Political Development, Modernisation and Political Culture

Comparative Politics: nature and major approaches; political economy and political sociology perspectives; limitations of the comparative method.

This article covers the three developmental approaches that dominated comparative politics from the late 1950s — political development, political modernisation, and political culture — together with political socialisation and the contrast between open and closed societies.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Section A, Unit 1

By 1960 the comparative politics of the new states had a vocabulary but no yardstick. Easton and Almond had made it possible to describe a Ghanaian and a Swedish political system in the same terms. What nobody could say was which of them was doing better, or at what.

The developmental approaches were built to answer exactly that. If political systems could be placed on a scale, then comparison would yield not merely description but ranking, diagnosis and prescription — which is what the American foundations funding the research, and the governments advising the new states, actually wanted.

Three successive attempts were made at the yardstick, and each was abandoned for the same reason.

Political development measured systems by the growth of participation, state capacity and institutional specialisation — and was attacked for defining development as movement towards Western liberal democracy. Political modernisation answered the charge by shifting to apparently neutral economic markers — industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, rationalisation — and turned out to smuggle the same destination in through the back door. Political culture shifted the ground again, to citizens’ own orientations, and was attacked for circularity: it explained stable democracy by a culture that could only be identified in stable democracies.

The story is not one of failure, however. Each collapse produced concepts that outlived the framework that generated them — political decay, institutionalisation, the soft state, the participant citizen, social capital, post-materialism — and those concepts are still the working currency of comparative analysis.

The Political Development Approach

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Why it emerged

• The approach was part of the broader behavioural revolution, advanced principally by Lucian Pye, Fred Riggs, James Coleman, Edward Shils and, in its most powerful form, by Samuel Huntington.
• Its purpose was specific: the study of developing areas. Most of its subjects had emerged from colonial rule within the previous fifteen years, and the question was how political institutions in the newly independent world evolve, adapt or fail as their societies change.
• Its founding insight is worth stating clearly, because it is still correct. Political development is not economic development. Economic development concerns wealth generation and industrialisation; political development concerns the growth and maturity of political institutions and processes. The two can move in opposite directions, and much of the interesting comparative work exists to explain when and why they do.

Pye’s three parameters

• Equality. Increasing political participation and inclusiveness — more sections of society drawn into voting, representation and mobilisation, and reduced exclusion by class, gender, ethnicity or region.
  • The associated ideas are universal adult franchise, mass parties, and the recruitment of political personnel by achievement rather than ascription.
• Capacity. The state’s ability to implement policy, enforce law and maintain order. A state that cannot enforce its own rules lacks both functionality and, eventually, legitimacy.
  • Gunnar Myrdal’s term for the Indian case is the standard illustration: a soft state, one whose legislation is abundant and whose enforcement is negotiable, because policy is compromised at the point of implementation rather than at the point of decision.
• Differentiation. Functional specialisation of political institutions — a judiciary that interprets, an executive that enforces, a legislature that makes law, each with a defined role. Overlapping or weakly defined roles are the mark of underdevelopment.
• The three are held together in what Pye and Coleman called the development syndrome, and the crucial claim is that they are in tension with one another.
  • Rapid expansion of equality can overwhelm capacity; the strengthening of capacity often requires restricting equality; differentiation without integration produces institutions that pull against each other. Development is therefore not a smooth accumulation of good things but a set of trade-offs.

The five crises of development

Pye and his colleagues identified the sequence of problems every developing polity must resolve. The order and severity in which they arrive largely determines the outcome.

• The identity crisis — whether the population regards itself as one political community. Unresolved, it produces secession, ethnic conflict and contested nationhood.
• The legitimacy crisis — whether the authority of the new state and its rulers is accepted as rightful, once the unifying legitimacy of the anti-colonial struggle has been spent.
• The penetration crisis — whether the state’s writ actually reaches its territory and population, or stops at the district town.
• The participation crisis — whether newly mobilised groups can be brought into politics through existing institutions, or must break them to enter.
• The distribution crisis — whether the state can allocate goods and welfare in a way that is accepted as tolerably fair.
• The comparative payoff is real and it is the school’s single best insight.
  • Britain met these crises sequentially over three centuries; post-colonial states met all five simultaneously in their first two decades.
  • This is a structural explanation for post-colonial instability that requires no assumption whatever about the character of the societies involved.

Huntington and political decay

• Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies is the most important book the approach produced, and it was written against the optimism of the rest of the school.
• His opening move demolished the assumption that development is linear.

“The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.” — Huntington

• The question is therefore not whether a state is democratic or authoritarian, but whether it is governed at all — and by that measure the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union belonged together, and all three stood apart from most of the states the development literature was written about.
• Political decay is his central concept: when political institutions fail to keep pace with the demands generated by a modernising society, the result is instability and the breakdown of order.
  • Development is therefore reversible. Institutions lose adaptability and legitimacy, and systems move backwards — which no other theory in the school allowed.
• The mechanism is stated as a ratio. Modernisation mobilises people faster than institutions can absorb them: literacy, urbanisation and mass media raise aspirations and expand participation, while institutions grow slowly. Where participation outruns institutionalisation, the result is political decay.
• Institutionalisation is measured on four dimensions, and this remains one of the most usable operational concepts in comparative politics:
  • Adaptability against rigidity — whether the institution survives changes in its environment, its function and its leadership.
  • Complexity against simplicity — the number and variety of its sub-units.
  • Autonomy against subordination — whether it has interests distinct from those of any particular social group.
  • Coherence against disunity — the degree of internal consensus on its boundaries and procedures.
• A praetorian society is his term for a polity in which participation is high and institutionalisation low, so that social forces confront each other directly with no institution to mediate — the wealthy bribe, the students riot, the workers strike, and the military intervenes.
• The conclusion drew sustained criticism and was meant to. The choice was not between liberal democracy and communism, both of which reflect a high degree of order, but between order and disorder — a formulation that made him the school’s most cited author and its most attacked one.

Riggs and the prismatic society

• Fred Riggs contributed the development trap: societies experience imbalanced development, where economic or social change outpaces political change, and institutions unable to cope produce dysfunction, unrest or authoritarianism.
• His larger contribution is the prismatic model, which remains the best available description of administration in transitional societies.
  • A fused society is traditional — one structure performs many functions, as a chief is judge, priest, general and tax collector.
  • A diffracted society is modern — each function has its own specialised structure.
  • A prismatic society is in between: structures are formally differentiated but functionally still fused, so a modern-looking bureaucracy in fact operates on kinship and patronage.
• Three features characterise prismatic society, and each is directly observable in South Asian administration.
  • Heterogeneity — the simultaneous presence of the highly modern and the entirely traditional, a stock exchange and a bonded-labour system in one economy.
  • Formalism — the gap between formally prescribed rules and actually observed practice. The law says one thing, everyone knows it will not be enforced, and both facts are stable.
  • Overlapping — formal structures penetrated by informal ones, so that caste, kinship and community determine what the office does.
• The sala is his name for the prismatic administrative office — neither the traditional chamber nor the modern bureau, but an office where public authority is exercised for private and communal ends. Clects are the associations, part traditional and part modern, that operate through it.

Significance and criticism

• The approach’s real achievements should be granted before its faults are listed.
  • It brought non-Western states into comparative politics as objects of theory rather than as curiosities.
  • It gave a dynamic view in place of the static institutionalism it replaced, showing that political systems must evolve alongside social and economic change.
  • It generated concepts — decay, institutionalisation, soft state, penetration, formalism — that are still in use decades after the framework fell.
• The criticism is fundamental and was ultimately fatal.
  • The definition of development is Western liberal democracy. The approach tends to define political development as movement towards Western institutions, so that political development for China would require China to become democratic.
  • This privileges one ideological model and delegitimises alternative political paths — the Marxist objection, and the strongest one.
  • The direction of causation is assumed rather than shown. Differentiation is treated as development because developed states are differentiated, which is circular.
  • The framework is teleological: it reads history as movement towards an end-state, and treats deviation from that path as pathology rather than as an alternative.
  • It carries the same defects as the systems approach on which it rests — status-quoism, inattention to power and class, and inability to explain rupture.
  • The empirical record is against it. Many states that developed strong institutions did not democratise, and several that democratised had weak institutions and stayed democratic.

Political Modernisation

The move to apparently neutral ground

• In direct response to the charge of bias, scholars introduced modernisation as an alternative parameter for comparison.
• The shift was deliberate: modernisation is primarily an economic category, denoting structural transformation of society rather than movement towards a political destination. Its four markers are:
  • Industrialisation — the shift of production and employment from agriculture to manufacture and services.
  • Urbanisation — the movement of populations into cities, dissolving village-based social control.
  • Secularisation — the decline of religious authority over public life and the separation of the sacred from the political.
  • Rationalisation — the extension of calculative, means-end reasoning into administration, law, economy and everyday life. This is Weber’s concept, and it is the deepest of the four.
• Because these are socio-economic processes rather than political preferences, the approach appeared ideologically neutral in a way that political development did not.
• It overlaps with the end of ideology thesis. If all countries modernising along these lines converge on similar social structures and similar policy problems, then ideological differences lose relevance and all countries follow similar developmental trajectories regardless of their political systems.

The theorists behind the markers

• Daniel Lerner, in The Passing of Traditional Society, made empathy the psychological key — the capacity to imagine oneself in another’s position, which he argued was produced by urbanisation, literacy and media exposure, and was the precondition of participant citizenship. His sequence runs urbanisation → literacy → media exposure → participation.
• Karl Deutsch’s concept of social mobilisation described the process by which old social, economic and psychological commitments are eroded and people become available for new patterns of behaviour — the mechanism through which modernisation generates the participation Huntington worried about.
• W. W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto, set out five stages — traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption. Its subtitle is the most honest statement of the school’s Cold War purpose that any of its authors made.
• Talcott Parsons’s pattern variables supplied the sociological content of the traditional–modern contrast, and they remain the crispest statement of it:

• Shmuel Eisenstadt worked within the school and eventually broke it, and his later concept of multiple modernities is now the standard alternative — the claim that modernity takes culturally distinct institutional forms, and that Western modernity is one of them rather than the template.

The democratising claim, and China

• Lipset’s proposition is the hinge: the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances it will sustain democracy. Economic development produces a larger middle class, higher literacy, more associations and more moderate politics, and these sustain democratic institutions.
• Huntington held that modernisation ultimately leads to democracy, and his account of the third wave of democratisation after 1974 appeared to confirm it, with economic development identified as the single most powerful predictor of transition.
• China is the standing challenge to the entire thesis. Despite four decades of extraordinary economic modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation, it has not moved towards democratisation.
  • The Communist Party’s control has instead become more entrenched, and the reason is explicitly comparative: the Party drew its lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding that political liberalisation preceding economic reform destroyed the Soviet state, and sequenced accordingly.
  • The case demonstrates that market economy and political pluralism are separable, which falsifies the strong form of modernisation theory. The party-state that results is a distinct regime type, not a transitional stage.
• Singapore and the Gulf states make the same point at smaller scale, and India makes the reverse point — sustaining democracy for three-quarters of a century at income levels the theory says are far too low.
• The analytical conclusion follows: even the modernisation thesis is not neutral. While claiming to move beyond ideology, it implicitly holds liberal democratic institutions to be the end-point of development. It does have an inherent agenda.

The wider critique

• Ethnocentrism. The traditional–modern dichotomy takes European social history as the definition of modernity and consigns everything else to the residual category of tradition.
• Unilinearity. It assumes a single path along which all societies travel at different speeds, when the evidence is of multiple distinct trajectories.
• Ahistoricism, and the missing colonial variable. The theory treats underdevelopment as an original condition to be overcome, rather than as a historical product. It has no place for the fact that the modernisation of Europe and the underdevelopment of Asia, Africa and Latin America were the same process.
• The dependency answer is the sharpest version of that objection. For Andre Gunder Frank, underdevelopment is not a stage but a product — generated by the transfer of surplus from periphery to core. His phrase, the development of underdevelopment, inverts the entire modernisation framework.
• Tradition is not the obstacle the theory assumes. Rudolph and Rudolph’s The Modernity of Tradition showed from the Indian case that traditional structures such as caste can be the vehicles of modernisation rather than its casualties — caste associations became instruments of democratic mobilisation, literacy campaigns and welfare claims.
• The empirical record now runs against the convergence claim directly. A 2024 study of World Values Survey data covering 76 countries and over 400,000 respondents between 1981 and 2022 found global divergence rather than convergence in values.
  • Values emphasising tolerance and self-expression diverged most sharply, particularly between high-income Western countries and the rest.
  • Rising wealth produced emancipative values chiefly in Western democracies; non-Western countries growing richer did not undergo the same value shift, and the relationship between income and value change weakened markedly in Asia and Africa.
  • Strikingly, values converged regionally while diverging globally — geographic proximity became an increasingly strong predictor of value similarity.
  • This is direct empirical support for multiple modernities against the universalist form of modernisation theory, and it is the strongest such evidence the debate has yet produced.
• Huntington’s own later turn completes the story. Having argued that modernisation produces democracy, he moved in The Clash of Civilizations to the position that cultural difference is durable and modernisation does not entail Westernisation — abandoning, in effect, the thesis he had done most to establish.

Modernisation theory answered the charge of Western bias by changing its indicators and keeping its destination — which is why the same objection defeated it twice.

The Political Culture Approach

Why culture became the variable

• Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture proposed a different basis for comparison altogether: the norms, values and orientations that people hold towards their political system.
• The rationale is methodological rather than sentimental. Culture is a long-term, deeply embedded phenomenon, changing slowly and measurably, which makes it a stable basis for comparison across systems in a way that governments and policies are not.
• Their theoretical borrowings are explicit:
  • Weber’s ideal types, used to construct model categories of political culture that no real society matches exactly but every real society can be located against.
  • Easton’s input–output model, used to define the types by asking whether citizens orient themselves towards inputs, outputs, both or neither.
• The study itself was a landmark of method: a five-nation survey of the United States, Britain, West Germany, Italy and Mexico — the first genuinely cross-national attitude survey in political science, and the model for every barometer since.

The three orientations

Political culture is the pattern of individual orientations towards political objects, and Almond and Verba decompose orientation into three elements. The three types below are derived from these; without them the typology is a list of labels rather than a theory.

• Cognitive orientation — knowledge of and belief about the political system, its roles, its incumbents, its inputs and its outputs. Do people know what a Rajya Sabha is?
• Affective orientation — feelings about the system: attachment, pride, alienation, hostility.
• Evaluative orientation — judgments and opinions about the system, combining information and feeling into a verdict on how it performs.

The three types, and civic culture

• Parochial political culture. People have little or no awareness of or involvement with the political system. They do not see themselves as part of political processes and have no expectations of government, influencing neither inputs nor outputs.
  • The illustration usually given is the position of indigenous communities in the Andaman Islands relative to the Indian political system — a peripheral relation in which the system is barely present as an object of orientation.
• Subject political culture. Citizens are aware of the system and of its outputs but have limited influence on its inputs. They are passive recipients of policy who do not shape the agenda.
  • They nonetheless matter at the point of implementation: the system is concerned about how people will react, even where it does not consult them.
  • India’s political culture until the 1980s is the standard example. People were not in a position to determine what went into the system, but the system could not entirely ignore their reaction. One consequence was the reluctance of Indian elites to attempt economic reform earlier, from the fear that people would not support it.
• Participant political culture. Citizens are actively engaged with both inputs and outputs, and see themselves as capable of influencing governance through voting, association, protest and civic activism.
  • Switzerland, with its referendums and dense participation, is the type case. In India the growth of participant culture from the beginning of the twenty-first century is visible in civil-society assertion, of which the Jan Lokpal mobilisation is the most cited instance.
• Mixed types matter as much as pure ones, and Almond and Verba named three — parochial-subject, subject-participant and parochial-participant — arguing that most real societies are transitional mixtures, and that the mixture, not the pure type, is what needs explaining.
• Civic culture is the crucial argument, and it is counter-intuitive. It is not the maximum of participation. It is a balanced blend of participant, subject and parochial orientations, and Almond and Verba held it to be the culture most conducive to stable democracy.
  • Excessive participant culture is destabilising. A citizenry permanently mobilised on every question overloads the system, and unrestrained participation can turn democracy into mobocracy.
  • A balanced mix allows the system to absorb shocks. Many citizens are engaged; others remain passive; the reservoir of deference and diffuse support permits governments to act.
  • The ideal citizen in this model holds a latent rather than active influence — believing they could affect government if they had to, and mostly not trying. The belief in one’s competence matters more than its exercise.
  • Civic culture thus supplies stability through moderation, resting on tolerance, trust in institutions and a sense of civic duty.
• The five-nation findings placed the United States and Britain closest to the civic-culture mix, Germany as predominantly subject with high knowledge and low participant confidence, Italy as alienated with low trust and low participation, and Mexico as parochial with strong aspirational participant elements.

What came after

• Almond and Verba’s own The Civic Culture Revisited revisited the findings two decades later and conceded significant change, particularly the erosion of deference in Britain — implicitly acknowledging that political culture is more mutable than the original argument required.
• Ronald Inglehart transformed the field with the theory of post-materialism. His scarcity and socialisation hypotheses hold that people prioritise what was scarce in their formative years, and that basic values change chiefly through generational replacement.
  • Generations raised in security shift from materialist priorities of economic and physical safety to post-materialist priorities of self-expression, autonomy, environment and quality of life.
  • The World Values Survey, which he founded and which now spans most of the world’s population, is the empirical instrument, and the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map plots societies on two axes: traditional against secular-rational values, and survival against self-expression values.
  • Christian Welzel’s development of the argument identifies emancipative values as the causal link, and reverses the older claim: it is not democracy that produces democratic culture but rising emancipative values that generate effective demand for democracy.
• Robert Putnam’sMaking Democracy Work is the most influential single piece of political-culture research since Almond and Verba. Comparing Italian regional governments created simultaneously with identical constitutional powers, he found performance varied enormously and tracked centuries-old differences in civic tradition.
  • His explanation is social capital — networks, norms of reciprocity and trust that make collective action possible. The civic community, dense with horizontal associations, produces good government; the vertical, patron-client south does not.
  • The historical depth of the claim, tracing the difference to medieval communal republics against Norman monarchy, makes it the strongest available statement of path dependence in political culture — and its most contested feature.
  • Bowling Alone applied the same apparatus to the decline of American civic engagement, and made social capital a term of general political usage.

The critique of political culture

• Circularity is the fundamental objection. Stable democracies are said to have civic cultures, and civic culture is identified by observing stable democracies. The explanation and the thing explained are measured by the same evidence.
• The direction of causation is undetermined. Does a participant culture produce democratic institutions, or do democratic institutions produce participant citizens? The evidence is equally consistent with both, and Inglehart’s own later work concedes that institutions shape values as well as being shaped by them.
• Brian Barry’s rational-choice critique in Sociologists, Economists and Democracy is the most technically damaging: the civic-culture argument, he showed, cannot distinguish attitudes that cause stability from attitudes that are consequences of it, and it presents as explanation what is at best correlation.
• It ignores power and interest. Culture is treated as freely held belief rather than as something produced. Gramsci’s account of hegemony makes the opposite claim — that mass consent to a political order is manufactured through the institutions of civil society, so that what political culture measures as legitimacy may be measuring successful domination.
• It underrates institutions. The same population behaves very differently under different electoral rules, federal arrangements and party systems, which suggests the causal weight lies with design rather than disposition.
• It is static and treats culture as homogeneous. Every large society contains political sub-cultures — regional, class, ethnic, generational — and the national average may describe nobody.
• The categories are ethnocentric. Parochial is a description of a society’s failure to resemble a mass democracy, and the ladder from parochial to participant carries the same developmental teleology the culture approach was meant to escape.
• The measurement problems are severe. Survey questions do not mean the same thing across languages and contexts, response styles differ systematically between cultures, and the 2024 divergence findings show that even the best cross-national instruments are measuring something that moves in unexpected directions.
• It risks becoming a residual category — the explanation invoked when institutional and economic accounts fail, which makes it unfalsifiable.

Political Socialisation

What it is and how it works

• Political socialisation is induction into the political culture. It is the process by which an individual acquires political attitudes, values, beliefs and orientations, and simultaneously the process by which a society transmits its political norms from one generation to the next.
• The term entered the discipline through Herbert Hyman’s Political Socialization, and it is the mechanism that makes political culture possible: without transmission, a culture is only a description of the living.
• It is inseparable from political recruitment, since socialisation prepares individuals to take up political roles — which is why Almond treated the two as a single input function.
• The agencies operate in sequence and with declining force through life:
  • The family is the primary agency and the most powerful. Party identification, basic attitudes to authority, and the sense of whether politics is one’s business at all are largely formed here.
  • The school is the most deliberate agency — through curriculum, civics teaching, national symbols, ritual, and the authority structure of the classroom itself.
  • Peer groups, whose influence rises sharply in adolescence and can override the family.
  • Religious institutions, which transmit both explicit political teaching and general dispositions towards authority and obligation.
  • Workplace, trade union and professional association, which locate people in the structure of economic interest.
  • Mass media, historically the great secondary agency and now, in its algorithmic form, arguably the primary one for the young.
  • Political parties and the government itself, through campaigns, public communication and the experience of dealing with the state.
• The distinctions that matter:
  • Direct socialisation transmits explicitly political content — a civics lesson, a party manifesto. Indirect socialisation transmits general dispositions that later become political — attitudes to authority formed in the family transfer to the state.
  • Manifest socialisation is intended by the agency; latent socialisation happens without anyone intending it.
  • Primary socialisation occurs in childhood and is deep and durable; secondary socialisation continues through adult life and is shallower but responsive to events.
  • Resocialisation is the deliberate replacement of an existing political identity, which is what regime change requires and what makes transitions so slow.
• Easton and Dennis described the child’s political learning in four stages, which remain the standard account: politicisation (awareness that political authority exists), personalisation (grasping it through a person, such as the president or prime minister), idealisation (attributing benevolence to that figure) and institutionalisation (transferring the attachment from the person to the impersonal office).
• The functions performed are systemic as much as individual: socialisation maintains the political system by reproducing support, legitimises authority by making it appear natural, integrates diverse groups into a common political community, and transmits or transforms the political culture across generations.

Socialisation in open and closed societies

• The contrast rests on Karl Popper’s distinction in The Open Society and Its Enemies.
  • The open society is one in which individuals confront personal decisions, institutions are treated as human constructions open to criticism and revision, and social improvement proceeds by piecemeal engineering tested against results.
  • The closed society is tribal, collectivist and historicist — it treats the social order as given, magical or inevitable, holds that history moves towards a knowable destination, and treats criticism as betrayal rather than as method.
• The difference in socialisation follows directly from the difference in epistemology. An order that believes it may be wrong must permit competing socialisation; an order that believes it cannot be wrong must monopolise it.

• The closed-society model in practice shows a consistent institutional design across otherwise very different regimes.
  • Age-graded mass organisations capture the individual for life: the Young Pioneers and Komsomol in the Soviet Union, the Young Pioneers and Communist Youth League in China, the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany.
  • The curriculum is a state monopoly and history is the most tightly controlled subject, because a regime’s legitimacy is a story about the past.
  • A cult of personality personalises authority and short-circuits institutional criticism.
  • Media and cultural production are state instruments, and the arts are enlisted through doctrines such as socialist realism.
  • Ritual and symbol — parades, mass gymnastics, anniversaries — perform affective socialisation that argument cannot.
  • China after 1989 is the best-documented modern case: the Patriotic Education Campaign rebuilt legitimacy around national humiliation and national rejuvenation rather than class struggle, and the incorporation of official ideology into school and university curricula continues that project.
• The open-society model is not the absence of socialisation but its dispersal.
  • Competing agencies produce cross-pressures, and the individual who receives conflicting messages from family, school, peers and media must adjudicate between them. The capacity for independent political judgment is a product of that conflict, not of its absence.
  • Open societies socialise deliberately too — a national curriculum, civic education, oaths, flags, anniversaries — and the important difference is that this content is publicly contestable, which is why curriculum disputes are such recurrent political events in democracies.
• The dichotomy is analytically useful and empirically crude, and four qualifications limit it.
  • Neither type exists in pure form. Open societies contain substantial unexamined transmission — the framing power of concentrated media ownership, the reproduction of privilege through elite schooling — and Gramsci’s hegemony describes precisely a consent manufactured in a formally free civil society.
  • Closed societies leak. Samizdat, foreign broadcasting, diaspora networks, smuggled media and now circumvention technology all mean that monopoly is aspiration rather than achievement, and the intensity of a regime’s information control is a measure of how incomplete it knows the monopoly to be.
  • Openness is a continuum, not a binary, and a system may be open in some domains and closed in others — permitting economic debate while foreclosing constitutional debate.
  • The digital environment has disrupted both. In open societies, algorithmic curation reconstructs the sealed information environment that plural agencies were supposed to prevent, and affective polarisation is the result — a re-closing from below rather than from above. In closed societies, the same technologies simultaneously enable unprecedented surveillance and unprecedented leakage.
  • Resocialisation after regime change is the hardest test of the distinction, and its slowness is the evidence that closed-society socialisation genuinely works: de-Nazification in Germany, the post-Soviet transitions, and the truth-and-reconciliation process in South Africa each demonstrated that formal institutions can be changed far faster than the orientations of the people who must operate them.

The Indian Context

• India’s political culture has moved decisively from subject towards participant, and the movement is measurable rather than impressionistic.
  • The National Election Studies run by Lokniti at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies since 1967 provide the survey base, and they document rising political efficacy, rising claimed interest in politics, and rising participation across almost every social group.
  • The participation gradient identified by Yogendra Yadav inverts the Western pattern: turnout rises as one moves down the social hierarchy, so that Dalits, Adivasis, the poor and — since around 2010 — women vote at higher rates than the privileged. Political culture theory, built on the assumption that participation rises with education and income, has no ready account of this.
• The developmental concepts fit the Indian case unusually well, which is why they were generated partly from it.
  • Myrdal’s soft state remains the standard description of the gap between legislative ambition and enforcement capacity.
  • Riggs’s formalism describes the same phenomenon from the administrative side, and the sala describes an office where public authority is routinely exercised through community and kinship networks.
  • Huntington’s participation–institutionalisation ratio is the most useful frame for the crisis decade of the 1970s: mobilisation ran far ahead of institutional absorption, and the Emergency was decay in his precise sense.
• The five crises arrived together, and the Indian resolution of each is a comparative datum.
  • The identity crisis was met through linguistic reorganisation of states and asymmetric federalism rather than through suppression.
  • The legitimacy crisis was met by conducting the first general election on universal adult franchise in a society with about 16 per cent literacy — a decision no theory of development recommended.
  • The participation crisis was met through the expansion of the party system and, eventually, the political rise of the lower castes.
  • The penetration and distribution crises remain the least resolved, which is where the soft-state characterisation continues to bite.
• Political socialisation in India operates through a distinctive set of agencies.
  • The family and caste together constitute a far more powerful primary agency than in most societies, transmitting not only party preference but the entire structure of social obligation within which political choice is made.
  • The school curriculum is a recurring site of political contestation, and disputes over the content of history textbooks are, in the language of this approach, disputes over the manifest socialisation of the next generation.
  • Elections themselves are a socialising agency of enormous power. Repeated participation in a competitive election is what taught a largely non-literate electorate the efficacy of the vote, and the Election Commission’s conduct of that process is therefore a socialising institution as much as an administrative one.
  • Panchayati Raj under the 73rd and 74th Amendments institutionalised participation at the level where most citizens actually encounter the state, and the reservation of seats for women has functioned as deliberate socialisation into political roles — with measurable downstream effects on the aspirations of adolescent girls in reserved constituencies.
• The contemporary shift is towards a mediated and highly affective political culture. Smartphone penetration and encrypted messaging have made peer-to-peer transmission the dominant channel for political information, largely displacing the editorially mediated media that the classic literature treated as the secondary agency — and reproducing, within an open society, some of the informational enclosure the model attributes to closed ones.

Conclusion

The developmental approaches asked the right question and answered it in terms that could not survive scrutiny. Political systems do differ in ways that matter to the people living under them, and a comparative politics that refuses to say so has given up the only thing that made comparison worth doing. Political development, modernisation and political culture were three attempts to say it, and each failed because each mistook a description of the West for a definition of the destination.

What survives is more useful than what was discarded. Huntington’s institutionalisation, Riggs’s formalism, Myrdal’s soft state, Pye’s five crises, Almond and Verba’s participant citizen, Putnam’s social capital and Inglehart’s generational value change are all live instruments, precisely because each can be measured in a particular society without requiring that society to be on its way to becoming another one.

The current evidence sharpens the point rather than settling it. Global values are diverging while regional values converge; China has modernised without democratising; India has sustained democracy without modernising in the theory’s terms. What each of these facts refutes is not the idea that societies change, but the idea that they are all changing in the same direction — and that is the durable finding of seventy years of developmental comparison.