[1] The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset,[1] drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons.
Levy Jr., Gabriel Almond, Seymour Martin Lipset, Walt Rostow, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, David Apter, Alex Inkeles, Cyril Edwin Black, Bert F. Hoselitz, Myron Weiner, and Karl Deutsch.
"Lipset's observation that democracy is related to economic development, first advanced in 1959, has generated the largest body of research on any topic in comparative politics,"[20] Anderson explains the idea of an elongated diamond in order to describe the concentration of power in the hands of a few at the top during an authoritarian leadership.
[23] As Seymour Martin Lipset put it, "All the various aspects of economic development—industrialization, urbanization, wealth and education—are so closely interrelated as to form one major factor which has the political correlate of democracy".
The modernization theory implies that this should correlate to democratic growth in some regards, especially in relation to the liberalization of the middle and lower classes.
However, active human rights abuses and constant oppression of Chinese citizens by the government seem to contradict the theory strongly.
Looking down the line in the 2000s, Chinese citizens saw even more opportunities to liberalize and were able to be a part of urbanization and could access higher levels of education.
They argue the ideal social and cultural conditions for the foundation of a democracy are born of significant modernization and economic development that result in mass political participation.
[29] Randall Peerenboom explores the relationships among democracy, the rule of law and their relationship to wealth by pointing to examples of Asian countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, which have successfully democratized only after economic growth reached relatively high levels and to examples of countries such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and India, which sought to democratize at lower levels of wealth but have not done as well.
"[33] Sirianne Dahlum and Carl Henrik Knutsen offer a test of the Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel revised version of modernization theory, which focuses on cultural traits triggered by economic development that are presummed to be conducive to democratization.
"[35] A meta-analysis by Gerardo L. Munck of research on Lipset's argument shows that a majority of studies do not support the thesis that higher levels of economic development leads to more democracy.
According to Seymour Martin Lipset, economic conditions are heavily determined by the cultural, social values present in that given society.
Modernization theorists such as Samuel P. Huntington held in the 1960s and 1970s that authoritarian regimes yielded greater economic growth than democracies.
"[40] A study by Daron Acemoglu, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo, and James A. Robinson shows that "democracy has a positive effect on GDP per capita.
Global trade has grown continuously since the European discovery of new continents in the early modern period; it increased particularly as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the mid-20th century adoption of the shipping container.
Former U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson was a supporter of the modernization theory and believed that television had potential to provide educational tools in development.
Rostow argued that American intervention could propel a country from the second to the third stage he expected that once it reached maturity, it would have a large energized middle class that would establish democracy and civil liberties and institutionalize human rights.
The goals proved much too ambitious, and the economists in a few years abandoned the European-based modernization model as inappropriate to the cultures they were trying to impact.
They firmly believed modernity was not only good for the target populations, but was essential to avoid communism on the one hand or extreme control of traditional rural society by the very rich landowners on the other.
However, Latham argues that the ideology was a non-coercive version of the modernization goals of the imperialistic of Britain, France and other European countries in the 19th century.
As Tipps has argued, by conflating modernization with other processes, with which theorists use interchangeably (democratization, liberalization, development), the term becomes imprecise and therefore difficult to disprove.
It emerged in the 1950s and argues that the underdevelopment of poor nations in the Third World derived from systematic imperial and neo-colonial exploitation of raw materials.
[54] Dependency models arose from a growing association of southern hemisphere nationalists (from Latin America and Africa) and Marxists.
[56] Another line of critique of modernization theory was due to sociologist Barrington Moore Jr., in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966).
[58] Political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell, in his Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism (1973) challenged the thesis, advanced most notably by Seymour Martin Lipset,[17] that industrialization produced democracy.