POL201Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: The Grocer, Modernization Theory, Profit Motive
Document Summary
The passing of traditional society ch1-2; modernization: theories and facts p155-183. There was a huge change in political science during the 1950s. They started doing research outside of europe and south america. Why: during the cold war, the ussr and the us divided the world into communist/democracies. The us"s foreign policy was centered around ensuring that the whole world would stay democracies (b/c they would be allied with the states instead of the ussr). They wanted to know how they could influence this decision towards democracy. Suddenly all these places opened up for political study, not just cultural study. Governments emerged that could be studied by political scientists. Before decolonization there wasn"t anything relevant to political science that could be studied in the other parts of the world: economic growth: after ww2, the world economy took off. Economic growth was particularly impressive in western democracies, but many poor countries made important economic advances.
