Abstract
Large scale comparative studies of national political systems offer the social scientist a methodology of great analytic power if only proper use can be made of the material at hand. In this article we examine in some detail a single sociological effort to apply the comparative method to national political systems.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support of the Faculty Research Committee of Dartmouth College. A Ford Foundation Public Affairs grant to Dartmouth College also aided the execution of this research. I was greatly stimulated by and am indebted to Robert A. Dentler for his advice, encouragement and helpful criticism during the initial and final stages of the study. Robert Sokol gave the manuscript a careful reading. My thanks to Robert Van Dam, Lawrence Stifler, Kimberly Holtorff and the other students who helped in the collection of some of the materials. The views expressed here in no way reflect the opinion of the Social Security Administration.
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Notes
Seymour M. Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review, 53 (March 1959), pp. 69–105.
See also Lyle W. Shannon, ‘Is Level of Development Related to Capacity for Self-Government?’ American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 17 (July 1958), pp. 367–82, and a follow-up study also by Shannon, ‘Socio-economic Development and Demographic Variables as Predictors of Political Change’, Sociological Quarterly, III (January 1962), pp. 27–43.
Leo F. Schnore’s ‘The Statistical Measurement of Urbanization and Economic Development’, Land Economics, XXXVII (August 1961), pp. 229–45, contains an assessment of the relationship among a number of different non-political indicators of national development we will use in this paper.
Ratings by a single expert or by panels of experts, averaging the opinions of judges concerning their opinions on the condition of the press, political freedoms, etc., are of less value than a more objective indicator of political development. Careful examination of Russell H. Fitzgibbons, ‘A Statistical Evaluation of Latin American Democracy’, Western Political Quarterly, 9 (1956), pp. 607–19, as well as Lipset’s attempt to place nations in ‘democratic’ or what amounts to ‘undemocratic’ clusters, reveal the problems of this method of subjective evaluation. The shift in the rank order (by experts) of the Latin American nations across time periods allows the person using the index to take his pick of the democratic and undemocratic nations. A more crucial point is the lack of agreement among raters concerning the rank order and, with larger numbers of nations, the necessity to abandon subjective evaluations and turn to objective indicators — what expert can be in intimate contact with the political histories of all the nations of the world and also be willing or able to order them on simple scales, let alone multiple dimensions? We can devise statistical and objective methods of measuring political development, just as the economist does when he asks about energy consumption per capita and not what an expert believes the whole economy of a nation has been doing over the past year. This implies that we can also remove ourselves from the world of ethnocentric judgments about the goodness or evil of political systems and turn to other aspects of political systems in order to understand them.
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© 1969 Jean Blondel
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Cutright, P. (1969). National Political Development: Measurement and Analysis. In: Blondel, J. (eds) Comparative Government. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15318-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15318-3_5
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