Zarmina Khan
The origin of the political development term can be traced to the 1950s when many American political scientists were endeavoring to study the political dynamics of newly emerging countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Development always happens within a context. Politics and development are two different aspects and when both are combined, it forms “Political Development”. Consciousness is the benchmark of development and until politics is consciously carried out, it cannot be developed. In the underdeveloped states, politics is haphazard and disoriented.
Development applies to the creation and improvisation of political systems, putting public affairs in order. Moreover, developing the political systems directly means institutionalizing, building, and promoting the political structures that contain political activities within well-defined bounds.
Political development increases the capability of the state to organize and allot resources to make policy inputs into implementable outputs. The study of Political Development enables to shape of development options, outcomes, strategies, and trajectories.
Political Development lacks a precise definition and many philosophers defined it in various ways.
Kenneth Organski discussed political development in the light of four factors.
- Political unification
- Industrialization
- National Welfare
- Abundance
Almond and Powell defined political development as the increased differentiation and specialization of Political structures, and the increased secularization of political culture.
Samuel P. Huntington stated that political development is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire values and stability.
Alfred Diamont defined political development as a process that aims at a particular condition but one that creates an institutional framework for solving an everlasting range of social problems.
Lucian Pye highlighted main features of Political development as:
- Equality
- Capacity
- Differentiation and specialization
Equality involves the idea of objective and equal application of law for all people. Moreover, it focuses on political recruitment on a merit basis rather than inscriptive consideration. Capacity involves the governmental performances, efficiency, and effectiveness, and capacity of the political system to affect the economic and social aspects of society through its outputs. Differentiation and specialization signify that along with the differentiation, there is increased functional specialization of different roles within the system and it also includes the integration of complex structures and processes.
The theoretical debate over political development is crucial to understand its importance.
Modernization theory equates development with the replication of the social, economic, and political patterns of the industrialized Western world. Political development happens when conditions are created for equitable growth through well-stable government and social acquiescence. Underdevelopment is contemplated as an undesirable condition and development as desirable and similar to the Western industrialized model. The political development process is held to be linear, leading from the former to the latter. It focused on internal rather than external factors.
Modernization theory has faced criticism because it puts undue importance on aspects or processes identified in Western development processes, exalting at length the importance of their absence in developing states while disregarding the worth of crucial processes taking place in those states. Only a segment of developing society is involved in the analyses. The preferences made into modernization theory stressed administrative characteristics of development at the expense of the effects of the process on the inhabitants of the developing states. Development was studied in terms of the degree to which order or steadiness or institutional development endorsed economic growth while slight consideration was paid to the influence of this growth predominantly regarding the distribution of benefits derived from it. Modernization theorists leaned to be stagnant, neglecting the current political dynamics of the developing states and overlooking the external context of the politics of developing states.
In response to the modernization theory which states that the reason of under developing countries remained underdeveloped is that they didn’t resemble the industrialized western world closely. Another theory has been presented.
Dependency theory focuses on the causes of the situations of underdevelopment in material and historical terms. The relative poverty of the underdeveloped states is the outcome of capitalist imperialism and exploitation of underdeveloped states and their resources through unequal incorporation of underdeveloped states in the economic system of the world.
The external international economic inequalities are replicated within underdeveloped states and the occurrence of political development is possible only on one condition which is the overthrow of the present economic order. Dependency theory focuses on the external determinants and the constraints on the underdeveloped states due to their conditions of dependency and it emphasizes the study of politics in a socio-economic context rather than study in isolation.
Dependency theory also faced criticism due to its rigidity of the analytical framework enforced on the study of underdeveloped states. Dependency theorists just focused on advocating the revolutionary overthrow of the existing system and the formation of a socialist order by way of prediction. Dependency theory didn’t anticipate the process of transition from dependency to one of development other than by way of revolutionary transformation. Dependency theory didn’t focus much on the political dimension of the development of underdeveloped states and control of the political domain of the development of underdeveloped states is efficiently detached from the domain of those states. It has been claimed that dependency theory leaned to dispirit the deep analyses of internal political processes.
Political Development is as crucial as the economic and social development of a country. Without proper civil and political rights, development cannot happen.
The writer is Research Associate at School for Law and Development.
