Communism and Economic Development

One of the major efforts of students of comparative politics in recent years has been directed at establishing, more or less systematically, relationships between economic development and political change. Much of the literature in this area, perhaps because of its stated or unstated value and policy orientation, has been concerned with the conditions and the prospects for democracy. In the present article, we attempt to correlate economic development with another phenomenon of political change, that of Communism and, more specifically, the strength of Communist parties. We begin with the hypothesis that the relationship between economic development and Communist party strength is curvilinear. In underdeveloped countries—and these included all Communist-ruled countries at the time the Communist party came to power except East Germany and the Czech sections of Czechoslovakia—Communist parties may be regarded as merely one variety of the modernizing movements that evolved in these countries in response to the impact of Western industrialism.