Almond and Powell’s Theory of Political Development

Posted on Mar 27, 2025 in Social sciences

Almond and Powell’s Contribution to Political Development Theory

By Pooja Articles

The developmental approach claims to understand a political system’s important variables, limits, and potentials. Systems at different levels of differentiation, secularization, or subsystem independence face various limitations, pressures, and potentialities. This approach describes, compares, explains, and predicts political changes and developments.

According to Almond and Powell, a theory designates relationships between variables to predict the consequences of their interactions. It can be tested and reformulated. They believe their approach enables prediction, description, and explanation while acknowledging political systems’ restrictions and limitations inherited from the past, influencing their future and limiting alternatives.

Almond relates political development to political structure and culture. The development approach measures political development by role differentiation and subsystem independence, and political culture by secularization. Political culture also involves socialization. This approach analyzes political systems at three levels, drawing theoretical conclusions by interconnecting them.

Almond’s Three Levels:

  1. Conversion
  2. Capability
  3. Classification of political systems

These are discussed based on structural differentiation, subsystem autonomy, and secularization, dealing with ‘inside’, ‘outside’, and ‘comparative’ views of political systems. The development aspect reflects the syndrome of political structure, subsystem independence, and secularization, with analysis at each level following conversion functions, capabilities, and system-maintenance patterns.

Almond and Powell have described and analyzed political systems indicated in their typology or classification scheme. They found a tendency for interrelated variables of structural differentiation, subsystem autonomy, and secularization to vary together, though their relationship isn’t always direct or unchanging. Almond’s classification is based on its utility and meaningfulness in comparing political systems, showing how structural and cultural characteristics are associated with processes and performance.

Four Types of Development Problems Faced by Political Systems:

  1. State-building
  2. Nation-building
  3. Participation
  4. Distribution

These influence the development variables of differentiation, secularization, and subsystem independence, marking turning points in political development. A political system must address unification and control, group identity and loyalty, involvement in decision-making, and distribution of goods and services through gradual increases in these variables.

According to Almond, an emerging theory of political development must connect how political systems have encountered and solved these four problems with their structure, culture, and performance. Conversion, capability, and adaptation processes must face these problems, relating past experiences to contemporary performance and future impact.

Political Development Can Be Predicted By:

  1. Describing and comparing:
    • Performance of political systems as ‘units’ or ‘persons’ in their environments
    • Their input-conversion-output pattern
    • Their system-maintenance and adaptation processes
  2. Classifying and comparing political systems according to basic structural and cultural characteristics related to different levels and performance patterns
  3. Relating various types of political systems to their historical experience in solving four development problems

Determining relationships between fundamental variables clarifies how to predict limitations, pressures, and potentialities shaping a political system’s future.

Theoretical Assumptions for Explaining and Predicting Political Development:

  1. Higher system capabilities depend on greater structural differentiation and cultural secularization. For example, rational bureaucratic organizations lead to higher levels of regulation, distribution, and extraction. Similarly, political structures like interest groups or party systems increase responsive capability.
  2. A close relationship exists between subsystem autonomy and responsive capability. Without subsystem independence, system responsiveness remains low and limited, despite highly differentiated political structures.
  3. Political systems face system development problems of state-building, nation-building, participation, and distribution. Pre-mobilized, traditional, primitive, and pre-mobilized systems, along with communication and technology expansion, tend to suffer from cumulative and pressing development problems. Their inadequate differentiation and capability severely limit alternatives.

Reading 2: Civic and Ethnic Nationalism

As a political doctrine, nationalism is the belief that the world’s people are divided into nations, each with the right to self-determination, either as self-governing units within existing nation-states. As a cultural idea, nationalism claims that the nation provides individuals with their primary form of belonging. As a moral idea, nationalism is an ethic of heroic sacrifice justifying violence in defense of one’s nation against internal or external enemies. Civic nationalism envisions the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to shared political values and practices. This kind of nationalism is democratic.

Democratization

Democratization is a power transition from a regime where political power is in the hands of elites unaccountable to the population to a regime with procedural democracy characteristics (1828-1920-1945-1965; 1975-1992).

Reasons for Authoritarian Regime Fall:

  1. Economic crisis
  2. Divisions in the ruling elites
  3. International factors

Strong States Have:

  1. Popular legitimacy, administrative efficiency, and effectiveness
  2. Capacity to mobilize and extract resources from the population
  3. The ability to establish and preserve law and order

The Government Indicators Project compares state power around the globe.

The main reasons for this follow from the crucial distinction between parliamentarism and presidentialism: under parliamentarism, legislatures may remove the government via a vote of no-confidence, leading to a new government or elections. Under presidentialism, the government and legislature serve fixed and independent terms.