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Political Development and Socioeconomic Development: The Case of Latin America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Martin C. Needler
Martin C. Needler*
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Extract

One way of acquiring insight into the processes of political development in Latin America is to compare the countries of the area systematically in terms of the “degree of development” which each can be said to have attained. Ideally, such an enterprise can lead to the understanding of the past history of the “more developed” countries by reference to the present problems of the “less developed” while an understanding of the problems confronting the more developed countries can make possible a glimpse into the future of those now less developed. Isolation of the factors responsible for a state's being more or less developed can moreover prove instructive for the understanding of the relations between political and socioeconomic phenomena.

Perhaps most important, such comparisons provide the means for holding constant effects attributable to characteristics shared by all, or nearly all, of the Latin American countries. Thus it can be argued with much plausibility that military intervention in politics, say, derives from elements in the Hispanic tradition. Yet it is clear that the frequency of military intervention varies from country to country, even where they share equally in that tradidition. Thus one is forced to go beyond the “Hispanic tradition” thesis with which the investigation might otherwise have come to rest.

In the present article I will be concerned with the problem of the relation of political development to socioeconomic development in the Latin American context. For reasons that will become apparent below, I will not at this point attempt a rigorous analysis of the concept of political development, which has already been the subject of a large and rapidly growing literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 889 - 897
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank the Harvard Center for International Affairs and the University of Michigan Faculty Research Fellowship Committee for providing him with the necessary time free of other duties. He also wishes to thank Walter C. Soderlund, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, whose research is reflected in the data on constitutional stability, and Richard Loebl of Harvard College, who performed the statistical calculations.

References

1 Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1963), pp. 27–63 Google ScholarPubMed.

2 Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James S., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 541 Google Scholar.

3 See Russell H. Fitzgibbon and Kenneth F. Johnson, “Measurement of Latin American Political Change,” this Review, 55 (September, 1961), 515–526.

4 As Lipset points out, op. cit., p. 31 n.

5 “The Political Effects of Economic Programs: Some Indications from Latin America,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, (10, 1965)Google ScholarPubMed.

6 A good example of the distortions introduced by these two failings is provided in the otherwise interesting and provocative article by Cutright, Phillips, “National Political Development: Its Measurement and Social Correlates,” American Sociological Review (04, 1953)Google Scholar, reprinted in Polsby, Nelson W., Dentler, Robert A., and Smith, Paul A. (eds.), Politics and Social Life: An Introduction to Political Behavior (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963)Google Scholar. Cutright constructed an index of political development, understood in a democratic sense, based on such acknowledged criteria of democracy as freedom of elections and respect for their results, and the existence and size of opposition representation in the legislature. Theindex was formed by assigning to each country one point for every year in which it was ruled by a chief executive chosen in free elections, one point for every year in which more than one party was represented in the legislature, and one point for every year a minority party held more than thirty per cent of the legislative seats. This represents a substantial contribution in several respects. Using number of years as a criterion creates the possibility of plotting positions along a dimension which has a more than purely notional meaning. Moreover, assigning one point for each year in which a chief executive chosen in free elections actually remained in office reflects not only the number of free elections that were held, a la Lipset, but also the degree of respect for their results which existed; this is an important variable in the Latin American context. However, taking the existence of a legislative opposition into account in constructing the index drastically distorts the results obtained. This is so, among other reasons, because of the common practice in Latin America of providing for the mandatory representation of opposition parties in the legislature. During the period since the end of World War I used by Cut-right, at least six Latin American countries operated under constitutional or legal provisions ear-marking legislative seats for an opposition party. The irony of the situation, and the reason why use of this criterion distorts Cutright's index so greatly, is that the provision for guaranteed opposition representation is particularly favored by the dictatorships, since it serves to take in foreign democrats with the illusion of a tolerated opposition. The opposition members, however, even holding the up to thirty-three per cent of the legislative seats legally guaranteed them, are of course powerless to oppose legislation passed by a disciplined majority loyal to the president. It is generally recognized, accordingly, that provisions for guaranteed legislative seats for the opposition frequently met with in the more dictatorial countries constitute no more than democratic window-dressing, and legitimate democratic opposition parties normally boycott elections that they feel will be conducted so as to favor the president's party. At the same time, however, there is never a lack of opportunists, sometimes renegades from the democratic opposition, who will organize a spurious opposition party to contest the elections in order to enjoy the privileges and emoluments of the opposition legislative seats, which are really sinecures.

The distortion introduced by considering the existence of a formal legislative opposition as a factor in determining a country's political development can clearly be seen in the case of Nicaragua. During most of the period covered by Cut-right's article, Nicaragua was a notorious dictatorship under the Somoza family, easily one of the two or three most stable dictatorships in Latin America. And yet on Cutright's scale of political development, which embraces all the independent countries in the world, Nicaragua scores the same number of points as the Netherlands, substantially more than Israel or Austria, and enjoys the fifth highest place among the Latin American countries.

Deane Neubauer has recently devoted an article to a critique of Cutright, along rather similar lines. “Some Conditions of Democracy,” this Review, 61 (December, 1967), 1002–1009. Unfortunately,he then goes on to construct his own index, which is liable to some of the criticisms applied to Cutright. Neubauer implicitly acknowledges this, explaining that he constructed his index “in a manner analogous to that used by Cut-right …. to enhance overall comparability between the two studies ….,” op. cit., p. 1006,footnote 8. This means that the value of Neubauer's index is limited to its use in criticizing Cutright. It cannot validly be used to draw conclusions about the process of political development, which Neubauer then attempts to do.

7 Russett, Bruce M., et al., World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 320–321 Google Scholar.

8 Using figures from Rosenstein-Rodan, P. N., “International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries,” The Review of Economics and Statistics (05, 1961)Google Scholar. Figures are estimates for 1961 in real terms. Slight changes in rank-orderings, but not differing consistently in any one direction, are obtained by using other sets of GNP figures or other economic development indices.

9 See Karl W. Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” this Review, 55 (September, 1961), 493–514.

10 This appears to be essentially the same dimension referred to by Frederick Frey as the “distribution and reciprocity of power.” “Political Development, Power, and Communications in Turkey,” in Pye, Lucian W. (ed.), Communications and Political Development (Princeton: Printon University Press, 1963), p. 301 Google Scholar

11 It is worthy of note that of the seven cases in which the economic development index, that is, the rank ordering on life expectancy, falls outside the range between the constitutionality and the participation rank orderings in Table 2, only one of these cases, that of Bolivia, seems to constitute a genuine exception to the hypothesis posited. The seven cases will be examined in turn.

One of them is, of course, Cuba, where the rank orderings on constitutionality, economic development, and participation respectively are 12–3–10. Here the participation ranking is much lower than the hypothesis would predict; however, this is only to be expected, since the ranking given, in the absence of a free election having been held, is that of the most recent election, that of 1954, which was notoriously rigged and the outcome (that of the “election” of the incumbent Batista) was known beforehand. If Fidel Castro were over-thrown tomorrow and free elections held, I would anticipate a high turnout figure comparable to those shown in Venezuela or the Dominican Republic.

In the case of Paraguay, where the rank orderings run 18–8–10, it is clearly the middle figure, that for life expectancy, which must be suspect. Paraguayan statistics may be the worst in Latin America, but in any case if Paraguay is indeed eighth inlife expectancy among the Latin American countries, that is the only social or economic indicator on which it reaches eighth place; on other economic indicators, Paraguay ranges between 12th and 18th place.

In four of the remaining five cases the economic development indicator falls only slightly outside of the predicted range: on Panama the rank orderings are 5–5–11; on Honduras 13–15–13; on El Salvador 16–14–16; and on Uruguay 2–1–3.

Only the case of Bolivia, with rank orderings of 9–20–8, constitutes an unequivocal exception to the hypothesis postulated. The problem can be stated clearly: the participation and constitutionality indices indicate that Bolivia is politically a relatively developed country, yet at the same time it remains economically extremely backward. Clearly Bolivia has been mobilized politically by some means other than economic change. The explanation for this is presumably that in Bolivia the Indians were mobilized, and were given a sense of personal efficacy usually found among occupants of higher-status positions in more developed societies, by having been enlisted into combat during theChaco War. It is thus likely that 30 years ago, before the Mexican economy had developedto its present point, the rank orderings for Mexico would have shown a similar inconsistency, since the processes of change at work in Mexico resemble those operating more recently in Bolivia.

12 Thus the table given in the Statistical Abstract of Latin America for 1964 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965)Google Scholar, on electoral participation is incomplete; I have not checked all of the figures which it gives, and many agree with those given by Labelleand Estrada and used here, but two of them are patently false: the Nicaraguan figure of an electoral participation of 80% of the population is surely extraordinary in that onlysome 50% of the population are of voting age; and, apparently due to an error in computation, the Chilean turnout was reported as 55%, when the correct figure should have been about one-third of that. Russett's electoral participation table gives turnout as apercentage of voting age population, rather than the whole population; the raw figures are not given, so the computations cannot be checked, but at least one figure, that given for Paraguay, is patently false, and other computation errors may have crept in, as theyhave in other of the tables Russett gives.

13 This may also be formulated as the principle that political development and economic development are aspects of a single process, the position taken by Jaguaribe, Hélio in his Desenvolvimento Econômico e Desenvolvimento Politico (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Fundo de Cultura, 1962)Google Scholar.

14 This conclusion appears to be confirmed by attitude survey data from Chile and Argentina turned up by the project headed by Alex Inkeles and still in progress at the time of writing: that as the propensity to participate in politics increases, support for the existing political order tends to decrease. See also the very interesting formulation of the problem in Deutsch, op. dt., p. 39.

15 The conclusion of Claude Ake on this point appears similar. See A Theory of Political Integration (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1967), p. 15 Google ScholarPubMed.

16 These figures are given on page 2 of The Chilean Presidential Election of September 4, 1964, Part II (Washington: Institute for the Comparative Study of Political Systems, 1965)Google Scholar.

17 The author does not mean to imply that “nothing is wrong” in Uruguayan politics. The point is that no extra-constitutional changes in the holders of power have taken place, at the same time as there is mass participation in politics and respect for civil liberties.

18 This point is discussed in my Latin American Politics inPerspective (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1963), p. 18 Google Scholar.

19 In other words, one should not expect that the relationships discussed here will be of help in comparing countries like Britain and the United States, for example, in which mass participation and constitutional stability can be taken for granted.

20 This was demonstrated empirically in my article Political Development and Military Intervention in Latin America,” this Review, 60 (September, 1966), 616–626.

21 Calculated from data given in Davis, Harold E. (ed.), Government and Politics in Latin America (New York: RonaldPress, 1958), pp. 68–69 Google Scholar.

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