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 Western liberal democracies, or whatever else was taken as the ideal. Particularly in the USA, a great deal of effort was put into comparative government studies with a developmental approach, and much of this was organized around the popular sociological theories of the day, which were all forms of functionalism. 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 of utilitarianism, 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 European colonialism often 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 the Third World claim to be on a path of gradual development of political capacity, usually going hand in hand with economic development. Thus the ideas of directed democracy and justifications 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 from feudalism to democracy, and that newer nations should therefore be expected to follow a similar developmental sequence.
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