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Outline of political development -- Structure and agency -- The nation -- The state -- Civil and political rights -- Democracy -- Democratisation -- Institution building -- State and regime failure

This book fills a growing gap in the literature on international development by addressing the debates about good governance and institution-building within the context of political development.

The integration problems faced by new nations should be viewed as part of an historical process of pol'al development through which Western pol'al systems have all gone. It is during the transitional phase of pol'al development, as gov's begin to assume or attempt to assume more functions, that integration problems become most acute. The most common integration problems involve problems of national identity, territorial control, the establishment of norms for the handling of public conflict, the relationship between governors & the governed, & the problems of organizing individuals for the achievement of common purposes. The major options available to gov's faced with integration problems are explored. AA.

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists' normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter's normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today's West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers' objectives.

The integration problems faced by new nations should be viewed as part of an historical process of political de velopment through which Western political systems have gone as well. It is during the transitional phase of political develop ment, as governments begin to assume or attempt to assume more functions, that integration problems become most acute. The most common integration problems involve problems of na tional identity, territorial control, the establishment of norms for the handling of public conflict, the relationship between gov ernors and the governed, and the problems of organizing indi viduals for the achievement of common purposes. The major options available to governments faced with integration prob lems are explored.

An evolutionary perspective, which is currently enjoying a revival in the social sciences, raises the possibility of a major transformation in the study of political development and modernization. It may be desirable to supplement (and in some instances replace) the concept of "political development" with the concept of "political evolution." Political development may be likened to the biological process of ontogeny. It involves the construction of a viable set of political qua cybernetic processes and structures at any level of social organization, from wolf packs to human families to empires. Political evolution is an aspect of phylogeny. It involves the invention, elaboration, and diffusion of novel political forms of all kinds, only some of which may be more effective, or inclusive, or democratic, etc. Nor are all evolutionary changes necessarily "better" (i.e., more adaptive). Political development is concerned with problems of social engineering, while political evolution is concerned with architectonics—with the emergence of functionally significant political innovations. Political development is always situation-specific, while political evolution is also historical and may include changes that diffuse and become "species-wide." Political evolution is thus a dimension of the larger process of biological evolution. The emergence of political systems, which long predates the evolution of humankind, constitutes a set of adaptive strategies with significant evolutionary consequences. Political development and political evolution may go hand in hand, but this is not always the case. A particular polity may develop or decay independently of the larger process of political evolution. Among the many theoretical implications of this conceptual reformulation, we briefly address the impact on functionalist theory, modernization theory, social mobilization theory, political economy (positive theory), world systems theory, dependency theory, and contemporary Marxist views.

Political theorists from Plato to the present have concerned themselves not only with the nature of the polity as we know it, but with how it came to be, what purposes it serves, and by what stages it has developed. The last item, however, has more often than not been slighted. This lack now forces itself on our attention for an obvious reason: Never before have so many "new states" come into being in so short a span of time and never before have students of politics been provided with so many living examples of states at all stages of development, many of them conspicuously failing to perform vital functions, frequently to the extent that disorder and violent change prevail.