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‘Crisis, Choice, and Change’, Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Brian Barry
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Extract

A major new study by Professor Gabriel Almond is a significant event in our discipline. Whether one believes that The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, i960) set comparative politics on the sure path of a science or set it back a decade, there can be no denying the influence of the so-called ‘functional’ framework set out in Almond's introductory essay. Crisis, Choice, and Change may well have the same degree of influence. Whether or not this is a prospect to be welcomed depends entirely upon the aspects of the book that make an impact. This essay is written in the conviction that the main drift of the book is disastrously misdirected but that part of it – the quasi-game-theoretical analysis of coalition formation – is valuable for what it tries to do, though seriously defective in execution. Since there is obviously a risk that these deficiencies could discredit the whole notion of applying game-theoretical concepts to the analysis of real political situations, my object will be, while drawing attention to the defects, to suggest that they are not inherent in game-theoretical treatments.

Type
Review Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 1977 , pp. 99 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Almond, Gabriel A., Flanagan, Scott C. and Mundt, Robert J., eds., Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1973).Google Scholar

2 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1966).Google Scholar

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4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’ in Laslett, Peter, Runciman, W. G. and Skinner, Quentin, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 4th series (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), pp. 8–26.Google Scholar

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6 Holt, and Turner, , ‘Crises and Sequences’, p. 982.Google Scholar

7 Holt, and Turner, , ‘Crises and Sequences’, p. 994Google Scholar. The last volume in the series is Binder, L. et al. , Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

8 Almond, Gabriel A., ‘Research in Comparative Politics: Plans of a New Council Committee’, Items, viii (1954), p. 2Google Scholar. Quoted by Holt, and Turner, , ‘Crises and Sequences’, p. 980.Google Scholar

9 See the careful and intelligent study by Hibbs, Douglas A. in Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1973)Google Scholar. Hibbs's verbal analysis shows that the social mobilization theorists have tended not to set out their hypotheses clearly, and his statistical analysis suggests that if one tests precise formulations the results are negative.

10 Przeworski, Adam and Teune, Henry, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley, 1970), pp. 34, 35.Google Scholar

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12 P. 692. This is quoted approvingly from Przeworski, and Teune, , p. 86.Google Scholar

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14 Charles Lewis Taylor, review of Alker, Hayward Jr et al. , Mathematical Approaches to Politics (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1973)Google Scholar in American Political Science Review, LXX (1976), 600–1Google Scholar, quotation on p. 601.

15 Riker, W. H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962).Google Scholar