although it takes a cultural explanation to uncover why that was the preference
set in the first place.
Political Development
Political development was a major research topic in political science in the
1950s and 1960s, but has of late become somewhat less fashionable. The basic
idea, operating by analogy with economic development, was that there existed
a fairly objective path of political progress through which societies moved
towards further political sophistication, just as there is, arguably, a trend towards
greater economic capacity which all economies can at least hope to take.
Political development had obvious serious problems in avoiding a purely
ideological bias in which nations were seen as more developed the more they
came to resemble Westernliberal democracies, or whatever else was taken as
the ideal. Particularly in the USA, a great deal of effort was put into
comparative governmentstudies with a developmental approach, and much
of this was organized around the popular sociological theories of the day, which
were all forms offunctionalism. The idea that there is a developmental path
towards greater political complexity and more efficient problem-solving is not
new, however. All of the major social theorists of the 19th and early 20th
centuries,Comte,Marx, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903),Durkheim,Weber
and, arguably, the philosophers of the English tradition ofutilitarianism,
believed in some sort of regular developmental sequence in the changes that
political systems underwent. In a less theoretical mode the policies of the
powers of Europeancolonialismoften implied such a notion too, with the
idea that the local inhabitants of, for example, India had to be led slowly
towards a capacity for independence by stages of taking more and more
responsibility as their economic and educational systems improved. In a similar
way many non-democratic nations of theThird Worldclaim to be on a path
of gradual development of political capacity, usually going hand in hand with
economic development. Thus the ideas ofdirected democracyand justifica-
tions for one-party states often start from the argument that fully-fledged liberal
democracy is incompatible with the stresses arising from the need to build
national unity and to organize a productive economy. Too much importance,
however, tends to be placed on the fact that Western democracies followed a
roughly similar path fromfeudalismtodemocracy, and that newer nations
should therefore be expected to follow a similar developmental sequence.
Political Machine
The great days of the party machine are probably long gone in modern liberal
democracies, but it may well become a feature of states in the process of
Political Development