This brings us to what I want to talk about today. We're going to leave the rest of democracy for Wednesday and then Monday. The purpose of the Liarda reading is to sort of highlight the quest for coming up with a grand theory of things, you know, a theory of everything.
Now, grand theory is by itself just simply a term that social scientists like to use to kind of utilize. as the synchonon theory for explaining everything. There are different theories that go into grand theory, right?
Grand theory is sort of like an overarching thing. What exactly is the most popular attempt at grand theory? This is where we begin. In the beginning was the word, and the word was modernization, and modernization was with political science.
The nobody bought this thing because it was the... affiliates to the new soccer. All right, this is where we begin. In the beginning was modernization.
Modernization theory has been really one of the cornerstones, not only of comparative politics, but theories of democracy and good governance, and theories of democratic transition. And if you really want to get even more specific about where does it all begin. There are very few articles that have been written within the political science field that have been regarded with such awe, reverence, and hesitation. scratching, because usually the two come together, as Seymour Morton Lipset's magnum opus, Some Social Requisites of Democracy, which was published in the 1959 edition of the American Political Science Review.
Now, the APSR is the major, major, major journal of political science research. And it's sort of understood that if you get published in the APSR, you're going places in policy. The downside is...
Why does that nobody reads the APSR? They said maybe like five people. So your goal is to get published for an audience of nobody, but the APSR is what it is. Now, not to knock the APSR back then, Libsyn's article is very, very important for a number of reasons, one of which is that Libsyn's article generated more, let's say, additional studies, more inquiries, more research agendas than pretty much any article, any study, The only other article, the only other study that maybe gives Lipset's article a run for its money is the famous, infamous, infamously famous, and famously infamous Clash of Civilizations by Sam Huntington. By the way, how many of you have heard of Sam Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?
If you were in my politics and culture class, you'd know. But Huntington's article was published in the early 90s. And Lipset's article was published in the early 90s.
at the end of the 50s but had already been seen as veritable gospel in the decade prior. So what exactly is modernization theory? The TLDR version of it is that the more modernized a country is, the more likely the country is to develop democracy. Lipset's article, which is about 40 different pages, effectively says modernization yields democracy.
Democracies are modern countries. They are developed countries. They are countries with some type of industrial economic system.
They embody the principles of market capitalism. And most importantly, Lipset was not the first person to coin this, but at this point it was pretty much. There's a certain segment of society that is absolutely vital, a certain economic class that is absolutely vital for a democracy to manifest.
What is this ultimately so important economic class? The middle class. The middle class, absolutely. Why the middle class?
What makes the middle class so much better? ...important for fostering a democracy. Why not the upper classes?
Why not the lower classes? What makes the middle class so important? Okay, so this is actually an interesting thing. This is something that really describes some of the foundations of real, structural, democratic literature, to which Lipset is included, Robert Dahl...
is included, Barrington Moore is included, among others. And the explanation is very aptly as follows. The middle class has a certain degree of political power, and they use that power as a way to way of safeguarding a number of provisions.
The middle class comes to power through a market economy. The middle class are a certain type of wage earners. They earn their money, they earn their fortune not through inheritance, not through titles, but through generating income, through industry, through commerce, through businesses.
And in that regard, they rely. on a biweekly paycheck. And it's a very simple thing. As long as I get paid, I don't riot.
The middle class are those people that enter into political debates and... Create safeguards for not only their earnings, but also to ensure that the state relies upon a constant flow of incoming money through the, and we call this as what? Taxes. that go towards providing state services. The wealthy just want to hoard it all to themselves, and the poor, well, sad but true, no money, no voice.
The middle class, therefore, are those that invest in the state. They invest in roads, in hospitals, in schools. They invest in higher education.
They are skilled labor. They are an educated class. They are a literate class. They do not hold aristocratic titles, and they don't have vast tracts of land that they can just simply live off.
No, they're wage earners. And as such, they are the ones that, whether they know it or not, are... are churning the gears of modernization and development. So Lipset effectively says the end result is clear.
Look at a country that has a developed economic system, a developed industry system, a developed education system, a developed civil society, right? All of these things are indicative of the idea that there is a middle place. And as such, the country is modern, and more often than not, the country is democratic. Rich countries are democratic. Poor countries are not.
The countries that are democratic are small. And they tend to be gravitated in the developed part of the world. By the way, when we're talking about modernity breeds democracy, which countries are, which countries do you think Libsyn has in mind? Great Britain, United States, France, Switzerland, Italy on a good day.
West Germany, very good. Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. You've got to remember, this is the 1950s. So, there are still governments... There are still ideologies that are counter to democracy.
There's communism, and there's various forms of dictatorships ranging from tribalism to, by God, Franco was still fascist. The understanding here is, look, it is the 19th century. So he is looking at correlation. He is saying, I'm looking at the democracies around the world, and I see the same thing. Develop, develop, develop, develop, develop.
Good for you, proximate reformation. Good for you, proximate work ethic. Okay? Now, this becomes gospel.
This is like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever. Okay? And this is, you know, kind of like rammed into all the graduate seminars for a new generation.
of political scientists that are going to school around this time, and they're kind of learning the ropes. Because remember, comparative politics started out as comparative political systems. And which countries are we really going to study?
Again, we're talking about the 40s and 50s. Which countries actually have developed a political system? The very ones that we just mentioned. And oh, look at that, they happen to be democratic. Now, there are countries out there that are developed, but they're not democratic.
So the union for one. China for another. Oh, by the way, Japan is also thrown into the exclusive.
Okay? But here's the thing. After a while, we kind of saturate the field by looking at the same countries. There's only so much you can write about Great Britain. There's only so much you can write about Switzerland and the United States.
There's a whole wider world out there. And by the 1950s... There's a major global event that's happening.
Decolonization. Okay? British Empire is quite possibly one of the only empires in history to kind of go gracefully.
Empires don't go gracefully. They kind of go kicking and screaming. Or they just, you know, fight to the last man, to the invading Ottomans, or whatever. Great Britain was like, oh, we're the greatest empire in the world, and, oh, well, that was von Gelderland.
And so the British Empire is breaking up. The French Empire goes kicking and screaming. The Belgian Empire. Yes, Belgium actually had a columnist, if you can believe it. Portugal, Spain, the Dutch, and the rest.
Which now opens up pretty much most of Africa, the Middle East. Southeast Asia and Latin America. In fact, the only region of the world that was closed off still was Eastern Europe. And why? Because of Soviet Union, right?
You just couldn't go. Okay? But the rest of the world is basically open up. Now, here was the $64,000 question within political science at the time.
Okay? Of all the countries that are now coming onto the map, Ghana, South Korea, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, you know, you name it. Which ones are likely to become democratic? and which ones are not using what you've learned in your seminars about modernization theory.
So these grad students, they go through all their classes, they do all their papers, and when it's time for them to write their PhDs, they are sent out into the world on their study abroad things and they're sent to wherever they want to go, Latin America, Africa, the United States, with the idea of come back in a year or two with your findings, which countries are likely to transition and which ones are not, okay? And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but two to five years later when these grad students were coming back and writing their dissertations, 90% of the countries under study were given a negative or at best inconclusive score. of rating. Inappropriate for democracy. Not likely to develop.
No sense of modernity whatsoever. But you kind of see where I'm going with this, right? India, Israel, Turkey.
Japan after the Second World War, right, they all get passes because what they do is they either abandon preexisting cultural traits and patterns for modern western patterns of development or they somehow find a way of making the two coexist. In almost all other countries, the answer was inconclusive or negative. Right? Now at some point you have to think to yourself, okay, if 90% of the countries under research came back negative, is the world that screwed up?
Or perhaps this is something that social scientists in. in general, and political scientists in particular, hate to acknowledge. Or maybe my theory isn't entirely correct.
Now, political scientists will basically go to no effort will go to no end to defend their theories, no matter how screwed up it is. And so instead of realizing, hey, you know what? Maybe 90% of the countries coming back inconclusive means that your theory is kind of wrong. No, no, no, no, no, my theory cannot be wrong. I'm a political scientist.
I like to make fun of my own discipline. We are very stubborn individuals. But it was dawning on people.
By the 60s, what about the 70s? That, you know, perhaps modernization theory is asking things or looking for criteria that aren't so much deficient, but just simply don't exist. Does that make the country deficient?
Or does that make your theory somehow biased? Now in the Wiarda article he mentions Peter Wich, who among other things, Peter Wich and Alastair McIntyre, these are two social scientists that made their name by basically critiquing everything and everyone in the discipline. And Peter Wich sort of said, or sort of offhandedly said, in the reading that perhaps, perhaps, just perhaps, modernization theory, which was designed around developed countries in Western Europe, and then applied to developing countries in other parts of the world, are really a case of applying apples to oranges, right?
Or in this case, you're not even applying apples to, all right, apples to oranges is fine. What we're doing here is applying apples to patio furniture, okay? But you're looking for criteria that just doesn't exist because it's in a different part of the world.
And how are you expecting to find a developed middle class in a country that was a colony for over 100 years? Right? I mean, isn't it sort of silly to look at one of the most developed countries in the world, Great Britain, and then apply that to Ghana and be like, oh, my God, look at what's wrong with Ghana. Well, you know, no shit, Sherlock. I mean, this is Great Britain.
This is Ghana. You know? I mean, come on. The other problem that came about with this is that the inconclusive studies also regarded there were these other things that got in the way. You know, silly, annoying little things like culture, language, religion, you know, all sorts of things that the West either tamed or put in the galleries of museums.
They no longer matter. Separation of church and states. The adoption of secular republicanism.
Due process. A social contract. A constitution.
Universities. All these things. And so critiques of modernization theory by the 70s began to understand that maybe it's not culture that gets in the way, but that culture does matter. And yes, here's a reality that kind of bucks the trend of theory, because you spend too much time in theory.
You kind of forget how the rest of the world works. Again, go back to what's the matter with Kansas. Yes, Virginia, culture does matter. Identities do matter.
Religion matters. Languages matter. Animosities matter. Legacies matter. And sometimes, they matter more than democracy.
That doesn't mean that they're anti-democratic. It just means that there's things that are more important right now. And if your idea of how does a country become democratic effectively is, the more they're like Great Britain, the more they'll be democratic, well, lots of luck trying to get countries to do that.
Okay? So in many cases, what I'm trying to say is, to say is that culture is not so much going to get in the way, but culture is what makes people identify themselves with. Not everybody is going to abandon Hinduism for the Church of England.
Okay, maybe there's like one disaffected Buddhist out there that's like, dude, I'm so sick of this metaphysics. I want hardcore rational thinking, C of E. Okay?
But other than that, it's not going to happen. Probably one of the best critiques about modernization theories grand theory application was from a 1971 article by Giovanni Sartori. We'll call it the phrase conceptual stretching.
I love this term. It can be a dry discipline. Every so often, we come up with some really neat things.
Conceptual stretching, Sartori postulates, is one of the biggest problems in political science methodology. In so many words, conceptual scratching is a result of erroneous conclusions that are reached. By applying criteria, listen to me, by applying criteria that was proven for one case, but you take that criteria and you now try to apply it to a whole bunch of other cases. Now you might get lucky and it may work one of the times.
More often than not, you apply the criteria for one set of cases to the rest of the world, no wonder it's not going to work. Okay? The problem with conceptual stretching, if I can make it a little bit more user friendly for you all, try running a program designed for a Mac on Windows.
And see if you don't get the blue screen of death. Right? Try running something designed for one operating system on another.
This is not going to work. Okay. Conceptual stretching is making conclusions based upon preexisting data but then applying those same criteria to another set whether or not that data exists. Does that make sense? Does that make sense?
What Sartori is saying is that you are going to the developing world looking for modernization that you came up with from the developed world. That just simply doesn't work. Okay? At the absolute least, take history into account. If you're going to at least apply this criteria, can you at least apply the criteria of modernization from these core countries, maybe 200, 300 years ago?
expecting, and this is also something that still kind of resonates within the policy world today. You know, every so often an authoritarian regime is overthrown, and we don't do this as much as we used to. You'd be surprised how, how recent we did. You know, the statue of the dictator is top on Monday and we're expecting full democratic consolidation, multi-party elections and a green party to take part in political consensus building by Friday.
And if we don't see that, oh well, you know, the Muslims just don't know anything about democracy. You know? I mean, you'd be surprised the crap that you can hear on TV. And I'm not just talking about Fox News. That just runs across the board.
Okay? The other thing we have to take into account is that. even those countries in the developed world took very different transition paths to get to where they were. Great Britain took about 600 meters to get to where it was by 1950. Germany took a World War or two in order to get to where it was. And Japan took an atomic bomb or two to get to where it was.
And let's also be honest. 1959, America was considered to be a developed democracy, but was it a consolidated democracy? Was it a social democracy? 1959?
1959, you still have... had people who could get lots of votes running for office on the platform. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
Let's also remember this is the 1950s. There were parts of this country. where there were suns, that said, whites only.
So tell me, how developed is your democracy? Are you just looking at structural configurations? Well, if you are, that's the Wikipedia easy way.
Are you looking for? for more attitudinal references to democracy. In that case, those countries that you consider to be democratic, you can cut them in half and take some of the smaller ones as the ones that work.
But of course, as I said, political scientists tend to really hold on to their theories. Because, damn it, I published something and my name is next to it. I will not have my name mispurchased. They're going to defend this to the death.
So of course, modernization theory... takes a major, major hit to the face with Vietnam. Because the Vietnam War, more than just simply a tactical loss for the United States, was the first time a country demonstrated to the world media that it did not want America's style of governance and it chose something else. At the end of the day, the Vietnam War was basically that. The Vietnam War was to get the Vietnamese to finally say, okay we'll take marching orders from Washington as opposed to Moscow.
The defeat of American diplomatic interests in Vietnam kind of threw us again, the 1970s was somewhat of a weird time for us. Fashion was horrible, disco was around, you know, the economy was tanking, New York was probably affordable to live in, but you know, very affordable, though you wouldn't want to live there. You said we're going to Times Square in 1975, I do not want to know what you're doing.
My point is, is that by the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam era, it had now, defenders of modernization theory had now reworked their theory. into, well, it's not so much that culture gets in the way, but there are just societies and there are just parts of the world that are just simply incompatible with democracy. Right, we just kind of retcon the whole thing. Well, the Vietnamese didn't want democracy, and what do they know, they're a bunch of white spick and ees. You know, what do they know about democracy?
Ha ha, you know? Just like those, you know, vodka drinking Russians and those, you know, Chinese whatever, what do they know? They don't know anything about democracy. And that kind of brings a whole new level of political science, which comes to conclude that perhaps democracy isn't exactly a global phenomenon, but perhaps it is specific to the West. So to kind of give you a sort of a little bookmark, okay, so what have we been talking about so far?
Political scientists may have begrudgingly admitted, okay, all right, modernization theory may not be grand theory. But modernization theory itself is still good, damn it. May not be grand theory.
because of the culture. All right, fine. So you know what? That's just fine.
Because the Western world will be the beacon of democracy and social contracts and all those types of liberties and freedoms. And the rest of the world can basically go screw itself. This is what Huntington started to think about civilizations clashing.
And he didn't really write this down formally for another 20 years or so. But the point is, is that you may recognize that the theory doesn't work. But you're still going to come up with implausible excuses.
Okay? So you're right for all the wrong reasons. Yes, you're right that modernization theory can't work.
It can't really function as a grand theory. But the explanations are very, very insular and they're also self-serving. What started out as political Eurocentrism, right, the democracy begins in Europe and it spreads out to the rest of the world, kind of devolves into Western ethnocentrism.
The West versus the rest. Okay? Huntington's a big practitioner of this, along with other contemporaries of his own. And even as recent as the years following 9-11, you hear people in the State Department, in Washington, Foreign Office in London and elsewhere, that have absolutely no problem and they will not even blink when they effectively say on camera something like, well, not everyone is going to become democratic because their culture either forbids it or makes it impossible. Islam is incompatible with democracy.
Orthodox Christianity is incompatible with democracy. Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. And there are a few countries that are non-Western that finally get their act together. South Korea finally gets its act together in the 1980s. But why?
Not because of South Korean culture, but because South Korea does what Japan does. Let's just go completely crazy. crazy consumer western nutball. So whereas Japan kind of did its own thing, there's a whole new phenomenon in South Korea today, I'm sure some of you have heard about it, it's called K-pop.
And nothing says modernization. like K-pop. And you compare the music that's coming out of North Korea versus South Korea.
North Korean music I absolutely adore. Want to know why? Because North Korean music sounds like it's perpetually 1943 Soviet Union.
They all sound like they are meant, they are actually trained to sing and sound like a Russian choir. If you listen to stuff that's coming out of North Korea today, you think, my god, is this like World War II? Eric, no, this shit was published in 2015. And then just across the DMZ you've got Donald Sile.
So in a way, modernization theory is still like, yeah, hi, look at South Korea today, yo, check that shit out. Back in the 1970s this was Best Korea, this was Inferior Korea. In the 2000-teens, Inferior Korea is now Super Korea, and Best Korea is Joker Korea.
Double K. But the point is, the point is, The culture changes, or at least that's what the CNN headlines are going to tell you, right? The culture changes. Become like America.
Become like the West. Get rid of your tea ceremonies all out of the gas, okay? Another element of this, which I don't want to spend too much time on now, because we'll get to it throughout the semester, but I talk about it a little bit more in my politics and culture class, which if everything works according to plan, I will be teaching again in the fall, is this understanding among the defenders of modernization theory that, okay, maybe paths of development... Maybe different here, here, here. What?
Ah! Certain paths of development created certain institutional and historical circumstances that led one group of people to reach democracy and another group of people to reach something else. Ah, so what was it that led to democracy? Ah, well, let's see.
Well, there are these things like the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation and the scientific and industrial revolutions. This all fits very nicely with modernization theory because these are the things that are going to change. the building blocks that create a middle class society. Of course, they're an advent of the free market, having spits, wealth, and nations, social contracts, separation of church and state, right? This begets this, this does this, this does this, this does this, this does this, right?
So it's a very nice process tracing that shows how Western Europe kind of started getting its act together around 1500 and has been an alpha ever since. And all of Western Europe's successful spin-offs, Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Prove that point. So it's a nice way of showing that the West has been the best since the year 1500, roughly around 1500. When all of this stuff started. The rest of the world didn't have this.
So okay, your culture is whatever it is, but you never had a web science. You never had a scientific revolution. You never had an enlightenment. You never had separation of certain states.
So the same hunting. and the Farid Zakarians, a big, big, big fan of Sam Huntington, the Lipsets and others are now following this cultural argument that says, okay, one set of cultural patterns created democracy while other things created something else. Okay, taking us. This is where I step into the equation.
Why? Because I'm teaching the same place. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's all fine and good. Based on this evidence, there never really was a I'm just going to come flat out and say it. The search for a grand theory is elusive because there cannot be a grand theory.
And there never was a grand theory. We tried with modernization and it maybe worked for a little bit, but after a while when your answers are coming back inconclusive, you have to kind of think maybe the formula doesn't entirely work. You just can't shove a round peg into a square hole and think it's. that it's going to work, okay?
And trust me, no one's going to follow the math in the APSR. The other thing to take into account, and this is a little bit more pragmatic, what we regarded as grand theory was somewhat premature because it was based on only a small handful of advanced industrial. And it is somewhat ballsy to call something grand theory when you're only applying it to the developed areas of Europe. You know, if you send your grad students out into the world and it kind of works, well, then you can call it grand theory. theory.
It's very Western-centric. And it also precludes and presupposes and biases and prejudices dozens of experiments, dozens of observations. The other problem is that our criteria for modernization Was based upon a set of axioms and data sets that, you know, in their own world, in their own mindset, in their own right, are fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
You know, Lipset is not a, or was not, you know, he was a well-respected political scientist. And as I said, modernization theory started dozens and dozens of other degrees of research. And if you follow his logic, yes, it makes absolute sense. There's nothing wrong with his theory. And Lipset wasn't the one that tried to make a great theory.
In many cases, Lipset's name is somehow attached to this whole thing. Let's make this, you know, around the world type of thing. But the problem is, is that these criteria have been too rudimentary. Especially if you're looking for all sorts of specific things that, if you argue, are product of certain historical circumstances, well then why are you applying this criteria to the world that you know it didn't exist in other places?
I mean, am I making sense? Well, follow me here. Okay, what is the law going to have to stop the cancer?
I don't, this makes sense in my head, but that doesn't mean that it makes sense in yours trust me. And here's the other thing. You got to also remember, this is the 50s and 60s.
What's going on in the world? What's going on in the world? Cold war.
Cold war. We have an agenda to push. We have a product to sell. What's the product?
Democracy. Very good. Okay.
That's the candy coating show. That's what's inside. Capitalism. We have capitalism.
There's a. At the end of the day, what won the Cold War? Thomas Jefferson or Adam Smith?
Adam Smith. Thomas Jefferson kind of got second place, maybe a participation trophy. Adam Smith won the poll.
You've got to also remember, what variation of Karl Marx are we going after? Are we going after political Karl Marx? Are we going after economic Karl Marx? We went after economic Karl Marx. It's always economic Marx.
It's the Cold War. If you read some of these earlier scholarly journals, they have a very obvious agenda set to them, right? We're going out into the world as veritable anointing sales.
Jehovah's Witnesses, peace. Lock it on the door. Excuse me, are you interested in democracy? Because you know who is right behind us?
Or who just came to the door? Hey, pretty fed up. Would you like to know about this thing called flow meters? Okay.
Well, you think Khrushchev is sitting home doing nothing? You know, you've heard of this guy called Che Guevara, right? You know this guy called Fidel Castro.
Okay, communism was pretty, you know, attractive. Okay? Especially in the post-colonial world.
So the idea here was, okay, which countries are going to work? Which ones can we do? Which ones can we work with?
You know, football here, football there. You've got to, you've got to. Especially after, especially after the Bay of Pigs, especially after Castro went and took Cuba Comics. Okay?
The idea is, okay, we can't allow this. So we have an agenda push. So it's natural that we're going to stick with our theory. Because again, one other thing that was taking place, again, this is not academic, but again, this very normative stuff is very important. It's one thing for the academics to argue about democracy.
It's another thing for the newspapers and the journalists to argue the world wants democracy more than communism. You've got to remember that. We're in a battle of souls here, though.
We've got to march. The country didn't want democracy. It wasn't that we blew the sail. It's that they're too dumb to know what to do with it. They don't know what to do with it.
They don't know what's in their best interest. So you know what? Let's just not give it to them because they don't mean ruin this. Let them ruin communism. Let them not ruin democracy.
So this was placed within a normative bias of self-promotion. This is the Cold War. So in that regard, we need to constantly remind ourselves that the pursuit of grand theory has much more than just an academic agenda. Okay. So what can we do?
Speaking of full bore,, right? What is to be done? As Leonard had asked.
Well, this is where we kind of go for the rest of the semester. And this is where I kind of critique some of the foundations of science, even though I have a PhD in it. And I love teaching.
Sometimes I'm really tired of the fact that I'm teaching. First thing that we need to do is probably make peace with the fact that we're not really a science. At least not in the classical understanding, you know.
You have the natural sciences, which are located in decrepit buildings on Livingston campus, and you have the social sciences, which are located in decrepit buildings on Dublin's campus. You have the history department, which is located in a relatively nice building on the top. But the big thing about social science is among, and political science is probably like the one that's the closest among their history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology brethren. Political science has been the one like, we're a science, we need to be a science.
The natural scientists will always laugh at us and say, that's adorable. You ain't no scientist. Come on, you're making stuff up.
And the historians and the anthropologists and the sociologists and the psychologists that, you know, get their wisdom. from chakras or whatever it is, are looking at positive vibes. And they're looking at political scientists, and they're basically saying, your feng shui is totally out of whack now. Mellow house.
In order to get serious here. Political science is a useful discipline, but we oftentimes take the science aspect more seriously than the political. Empirical modeling can certainly be practiced.
There's no question about that. And you can draw inferences based upon observable data. It's all fine and good.
The first thing we have to recognize is that no two democracies are the same. No two countries are the same. You know, we might have a different political system, but we might not have the same political system. be a able to come up with let's say regional mid-level theories. Then we might be able to draw some kind of broad-based theory about States and societies of Western Europe, or Southern Europe, or Eastern Europe.
We might be able to draw inferences about states in the Middle East and Latin America. And that's all fine and good. It's certainly plausible to find comparable evidence between the development of, let's say, Serbia and Romania.
Or Chile and Argentina. Or France and Germany. You know?
India and Pakistan. But you have to take these regional differences into account. You have to take historical circumstance into account. I'm not saying that I'm a historical fatalist.
What happened 600 years ago screws you or benefits you. No, no, no, it's not the case at all. But there are things that do matter.
There are things that do factor in to these equations. And so some will just simply say, well, we need greater regression analysis. We need more rigorous statistics. We need more mathematical quantification.
And I just kind of sit there in the room and I say, no, what we need to do is learn algorithm. I know. Or learn Spanish. Or better yet, not just learn Arabic and Spanish through.
Learn the slang. Learn the colloquialism. Because that's what gets you to understand what people mean and what people say. Okay? Some argue that we need more regression.
Some argue regression analysis. I mean we need more statistical analysis. I think we should just be better in the story.
I think we should take anthropology into account, sociology into account. Where's the incidental music coming from anyway? It's actually rather nice in my lectures. You know?
And so with that in mind, there is this thing within the the political science discipline between small n studies and large n. Small n studies are your qualitative things. That's where the history comes in.
That's where the slang comes in. That's where understanding the what people mean when they say what they do. Okay?
And while that's not going to get you the key to all of your answers, it's going to help you understand that culture and that society, I think, a little bit more. There's only so much you can do by kind of expanding these things into ones and zeros. Look, I'm not knocking the quantitative studies.
Quantitativists are, you know, quick people in their own selves. point we're probably going to take a quantitative studies class in political and political science. And they'll probably tell you that people like me are the people who don't know what the hell to do.
Again, it's a turf war. But my point is, if grand theory doesn't work, And modernization theory can only take us so far. That brings us back to the question that many of these students were sent out into the world to look for. And that is, can any country in the world become democratic? The preemptive answer to that, using qualitative studies, is yes.
Any country can. Any country. Cuba, yes.
Afghanistan? Yes. Iraq?
Yes. Turkey? Yes. Because it's really not that great. North Korea?
With enough money, funding, time, and alcohol, I would come up with a solution. Can it happen? Absolutely. There is absolutely no country in the world today that is somehow screwed out of the box.
And let's also put it this way, there is no country or no society in the world today that is just by proxy democratic. To be perfectly honest. So that's kind of, you know, where we're going to be going in this place.