Social Mobilization and Political Development

Abstract

Social mobilization is a name given to an overall process of change, which happens to substantial parts of the population in countries which are moving from traditional to modern ways of life. It denotes a concept which brackets together a number of more specific processes of change, such as changes of residence, of occupation, of social setting, of face-to-face associates, of institutions, roles, and ways of acting, of experiences and expectations, and finally of personal memories, habits and needs, including the need for new patterns of group affiliation and new images of personal identity. Singly, and even more in their cumulative impact, these changes tend to influence and sometimes to transform political behavior.The concept of social mobilization is not merely a short way of referring to the collection of changes just listed, including any extensions of this list. It implies that these processes tend to go together in certain historical situations and stages of economic development; that these situations are identifiable and recurrent, in their essentials, from one country to another; and that they are relevant for politics. Each of these points will be taken up in the course of this paper.Social mobilization, let us repeat, is something that happens to large numbers of people in areas which undergo modernization, i.e., where advanced, non-traditional practices in culture, technology and economic life are introduced and accepted on a considerable scale. It is not identical, therefore, with this process of modernization as a whole, but it deals with one of its major aspects, or better, with a recurrent cluster among its consequences.

Ensemble forecasting of irregular leadership change

“…Inspired by a wide range of coups that took place in Africa, early work focused on the structural determinants of coups. Goemans and Marinov (2011) note three distinct classes of arguments for why coups occur: political instability resulting from rapid economic modernization (Deutsch, 1961); political illegitimacy following lackluster economic performance and development (McGowan, 2003); and conditions that increase the likelihood of military intervention in politics (Jenkins and Kposowa, 1990;Johnson et al, 1984). These arguments are not disjoint: while one set informs us about the conditions under which a coup might occur, for example as a result of certain structural conditions like the political system, factionalism, or a politicized military, the other provides traction on when a coup may occur if the structural conditions are ripe.…”

The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi

“…Modernization explanations (e.g., Deutsch 1961;Huntington 1968) provide no leverage in accounting for the differing salience of the Chewa--Tumbuka cleavage, since there are no discernible differences in the level of development of Chewa and Tumbuka respondents in each country, no differences in resource scarcity, and, by design, no differences in the levels of the respondents' exposure to national political affairs across the village pairs. Nor does the so-called "contact hypothesis" (Forbes 1997) offer an explanation, since the Chewa and Tumbuka villages on each side of the border were selected so that Zambian and Malawian respondents would have similar levels of exposure to people from the other ethnic group.…”

Introduction: Natural resources and ethnic conflicts in Asia Pacific

“…Variously described as the 'modernist' (Smith, 1986) or 'elite competition' (Brass, 1985) approach, this school was strongly influenced by work on European nationalism (Deutsch, 1953(Deutsch, , 1961. It is most prevalent in the comparative politics subfield of political science but could also include the work of historians such as Hobsbawm (1990), philosophers like Gellner (1983) and others including Anderson (1983).…”