Comment: Nature of political process in the Third World. (2001, 20 Marks)
The political process is the way power is sought, exercised and contested: through parties, elections, bureaucracies, armies, movements and informal networks. In the post-colonial Third World it has run under two conditions Europe never faced together: compressed time and external constraint. Its defining character is a gap between imported institutional form and indigenous social content.
Structural roots
- The colonial state. Hamza Alavi argued that the state inherited at independence was overdeveloped relative to society. Bureaucracy and army were built to dominate every indigenous class, so they entered independence with autonomy and ambition. State-building preceded nation-building, often within arbitrary borders.
- Simultaneous crises. The crises of identity, legitimacy, penetration, participation and distribution named by Lucian W. Pye and his colleagues arrived together rather than in sequence.
- Dependence. Commodity reliance, debt and structural adjustment narrowed policy choice, as dependency theorists from Raúl Prebisch to Andre Gunder Frank argued. Cold War patronage propped up friendly regimes.
Characteristic features
| Feature | Mechanism | Illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Praetorianism | Participation outruns institutionalisation (Samuel P. Huntington) | Coups in Pakistan, Latin America and Africa; Sahel juntas (2020–23), entrenched by Mali’s renewable five-year term for its coup leader (2025) |
| Formalism | Modern rules, traditional practice (Fred W. Riggs’s prismatic society) | Party constitutions unobserved; office used through kinship |
| Personalism | Neo-patrimonial rule; leader above party | Dynastic parties; founders’ parties dying with them |
| Clientelism | Targeted benefits for votes; ethnicity as a signal (Kanchan Chandra) | Patronage democracy in India |
| Identity politics | Ethnic parties make elections censuses (Donald L. Horowitz) | Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Kenya |
| Soft state | Weak enforcement of law (Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama, 1968) | Policy announced, not implemented |
- Dominant and single parties. Mexico’s PRI, Julius Nyerere’s TANU and India’s Congress system (Rajni Kothari) aggregated diverse interests within one party.
- The state as prize. Where the state is the main source of jobs, contracts and licences, office becomes the route to wealth, what Jean-François Bayart called the politics of the belly (1989). Politics turns winner-take-all, which raises the stakes of losing and tempts incumbents to rig or refuse defeat.
- Bureaucratic authoritarianism. Guillermo O’Donnell traced military-technocratic regimes in Argentina and Brazil to the crises of dependent industrialisation.
- Politics outside institutions. Kothari’s non-party political formations and Partha Chatterjee’s political society describe the poor negotiating with the state as populations, not as rights-bearing citizens.
Significance and limits of the generalisation
- The process has also been democratising. Huntington’s third wave carried elections across Latin America, Africa and Asia. In India’s 1990s upsurge, turnout rose as one moved down the social hierarchy, inverting the Western pattern.
- Many regimes became hybrids. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way call them competitive authoritarianism: elections are real but tilted by control of media, courts and state resources.
- Recent upsurges show mass politics overturning entrenched rulers: Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (2022), Bangladesh (2024) and Nepal’s Gen Z protests (2025). Each later returned power to the ballot box (Sri Lanka, 2024; Bangladesh, February 2026; Nepal, March 2026).
- The category is heterogeneous. Botswana, Costa Rica and India sustained democracy, while East Asia’s developmental states grew under authoritarian rule. “Third World politics” is a family of patterns, not one type.
- Many supposedly Third World pathologies (personalism, clientelism, executive aggrandisement) now mark established democracies too, eroding the boundary the concept assumed.
Conclusion
The Third World political process is best read as compressed political development. Mass participation, a powerful inherited state and external dependence collide before institutions mature, producing hybridity between modern form and traditional content. Instability is therefore one outcome rather than the essence. Where parties and institutions have absorbed participation, as in India, the same hybridity has deepened democracy rather than undermining it.