Academic analysis of development theory and democracy promotion

[9 return to the question of how well that strategy worked in the Middle East later. Development in Silos As interesting and important as Huntington’s work was, it lay outside of mainstream thinking about development, which from the start was a highly Balkanized academic field that was dominated by economists. Few scholars have sought to understand development as an inter-connected process with political, economic and social parts. Development economists looked primarily at economic factors like capital, labor and technology as sources of economic growth, and thought neither about the consequences of growth for politics nor the relationship of political institutions to growth. The Harrod-Domar growth model that was dominant in the 1950s suggested that less- developed countries were poor primarily because they lacked capital, which then led development agencies like the World Bank to try to kick start growth with generous infusions of capital for physical infrastructure. It was only when steel plants and shoe factories in sub- Saharan Africa went idle due to corruption or lack of organizational capacity that they were forced to go back to the drawing board. The political scientists, for their part, scaled back their ambitions from large Huntingtonian-style theory and focused primarily on political phenomena. Beginning in the 1980s, there was increasing interest in the problem of transitions into and out of democracy; with democratic transitions in Spain, Portugal and nearly all of Latin America, this became a particularly pressing issue. There was some revival of interest in the democracy-development linkage, but it never led to a clear consensus on the causal links connecting the two phenomena. The academic interest in transitions corresponded to the burgeoning of democracy promotion as a distinct field of international practice, both on the part of the United States and of other democracies around HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023476