What Is Political Development? A Constitutional Perspective

Abstract

AbstractDevelopment approaches to the study of politics, precisely because they focus on movement through time, seem uniquely positioned to illuminate the logic and experience of the polity in a manner that cannot be captured by more conventional political science methods. And yet, political development has come to be seen as whatever historical change happens to a regime, neglecting the normative nature of the polity. The result is an “a-constitutional” approach to political development. This paper argues that political science can and should examine development in normative terms and that attempts to fit political development more securely within value-free social science threaten to rob it of its promise.