Integration and Instability: Patterns of African Political Development* | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core (original) (raw)
1 The work of Karl Deutsch represents some of the major explorations in the theory of political integration, and his thinking is well represented in his contributions to the following works: International Political Communities—An Anthology (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1966)Google Scholar, and Jacob, Philip and Toscano, James V., eds., The Integration of Political Communities (New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1964)Google Scholar. Both of these works include other useful material on the subject. Also useful are: Etzioni, Amitai, Political Unification: A Comparative Study of Leaders and Forces (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965)Google Scholar; Galtung, Johan, “A Structural Theory of Integration,” Journal of Peace Research, 4 (1968), 375–395CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ake, Claude, A Theory of Political Integration (Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1967)Google Scholar, which is one of the few recent works specifically concerned with national integration. Also see Binder, Leonard, “National Integration and Political Development,” American Political Science Review, 28 (09, 1964), 622–631CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weiner, Myron, “Political Integration and Political Development,” The Annals, 358 (03, 1965), 52–64Google Scholar; Goldman, Ralph M., “A Transactional Theory of Political Integration and Arms Control,” American Political Science Review, 63 (09, 1969), 719–733CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lijphart, Arend, “Cultural Diversity and Theories of Political Integration,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 12 (03 1971), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
Representative of some of the recent work on political instability are: Bwy, D. P., “Political Instability in Latin America: The Cross-Cultural Test of a Causal Model,” Latin American Research Review, III (1968), 17–66Google Scholar; Davies, James C., “Political Stability and Instability: Some Manifestations and Causes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 13 (03, 1969), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duff, Ernest A. and McCamant, John F., “Measuring Social and Political Requirements for System Stability in Latin America,” American Political Science Review, 62 (12, 1968), 1125–1143CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ivo, K. and Feierabend, Rosalind L., “Aggressive Behavior Within Politics, 1948–1962: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (09 1966), 249–271Google Scholar; Fossum, Egil, “Factors Influencing the Occurrence of Military Coups d'Etat in Latin America,” Journal of Peace Research, 3 (1967), 209–227
27 Cf. the definition of the state given by Weber, Max in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1947)
28 This has to do with what Deutsch calls the range of integration—“the range of rewards and deprivations for the component units, by which an integrated relationship is maintained among them.” Deutsch, , The Analysis of International Relations, p. 159Google Scholar.
29 Compare the argument of Etzioni: “A political community is a community that possesses three kinds of integration: (a) it has an effective control over the use of the means of violence … (b) it has a center of decision-making that is able to affect significantly the allocation of resources and rewards throughout the community; and (c) it is the dominant focus of political identification for the large majority of politically aware citizens.” Etzioni, , Political Unification, p. 4Google Scholar.
30 “The measures we use are: a) legislative fractionalization at independence, calculated as
where PRi is the proportion of legislative seats held by the j'th of a set of different parties; b) the number of political parties established from the date of a nation's independence to 1969; c) percentage of the wage labour force employed in the public sector; d) rate of growth in the ratio of government spending to GNP, 1963–65; e) rate of growth in government revenue as per cent of GNP, 1963–65; f) rate of growth in central government revenue, 1963–66; and g) central government revenue, c. 1963. The data for these variables are given in Morrison et al., Black Africa, chaps. 7, 8, and 9.
31 A large number of measures relating to military and security forces in African nations were factor analyzed, and from this analysis we constructed three unidimensional factors indicating the size of military and security systems, the budgetary allocations to such systems, and the amount of foreign military aid in these nations. The content of these factors is shown in the appendix to this paper. In addition to the factor scores derived from these three scales, we use three variables that were unique to the original factor solution as measures of coercive potential: the percentage change in the national defence budget as a proportion of GNP, 1964–67; the number of political parties banned through the period independence to 1969, and the number of persons arrested for political offences in the period independence through 1969. For the sources of military data and a presentation of selected indicators, see Morrison et al., Black Africa, chap. 12. The data on parties banned is taken from Part II of that book, and the data on political arrests have been coded from the sources used in the collection of data on political instability reported in Chapter 11.
32 This conceptualization of political instability, and the theory presented here, should be sharply distinguished from more common approaches to the analysis of political instability, which are based on a conceptualization of political instability as aggression directed by individuals against the political system, and which explain such aggression by variation in indices of frustration, or relative deprivation, such as the ratio of social want satisfaction to social want formation. See Ivo, K. and Feierabend, Rosalind L., “Aggressive Behavior Within Politics 1948–1962: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (09, 1966)Google Scholar; Davies, James, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review, 37 (1962)Google Scholar; Raymond Tanter and Manus Midlarsky, “A Theory of Revolution”; D. P. Bwy, “Political Instability in Latin America …” and Ted Gurr, “A Causal Model of Civil Strife …” The theoretical basis for these approaches is frustration-aggression theory, which is well summarized in Berkowitz, Leonard, Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962)Google Scholar, and reviewed by Ted Gurr in “Psychological Factors in Civil Violence,” World Politics, 20 (01, 1968), 245–278CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Why Men Rebel, Chaps. 2 and 3. Our approach should also be contrasted with that in recent research based on minimal theoretical focus, in which the data have been allowed to “speak for themselves” providing factor solutions of indicators of conflict behaviour, which are then labeled as types of political instability—e.g., turmoil and anomic violence. See, for example, Rummell, Rudolph J., “Dimensions of Conflict Behavior Within Nations, 1946— 59, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (03, 1966), 65–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tanter, Raymond, “Dimensions of Conflict Behavior Within and Between Nations 1958–60” JCR, 10 (03, 1966), 41–64Google Scholar. For details of our own conceptualization of political instability, and a review of related work, see Morrison, and Stevenson, “Political Instability in Independent Black Africa: More Dimensions of Conflict Behavior Within Nations,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 15 (09, 1972), 347–368CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Ted Gurr, “Psychological Factors in Civil Violence.”
34 Feierabend, Ivo K., Feierabend, Rosalind L., and Nesvold, Betty A., “Social Change and Political Violence: Cross-National Patterns,” in The History of Violence in America, Davies, and Gurr, , eds., pp. 632–687Google Scholar.
35 Rummell, “Dimensions of Conflict Behavior Within Nations, 1946–59.”
36 Gurr, Ted, “A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices,” American Political Science Review, 67 (12, 1968) 1104–1124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 See the discussion in Eckstein, Harry, “On the Etiology of Internal War,” History and Theory, 4 (1965), especially p. 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Factor analysis has been widely used as an inductive approach to typologies of instability. Factor solutions of data on political instability are variously entitled revolution, subversion, and turmoil (Rummell Dimensions … 46–59”); internal war and turmoil (Tanter, “Dimensions … 58–60”); or organized and anomic violence (Bwy, “Political Instability in Latin America”). Such has been the impact of these empirical findings that direct coding is now organized in terms of a factor-based typology of internal war, conspiracy, and anomic violence (Gurr, “A Causal Model of Civil Strife”). Ironically, the complexities of these typologies are for the most part ignored in analysis of the conditions giving rise to political instability, in which the dependent variable is most often an aggregate measure of civil strife or instability.
38 By the intensity of violence we mean the number of persons involved in unpredictable or physically destructive behavior; the duration of such behavior; and the extent of the alterations in the established political structure brought about by such behavior.
39 A review of the relevant writings on the subject is given by Rapoport, David C., “Coup d'Etat: The View of the Men Firing Pistols,” in Nomos VIII: Revolution, Friedrich, Carl J., ed. (New York: Atherton Press, 1966)Google Scholar.
40 These data, and all measures of political instability used in this paper, are summarized in chapter 11, “Political Instability,” in Morrison et al., Black Africa. Part II of that book contains abbreviated verbal descriptions of the events coded. The sources used for the collection of these data are also detailed there.
41 Since we are dealing with the postcolonial history of Sub-Saharan Africa, we are not concerned with anticolonial revolts or with the liberation struggles in the Portuguese territories and white-controlled Southern Africa.
42 Elite instability is measured as follows: Successful coups d'état are given the numerical weight 5; attempted but unsuccessful coups are weighted 3; and plots, 1. The index for each country is the sum of all such events so weighted in the period from independence to 1970. Communal instability is mea-sured as follows: Civil wars are given the weight 4; rebellions, 3; irredentism, 2; and ethnic violence, 1. The index for each country is calculated by summing the numerical weights for each event multiplied by the number of years in which such an event was reported. It should be noted that the individual measures used in the calculation of these indices are highly intercorrelated, and that they represent independent dimensions in factor analytic results based on a much larger set of variables. Those results indicate support for our theoretical distinctions between elite, communal, and mass instability, and they also indicate additional evidence for the existence of an independent dimension measuring “turmoil,” which is based on indicators of strikes, riots, demonstrations, numbers killed and arrested, and terrorism. Although this dimension has been regularly reported in other studies, we do not use it as a dependent variable in this study, because we believe that the events involved are the least reliably reported and can only very loosely be interpreted as attempts to change authority relationships in the political system. See Morrison and Stevenson, “Political Instability in Independent Black Africa …”
43 The notion of process as applied to the discussion so far may be confusing, but the distinction between static and dynamic models of integration is in part artificial. We see process as continuous interrelationships among characteristics of a system over time—i.e., as a series of state descriptions over time. What is important about the distinction is that it sensitizes the researcher to the consideration of historical, or time-series, relationships. Although we are not investigating the major questions of what dimensions of integration precede others in points of time in the development process, and although we cannot in this paper explore the many possibilities of lagged relationships between aspects of integration and instability, we do intend to explore the differences that result from testing our model of integration and instability with static, cross-sectional data, as opposed to tests based on variables measuring rates of change over time. Our expectation is that the results will be quite different, with important implications for the analysis of integration and instability.
44 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 64Google Scholar.
45 See Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication.
48 Guetzkow, Harold, Multiple Loyalties: Theoretical Approach to a Problem in International Organization (Princeton: Center for Research on World Political Institutions, Princeton University, 1955), p. 33Google Scholar. Guetzkow argues for the greater effectiveness of positively reinforced rather than punitively induced loyalty to political systems.
49 See Midlarsky and Tanter, “Toward a Theory of Political Instability in Latin America.”
50 See the introduction to Morrison et al., Black Africa, for a more detailed discussion.
51 Campbell, Donald T. and Fiske, Donald W., “Convergent and Discriminant Validation by the Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix,” Psychological Bulletin, 56 (03, 1959), 81–105CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; citation is from p. 83. It should be noted that our own use of the multitrait, multimethod logic is not strictly tied to the argument and method illustrated in this seminal publication. Where Campbell and Fiske are concerned primarily with experimental research, our own work is based on nonexperimental data. Multitrait operationalization in our work, therefore, cannot approximate the standards of strict replication of experimental methods of data collection as a basis for assessing reliability, and the different methods of data collection we use are not strictly comparable to the alterations of treatment and experimental design discussed by Campbell and Fiske. We are also interested in an elaboration of the multimethod framework to include a multi-unit dimension for nonexperimental research: that is, we feel that data measured on different entities, or units of analysis (such as individuals, ethnic groups, and elite groups), should be compared for converging validation of conceptual variables.
52 In particular we utilize data collected on ethnic groups and members of cabinets, in addition to the more general kinds of statistics aggregating the characteristics of individuals or goods in a nation.
53 When these procedures are not adopted, factor scores often include the effects of variables which individually load low on the factor, but may be an important influence on the total factor score.
54 See Wright, Sewall, “The Method of Path Coefficients,” Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 5 (1934), 161–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wright, “Path Coefficients and Path Regressions: Alternate or Complimentary Concepts,” Biometrics, 16 (06, 1960), 189–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duncan, Otis Dudley Jr., “Path Analysis: Sociological Examples,” American Journal of Sociology, 72 (07, 1966), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Land, Kenneth, “Principles of Path Analysis,” in Sociological Methodology 1969 (San Francisco: Jossey-Boss, 1969)Google Scholar; Boyle, Richard, “Path Analysis and Ordinal Data,” American Journal of Sociology, 75 (01, 1970) 461–480CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A computer program for calculating path coefficients, standardized partial regression coefficients, and the Z-scores of the regression coefficients has been written by Louis Goodman, of the Sociology Department at Yale University, and Donald Morrison. This program was used for computing the results analyzed in this paper.
55 These results are corroborated by the results of a stepwise multiple discriminant analysis in which our indicators of integration are used as independent variables, but nominal dependent variables are used to indicate whether or not a country has experienced a coup d'état or civil war, rebellion, and irredentism. This technique calculates a discriminant function, a linear combination of the independent variables, which maximizes differentiation among the groups of cases typologized according to the dependent variables. Each nation used in this analysis is then assigned a score derived from the discriminant function, and that score indicates whether the nation should be classified in one or another of the dependent variable groups. Using this technique, we are able to classify correctly all African nations as having experience or no experience of communal instability, and more than 80 per cent of African nations as having or not having experienced coups d'état, on the basis only of knowledge of their values on indicators of integration. For a discussion of this technique, see Morrison, Donald G. and Art, Richard Jr., A Fortran Program for Stepwise Multiple Discriminant Analysis, 04 1967, Vogelback Computing Center, Northwestern UniversityGoogle Scholar, and Behavioral Science, 13 (01, 1968), 82–83Google Scholar.
56 Compare the argument in Zolberg, “… Political Conflict in the New States of Tropical Africa.”
58 For more pessimistic conclusions, see Feit, Edward, “Military Coups and Political Development: Some Lessons from Ghana and Nigeria,” World Politics, 20 (01, 1968), 179–193CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and O'Connell, J., “The Inevitability of Instability,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 5 (1967), 181–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Some of the important considerations left out of this analysis are the effects of modernization on the relationship between cultural pluralism and political instability. We have investigated that problem in our “Cultural Pluralism, Modernization and Conflict: Sources of Political Instability in Black Africa,” Canadian Journal of Political Science (03, 1972)Google Scholar.
60 van den Berghe, Pierre, “Dialectic and Functionalism: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis,” American Sociological Review, 28 (10, 1963), 696–697CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 See Black, C. E., The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)Google Scholar.
62 Deutsch, , The Analysis of International Relations, p. 198Google Scholar.