Late industrialisers, late democratisers

Developmental states in the Asia-Pacific

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11187817
AutoresMark R Thompson (0000-0002-7004-3669, autor de correspondencia)
Año1996
Volumen17
Número4
Páginas625-648
Fecha de publicación1996-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThird World Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0143-6597 • E-ISSN: 1360-2241
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01436599615290
OpenAlexW2067215689
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas16
Referencias citadas7

A sound generalisation in the social sciences is that theories pronounced dead will continue to haunt the discipline long thereafter. A case in point is so-called modernisation theory. This is the claim that economic growth first leads to social mobilisation-urbanisation, mass communication, growth in literacy and the degree of formal education, the creation of new social classes (particularly the working, middle and business classes), etc-which in turn results in new forms of political activity.' This political transformation involves the organisation of new groups and strata into political bodies-including labour unions, student groups, professional associations, chambers of commerce, etc. Such changes create conditions highly favourable to the existence of democratic government. Seymour Martin Lipset's classic statement specified socioeconomic 'requisites' of democracy.2 Empirical verification of the correlation between economic advancement and democracy poured in.3 By the late 1960s, however, modernisation theory appeared to have been buried under collapsing democracies in many developing countries, including some of the most economically advanced. The theoretical interment quickly followed. In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington showed modernisation was not producing a political culture congenial to democracy in most developing countries; on the contrary, in weakly institutionalised political systems economic development and the resulting social mobilisation produced what Huntington called praetorianism, which favoured the rise of authoritarianism.4 In an influential book about South America, Guillermo O'Donnell claimed that higher levels of modernisation in that region were correlated with dictatorship not democracy.5 O'Donnell ventured that 'it is a disquieting possibility that authoritarianism might be a more likely outcome than political democracy as other countries achieve or approach high modernization '.6 Several dozen redemocratisations later-many in South America, O'Donnell co-authored a book in which countries in this and other regions were (at least implicitly) shown to be ripe for democratic transition after all.7 Huntington's turnaround was more explicit. Huntington argued that when countries began to develop-reaching a middle level income of GNP per capita, between US$1000 and $3000 (1976 dollars)-they entered the 'zone of transition' in which most of the recent democratic transitions had in fact occurred.8 Not that these political

Authoritarianism · Democracy · Development economics · Dictatorship · Economic growth · Economics · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · International Development and Aid · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies