Convergence Theory Essay

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The central questions for students of convergence begin with whether, after centuries of industrialization, currently rich countries become more alike in social structure, culture, and politics. If they converged, the specific ways that they became alike are then pondered, followed by explanations for deviations from the common patterns. In this theory, the driving force that moves modern societies toward common structures, values, and beliefs is continuing industrialization. Industrialization is defined as the increasing and widespread use of tools that multiply the effects of their initial applications of energy and inanimate sources of energy.

High-energy technology is similar to how a hoe increases the effects of human energy far more when digging a hole for planting than the stick that preceded it; how a horse-drawn plow continues to multiply the effects of the human hand; how the tractor continues the escalation of effects; and how an atomic bomb can move a mountain, or destroy a city, with a push of one finger. This idea also applies to recent information technology. The same fingers that operated the keyboard for a statistical report using the IBM mainframe of the 1950s can, with the same energy expenditure, now process gargantuan amounts of information—a continuous process of making smaller microprocessors do ever-increasing work. Before the early modern period, with inanimate sources of energy, perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the total energy consumed at any one time was derived from plants, animals, and humans—an intractable limit on their productivity.

The concept of industrialization is most attainable when confined to this technological idea. If all the correlates, along with organizational and demographic outcomes, of industrialization are encompassed in its definition, it cannot be invoked as a cause of the structures, cultures, and political patterns of interest; this is why so much of the early literature on industrialism, based on broader definitions, was tautological. For example, scholars have identified industrialism as including one or more of the following: high degrees of specialization, including the concomitant monetary system of exchange; complex organizations; mechanization; urbanization; extensive use of capital; frequent technological change; rational capital accounting; emergence of a working class; a reasonably predictable political order; demographic transition; and individual work ethics. There is no way to relate the underlying increases in high-energy technology and inanimate sources of power to these variable structures and values if they are all included in the concept. Most of the empirical studies of convergence therefore use the narrow definition, roughly measured by economic level, or gross national product or gross domestic product per capita.

The term continuing industrialization captures two essential facts about these technological-economic changes: They cover many centuries and, despite recurrent spurts of growth, they are continuous. A gong did not ring when the industrial revolution began; it was a long and gradual process, and as economic historians reiterate, it has continued since long before the nineteenth century. The High Middle Ages (ca. 1000–1350) saw substantial economic growth and much innovation (e.g., the inanimate power of windmills, invention in armaments, marine transportation and navigation, optics, the mechanical clock).

During the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800), imperial expansion and a global trade network, combined with the spread of literacy among craftsmen and the experimental method among the educated, increased standards of living in the West. Of course, the pace of technological change picked up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the period we label the Industrial Revolution, and accelerated markedly after about 1850 wherever science was applied to agriculture and industry.

Finally, convergent tendencies have threshold effects. The process and effects of early industrialization are not the same as the process and effects of later continuing and accelerating industrialization. The threshold for fully modern is about the level of economic development where roughly three-quarters of the modern labor force no longer work in agriculture—due to the extraordinary increases in agricultural productivity— and 40 or 50 percent of adult women work in nondomestic settings. In 1910, the United States still had almost one-third of its labor force in farming. This is about the level where France was in 1946, Japan in the 1950s, and the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s.

Convergent Tendencies Of Industrialization

Nine major structural and demographic shifts, all rooted in industrialization, characterize what is truly modern about modern—advanced industrial—society. However, as the range of per capita income from developing to developed countries narrows, sheer levels of well-being fade as an explanation for national differences in structure, culture, politics, and policy. Types of political economy combining party ideology, power, and national bargaining arrangements among major economic interest groups and government explain persistent differences among equally modern nation-states that share these common trends. These convergent tendencies among the currently rich countries ignore differences in timing and concentrate on the amount, pace, and direction of change.

Changes In Family Structure

For over two centuries, there have been major changes in family size, composition, functions, and lifestyles; these have coincided with associated political demands and elite responses. By separating work from residence and changing the occupational and educational structure, industrialization increases mobility opportunity for both men and women, and inspires rising aspirations among parents for themselves and their children. Convergent tendencies also reduce the economic value of children and increase their cost, giving women both motive and opportunity to enter the nonagricultural labor force. This thereby increases their independence, reducing fertility rates, and increasing family breakup. Convergence also reduces the family’s motivation and resources to care for aging parents and to meet the risks of invalidism, sickness, job injuries, and other shocks .The net effect is a dominant family type in industrial society—small and independent. The dramatic population response to rapid economic development, with birth rates and death rates both falling, has earned the label of demographic transition.

Declining birthrates and increased longevity are the product of public health measures—sanitation, control of epidemic diseases, better nutrition, and spacing of births—plus increasing access to medical care. The political responses to these structural changes include a mass demand for the welfare state, especially income and care for the aged; a family polity to help facilitate the balance between work and family; and finally, public policies that enhance gender equality. Rich democracies are moving toward the Swedish model, even Japan and Switzerland, the developed countries most resistant to gender equality.

Minorities’ Push For Equality Alongside Governments’ Increasing Openness

Much change has occurred in equality for minorities over the last century, accelerating during and after World War II (1939–1945). Everywhere, discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, language, gender, sexual preference, and physical disability has declined. Despite the occasional resurgence of minority-group militancy, structural and cultural integration of minority groups is increasing, even those based on race. Two sources of long-term integration are increased opportunities for education and the work, with the consequent increase in inter marriage. These trends foster some merger of values and tastes.

A recent convergence in social heterogeneity, rooted in a revival of massive migration of economic and political refugees, moves all rich democracies toward the American multicultural model. Yet, as governments respond to the demand for gender equality, the rich democracies move toward models in Scandinavia, however varied their specific policies and speed of response. The increase in equality of educational opportunity facilitates the considerable achievement of minority-group equality and the great changes in women’s roles and family structure.

Increasing Equality In Higher Education Opportunities

For more than a century, education has been the main channel for upward mobility in occupation, income, and social status. The ambivalent mass demand for some combination of absolute equality and equality of opportunity—which often takes the form of demands for affirmative action or quotas for those groups presumed to be deprived—has had little effect on the essential character of higher education. Colleges and universities remain meritocratic, very much attuned to the demands of the economy, and quite vocational in emphasis. Education for alert citizenship and critical thought—for making moral judgments, for the pursuit of wisdom, for the enhancement of capacities of appreciation and performance in the arts, and for broader understanding of the individual in society—all tend to take second place. In recent decades, the laggards in mass higher education have moved toward the leader, the United States, and in a few cases have surpassed it in enrollment ratios. Finally, in response to the intensified demand for skilled or professional labor and the great variety of people to be processed, all rich countries now share the twin trends toward universality, along with specialization of institutions and curricula in higher education.

Mass Media Ascendance

Leaving aside nondemocracies, the convergence of rich democracies toward the American model is evident not only in mass higher education but also in the increased influence of mass communication and entertainment media in politics and culture. Industrialization links to the spread of expensive media technology and organizational forms, and also to the increase in income and leisure that it provides the audience. Despite national differences in the control, financing, and organization of the media, which persisted for decades, there is an unmistakable—recent and swift—convergence toward the commercialization and privatization of public broadcasting with a concomitant but somewhat slower shift toward American style and content. The media is now increasingly competitive, frantic, sensational, negative, aggressively interpretive, and anti-institutional. This talk-show style has itself become dominant in American print and broadcasting media only in roughly the last thirty-five years. In political campaigns, however, convergence toward the American model is quite slow—counter pressures in Europe and Asia that make the United States still exceptional among rich democracies include strong parties; government-assured access to television and radio for parties and candidates; restrictions on ads and the length of campaigns; and the well-financed, year-round public broadcasting news coverage.

Increased Prevalence And Influence Of Intellectuals

Scholars who emphasize changes in the mentality of masses or elites suggest that modernization produces a transformation toward a secular, rational, skeptical outlook. Max Weber, in 1918, spoke of “the disenchantment of the world.” With a touch of irony, Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 observed that the abundance of critical, independent intellectuals might undermine the very affluent capitalist order that supports them. Plainly, scientists and intellectuals are a double-edged sword: Modern society evidences not only rational secular bureaucratic tendencies, but also per iodic resurgence of backlash movements and parties among the losers and their ideological leaders (e.g., the creationist movement in the United States or the Christian right and Southern takeover of the Republican Party and its associated think tanks). In almost all of the most developed countries, populist-right protest movements and parties—sectarian religious, ethnic linguistic, or nativist— abound. The question for research is whether their incidence and influence increase or remain peripheral and cyclical.

Social Stratification And Mobility

Continuing industrialization shapes social stratification—the class structure—and mobility in several ways. It blurs older class lines and creates increasing social, cultural, and political heterogeneity within each social class; the internal differences within classes then become greater than differences between them. Continuing industrialization also fosters the emergence of a politically restive middle mass—in the upper-working class or lower-middle class—whose behavior, values, beliefs, and tastes increasingly differ from those of the privileged college educated, upper-middle class, the very rich above them, and the poor below. Increasing mobility adds to the heterogeneity of social classes. At every level, the mobile population and those with mobility aspirations contrast sharply with the no mobile population at the same socioeconomic status. Finally, the persistence and even slight growth in the urban self-employed portion of the labor force—people who live in a separate world—adds another source of heterogeneity within each class.

In short, convergence theory exceeds explanations based on social class, however measured. Convergence in mass education and occupational structures; related increases in mobility among all rich countries; and multiple ladders for achieving income, status, or power all allow explanations for the behavior of modern populations of almost any major source of social differentiation. Although all affluent countries share these trends in class structure, they differ greatly in the cross-class solidarity fostered by labor-left parties and groups, and in the percentage of working and nonworking poor.

The Organization Of Work

With all its variety within and across nations, the technical and social organization of work is still an area of convergence. Continuing industrialization brought a steady decline in annual average hours of work from the late nineteenth century up to about 1960, with a divergence since then as the long annual-hours countries like Japan and the United States reduced hours only slightly, while the short-hours countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway continued their penchant for leisure. Within nations, the uneven distribution of work increased in recent decades; the most educated groups intensified their labor, while the rest of the population typically continued to reduce average annual hours, or suffered forced leisure. There has recently been a gradual spread of nonstandard work schedules, especially among women; and a sizable, rapid growth of contingent labor—part-time, temporary, or subcontracted work—equating to a source of widespread insecurity.

As for modern society becoming a high-tech or postindustrial society, evaluation of occupational and industrial trends shows that the vast majority of modern populations work in low-tech or no-tech jobs and that almost all of the large and fastest growing occupations are anything but high-tech positions.

Growth Of The Welfare State

For more than a century, since Bismarck in Germany, there has been gradual institutionalization of the social and labor market programs comprising the welfare state. The essence of the welfare state is government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health and safety, education, and housing assured to every citizen as social right, not as charity. In the abstract, this is an ideal embraced by both political leaders and the mass of people in every affluent country, but in practice it becomes expensive enough and evokes enough ambivalence to become the center of political combat about taxes, spending, and the proper role of government in the economy. Because the welfare state is about shared risks that cross generations, localities, classes, ethnic and racial groups, and educational levels, it is a major source of social integration in modern society. Because it lends a measure of stability to household incomes, it has been an important stabilizer of the economy in the downswings of the business cycle, especially since World War II. Developing and developed countries, whatever the type of regime or elite motives, all move in this direction.

Changes In The Polity

At first glance, change in the polity is an area of least convergence; a high level of economic development may not be a decisive determinant of political systems. But the first eight areas of most convergence may well foster some convergence in polities. Among the most solid findings in the literature of comparative politics are that affluence brings a decline in civil violence, a decline in coercion as a means of rule, an increase in persuasion and manipulation, an increase in pluralism, and less surely, an increase in democracy. All democracies focus on the market, though all market-oriented political economies are not democracies.

Economic development at the level of the rich democracies brings a sharp decline in internal collective political violence, and even a decline in the intensity of peaceful demonstrations. The most extensive analysis of this relationship, carried out by Ted Robert Gurr and published in his 1979 article “Political Protest and Rebellion in the 1960s,” covers the extent and intensity of civil conflict at three levels of economic development in eighty-seven countries. The first finding is that the higher the standard of living, the less deadly and extensive is civil conflict, but there may be a curvilinear relationship between economic level and collective political violence. The twenty-nine most violent countries are poor but not the poorest; they have begun a process of industrialization. Somewhat less violent are countries at very low and medium levels of development, and the twenty-nine richest countries are by far the least violent. The old idea that political violence and militant labor protest intensifies during the painful transformation of early industrialization from rural to urban, and from peasant to dependent industrial or service worker, is confirmed.

The second finding is that at low levels of development, personal dictatorships and modernizing oligarchies alike provoke the most civil violence. In contrast, the twenty-one pluralist regimes and the eight formerly communist regimes at relatively high levels of economic development yield the very least civil violence. Three forces are at work among the richer countries. Pluralist and democratic systems channel mass grievances and group protest into electoral politics while delivering abundant material benefits; communist or other centrist authoritarian regimes could keep the lid on for decades by comprehensive agencies of political and social control, including one-party domination of secret police, armed forces, mass media, schools, and workplaces.

Students of comparative politics have established that all democracies have market economies. Historically, liberal constitutional systems—the United States, Britain, and France— were established mainly to win and protect private property, free enterprise, free contract, and residential and occupational choice against government restrictions, not to achieve broad popular participation in governance. In the development of the older democracies, this emphasis on liberty to engage in trade was more prominent than the idea of equality of participation in selecting leaders. The expansion of civil liberties, the suffrage, and the rule of law in these countries was preceded or at least accompanied by the expansion of institutions supporting free markets. Yet, again, all market economies are not democracies. For instance, in periods following World War II, South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, and Argentina were authoritarian and market oriented. To say that all the currently rich democracies have market economies does not say much about convergence, because democracies relying on the market vary greatly in the institutions in which markets are embedded—in the legal, political, economic, and social context in which finance, industry, labor, the professions, agencies of the executive, the judiciary, and the legislative interact and shape market transactions.

The interplay between modernization, markets, and democracy is complex and does not reflect any straight-line trend. Historically, as Samuel Huntington notes, democracy advanced in waves from early nineteenth century until now, and each wave was followed by reversals and new gains. Sometimes the reversals were drastic. Thus, several of the worst cases of totalitarian or fascist rule emerged in relatively advanced industrializing societies—Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hirohito’s Japan. Happily, both for democratic values and convergence theory, each reversal did not undo all previous gains: The net number of democracies by Huntington’s reckoning went from zero before 1828 to fifty-nine in 1990. They are not, though, all rich or near rich, because the number includes poor Bangladesh, India, Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Botswana. It is clear, however, that the central tendency is for successfully industrializing countries to become more pluralistic and even more democratic as they become wealthier—for example, the cases of South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Mexico, and South Africa. These countries may represent the threshold beyond which changing social structures rooted in industrialization strongly favor pluralism, and even some authoritarian regimes tolerate a few autonomous groups and limited cultural freedom. Among the relevant changes are the dominant convergent tendencies: growing middle and upper-middle strata; accommodation of the minority-group thrust for equality; mobility out of the working class; rise of professionals and experts; growth of the welfare state; and the spread of commerce and industry, both of which require a rule of law.

Whatever the intermediate links between economic level and democracy, the two strongly correlate. Thus, the authoritarian countries that are mostly successful making the move to democracy were overwhelmingly middle income, moving toward upper-middle income. The strong causal relationship very likely runs from economic development to democracy, and not the other way round.

The level of economic development and its structural and demographic correlates help explain why democratic regimes in Greece, Portugal, and Spain by the 1980s, and the Czech Republic, the former East Germany, and Hungary by the late 1990s, successfully consolidated after their authoritarian regimes collapsed and why the transition to democracy has been so problematic in the less developed countries of Central and Latin America (except for Uruguay), and even worse in the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, including Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia.

Ethnic warfare can further complicate the democratic transition, as it has in the former states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, both of which also delivered drastic declines in standards of living. Consistent with convergence theory, however, it is the less developed countries in which ethnic conflict is most virulent and violent, especially where feeble authoritarian regimes face ethno national rebellions, as in Bosnia, Georgia, Rwanda, and Haiti. In the early 1990s, there were about 120 shooting wars going on in the world, 90 of which involved states attempting to suppress ethnic minorities. None were among the rich democracies. In fact, economic development at above average levels and democratization together always channel such movements into nonviolent politics.

Rich democracies have both economic strength and a high degree of legitimacy—resources to use for any aspect of social peace. As Arend Lijphart suggests, dominant “majorities” do this by sharing power (coalitions), dispersing power (bicameralism and multiparty systems), distributing power more fairly (proportional representation in its various forms), delegating power (federalism), and limiting power formally (minority veto). The mix of these electoral and constitutional arrangements varies, but all modern democracies have found ways toward minority and majority accommodation. Some form of affirmative action in assignment of jobs, political positions, or college admissions is also common, although specific government policies vary. Finally, an obvious and well-traveled road to social peace is expansion of the franchise and a well-developed, universalistic welfare state.

Democratic Transition And Contemporary Research

Research on the breakdown, emergence, or consolidation of democracy is a growth industry. Among scholars analyzing lengthy lists of conditions favorable to the democratic transition, such as Huntington, all note the importance of economic level or material conditions for the emergence and the consolidation of democracy. However, they all offer a list of noneconomic determinants of uncertain relative importance. Major contributors to knowledge in this area include S. M. Lipset, Robert Dahl, John Stephens, Larry Diamond, and Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan.

Among social scientists, convergence or modernization theory was most popular in the 1940s through the mid-1960s when it went out of fashion. But it has recently been revived. The scholars who early articulated these ideas include Wilbert Moore; Daniel Lerner; Neil Smelser; Clark Kerr and colleagues; Samuel Huntington; and, on the social psychological correlates of economic development, Alex Inkeles. A chorus of criticism emerged in response. Students of the organization of work, such as Ronald Dore and Reinhard Bendix, emphasized the national and sectoral variations in authority relationships in the workplace and society. Many political critics, including André Gunder Frank, emphasized what they saw as the Eurocentric or North America–centric, or the conservative bias, of convergence theory. Emmanuel Wallerstein, in 1974, counterposed the idea of a world system dominated by a core of imperial capitalist states including the United States; others, like Peter Evans in 1979, accented the related theme of dependent development. A few critics allege that convergence theorists ignore politics; they forget that theorists and critics are not contending camps at war—economic determinists versus political or social determinists. In fact, the most systematic and creative work in this area deals with the interplay of markets and politics (political economy) or the social bases of politics (political sociology) or both. The trick is to learn how much of the explanation of outcomes is attributable to industrialization and how much to alternative theories, including variation in political and social organization. Using both quantitative and comparative historical methods, much recent research does exactly that, for example the less polemical students of varieties of capitalism, including Peter Hall and David Soskice. Indeed, many contemporary scholars such as Ruth and David Collier, John Stephens, and Harold Wilensky focus fruitfully on the interaction of economic and noneconomic forces shaping diverse paths of development among nations and regions of the world—a continuing challenge for researchers today.

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