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.

Egalitarian norms, economic development, and ethnic polarization

“…102, 103) asserted that these theories cannot convincingly explain why so much ethnic conflict has occurred in some of the least modernized regions of the world. In these regions, ''social mobilization'' (Deutsch, 1961) applies to relatively few people, too few, according to Horowitz, to base an explanation for an entire conflict on.…”

Canonical ecology and the analysis of aggregate voting models

“…The study of developmental variation and its impact upon political life has generally involved the comparison of total societies along a series of nationally-aggregated measures (Cutright, 1963;Deutsch, 1961;Lipset, 1959). However, comparisons made at the nation-state level through aggregate analysis are faced with a number of uncertainties (see Allardt, 1966).…”

Structure and process of modernization. Some remarks on recurrent features in geographical studies of modernization

“…(The literature on this topic is quite large and it is not the intention to cover the whole range here. For further references see for example Deutsch (1953Deutsch ( , 1961, Lerner (1958), Emerson (1960), McClelland (1961), Apter (1965), Eisenstadt (1966), Black (1967) and Moore (1967).) As was implied at the beginning of this section, the concept is very wide and therefore vague.…”