This article reviews four decades of scholarship on political development. It contends that the theoretical ambitions of the early political development literature to frame the comparative inquiry of politics and political change in less developed countries were undermined by intellectual challenges to the paradigms of modernization and structural functionalism and that the literature’s teleological dimension was contradicted by real-world events. Nonetheless, in subsequent decades, the field made great advances in the study of political institutions, democratic stability and breakdown, state structures, civil society, and the uneven character of political development itself. The article argues that amid manifold evidence of plural forms of political development and decay at the century’s end, the field should avoid relapses into neomodernization theory and instead focus on such issues as state reform, democratic governance, political representation and accountability, and the organization of civil societies. Such an expansive and fluid research agenda will enable the field of political development to generate important theoretical advances in comparative politics.
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