Rethinking Modernization Theory: A Critical Perspective on The Relationship Between Economic Development and Democracy

In the 1960s modernization theory has become one of the dominant paradigms in sociology and political science and both disciplines relied on it in explaining why non-Western countries remained underdeveloped. Modernization theory, which suggests that economic development requires a cultural and social transformation, has also affected the literature on comparative politics, particularly when democracy has become the dominant regime type in the Western world. As such, many studies to date has employed this approach as a way to understand and explain the processes of democratization in different contexts. Seymour Martin Lipset, the founding father of modernization theory, approaches democratization as a natural outcome of modernization and forms a linear relationship between the economic development and the social and political development. Lipset’s article “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy” published in 1959 is considered to be a seminal work in this respect. Lipset argues that there is a correlation between economic development and democracy in that the higher the level of economic development and economic welfare the higher the chances of democracy to survive. The major goal of this article is to rethink the premises of modernization theory based on the aforementioned article of Lipset from the perspective of comparative politics. Accordingly, in this paper we will critically analyse the theories of democratization based on the modernization approach and try to observe the impact of modernization theory on the democratization literature