Is it necessary to evolve a distinct theoretical framework for analyzing emergent politics in the developing world? (2009, 20 Marks)
Post-war comparative politics met the new states of Asia and Africa with tools built for the West: Gabriel A. Almond’s structural-functionalism and the modernisation theory of Lucian W. Pye and others. Their failure to explain post-colonial politics prompted calls for a distinct framework. The case for adapting theory is strong; the case for a wholly separate theory is weak.
Why Western frameworks misfire
- Ethnocentrism and teleology. Modernisation theory treated development as movement towards Western liberal democracy and filed everything else under “tradition”.
- Different state origins. Hamza Alavi (1972) argued that the post-colonial state was overdeveloped: a colonial apparatus built to dominate all indigenous classes, leaving bureaucracy and military autonomous of society. European state theory assumes the reverse.
- Compressed crises. The crises of identity, legitimacy, penetration, participation and distribution (Leonard Binder, Pye and colleagues, Crises and Sequences in Political Development, 1971) struck new states together, not in sequence over three centuries.
- Form versus function. Fred W. Riggs’s prismatic society captures modern institutions running on kinship and patronage.
- External structure. Andre Gunder Frank’s “development of underdevelopment” and Guillermo O’Donnell’s bureaucratic authoritarianism (1973) located politics within global capitalism.
- Inverted patterns. In India’s 1990s “second democratic upsurge” (Yogendra Yadav), turnout rose as one moved down the social hierarchy. Partha Chatterjee’s political society shows the poor negotiating with the state as populations rather than as citizens of civil society.
Why a wholly separate theory is unnecessary
- Exceptionalism repeats the old error. A theory reserved for “them” reproduces modernisation’s binary with reversed sympathies.
- The “developing world” is not one unit. Botswana, Chile, India, China and Somalia share little beyond a label.
- General concepts travel when handled carefully. Giovanni Sartori’s warning against conceptual stretching (1970) prescribes moving along the ladder of abstraction, not abandoning comparison. Samuel P. Huntington’s institutionalisation, new institutionalism and Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully’s party-system institutionalisation work across regions. Robert H. Bates (1997) argued that area knowledge and general theory need each other.
- Convergence. Concepts forged in the South now explain the North. Clientelism, populism and electoral autocracy fit Western cases: the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 downgraded the United States and recorded autocratisation in the United Kingdom and Italy. Jean and John Comaroff (Theory from the South, 2012) argue that Euro-America is evolving towards Africa.
- Tradition is not the obstacle. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph’s The Modernity of Tradition (1967) showed caste associations becoming vehicles of democratic mobilisation, a finding of general value.
The better course
- Contextualised general theory. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities treats Western modernity as one variant, not the template.
- Provincialising Europe. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) holds European categories to be indispensable yet inadequate, to be revised against non-Western history.
- Concepts from the South into the canon. Rajni Kothari’s Congress system, Kanchan Chandra’s patronage democracy and Chatterjee’s political society are general concepts generated from the Indian case. Sudipta Kaviraj’s account of democracy taking root through vernacular and community idioms shows the method: a Western concept reworked by Indian evidence rather than discarded.
Conclusion
A distinct framework is needed only in a limited sense: comparison must begin from the specific histories of the colonial state, the external economy and plural societies, not from a Western endpoint. A separate theory would ghettoise the developing world. The task is to rebuild general theory so that the developing world becomes one of its sources rather than its residual category.