of
Instability and Revolution 237