Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

productivity and the possibility to provide people with food - in the course of both
revolutions those capacities have been raised by a hundredfold. But considering the time
span available for the changes to take place, a tremendous difference becomes apparent:
“[W]hile it took thousands of years for the discovery of agriculture to transform the
world, the industrial revolution spread throughout the world in only two centuries”
(Inglehart 2001: 9966).
Since the 1950ies, numerous debates about economic, social and political consequences
of modernization were stimulated in the social science community, even though
modernization theory was also then not a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, it did not
enjoy a broad scope of academic interest before the 1950ies and 60ies 3 , about 90 years
after Karl Marx had published his influential pieces of work, anticipating the societal
effects of economic growth (Marx 1990 [1867]; 1993 [1858]). Based on this work,
subsequent scholars have argued that modernization theory rests upon the assumption
that societal changes follow – to a certain degree – predictable pathways, meaning that
particular developments are inevitable for such a society, simply because they are
inherent to the process of modernization. Among those ‘side effects’, secularization,
bureaucratization and individualization play a significant role but the economic process
of industrialization is at the core of modernization (Inglehart and Baker 2000: 20;
Inglehart and Welzel 2005).
Lipset (1959, 1981 [1960], 1992, 1994; see also Lipset, Seong and Torres 1993) is one
of the most prominent proponents of this approach. Analyzing pathways to modernity in
Britain, the US and Western Europe during the 19 th century, he could show that modern
societies developed at the same time when these societies transformed into capitalist
ones. Lipset was not the only one noting a relationship between market economy and
democracy (see, for example, Schumpeter 1950; Moore 1966; Diamond 1992; Diamond,
Linz and Lipset 1988) but his résumé of what he considered to be a causal relationship
3 With the emerging broad interest in modernization, Rustow noted a trend of changing paradigms from an
institutional-legal to a behavioral-cultural approach within the discipline. This trend is also reflected in a
wider acknowledgement of sociological, anthropological as well as psychological concepts among
political scientists (Rustow 1968: 37-38).
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