The Nigerian State and the Quest for a Stable Polity
The Nigerian State and the Quest for a Stable Polity
复制标题
尼日利亚国家和对稳定政体的追求
DOI:
10.2307/422134
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发表时间:
1992
影响因子:
2.3
通讯作者:
Kola Olugbade
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Kola Olugbade
The conditions and causes of political stability have been debated from different ideological and theoretical perspectives. There is no agreement on its causes. Moreover, there is no clear conceptualization of what stability or instability actually is. Thus, while Claude Ake and D. Sanders focus on patterns of behavior either in terms of regularity and behavior' or of its normality2 and hence seek a nonethnocentric definition of stability, Dowding and Kimber see stability as dichotomous. For them, and unlike Ake, there is no need to measure the degree of stability or instability. As they put it, "a system is either stable or unstable. There are, therefore, no degrees of stability."3 In their theoretical review of the literature on political stability, Melanson and King classified the study of political stability in three principal ways: the broadly speculative approach, the sociodemographic approach, and a more self-consciously theoretical approach. According to them, "the speculative reflections on the causes and nature of stability have had little significant impact on providing empirical confirmation or rejection of the kinds of generalizations made to sort out the possible causes of stability. "4 The assumption of the sociodemographic approach is that stability is based on ecological patterns showing a wide distribution of material well-being and on mass consensus concerning the values of the political system. They found this approach to be of little help in explaining political instability because of its emphasis on an ethnocentric notion that models stability upon the western democracies. Other reasons for their rejection of this approach include its assumption that politics lacks an independent influence in the life of the polity, its failure to specify any criteria for relationships between the variables coupled with its inability to delineate independent and dependent variables, and its tendency to seek the causes of political stability in the data most conveniently available and not in data which are consistent with the conceptual integrity of the inquiry.5 The third approach is rejected because, like the other two, it is never explicit and the independent variables of political stability and instability are not clearly specified. As the work of those who explain political instability (violence) from an economic standpoint shows, while political factors are important, economic factors are equally important, especially in the Third World. The works of Edward N. Muller and Mitchell Seligson are particularly important in this regard. Using cross-national data on land inequality, landlessness, and income inequality, they found that inequality in all forms (including economic and political) contributes significantly to political violence, and by implication economic development. According to them, "redistribution of income must be ranked as one of the meaningful reforms that a modernizing government can undertake in the interest of achieving political stability. "6 Samuel P. Huntington's approach also has influenced discussion of political stability in