literature review modernization theory

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Modernization theory.

• Prateek Goorha Prateek Goorha Deakin Business School, Deakin University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.266
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017

Modernization theory studies the process of social evolution and the development of societies. There are two levels of analysis in classical modernization theory: the microcosmic evaluations of modernization, which focuses on the componential elements of social modernization; and the macrocosmic studies of modernization focused on the empirical trajectories and manifest processes of the modernization of nations and their societies, economies, and polities. However, there are two key sources of problems with classical modernization theory. The first is the determinism implied in the logic of modernization, while the second relates to the specific development patterns that modernization theory must contend with. A contemporary theory on modernization relates structural change at a higher level of analysis to instrumental action at a lower level of analysis, doing so within a stochastic framework rather than the deterministic one that classical modernization theory implied. In addition, the refocused attention of social scientists on the process of development has led to a renewed interest in the characterization of the relationship between economic development and democratization. The transformation of knowledge into economic development can be examined by looking at the weightless economy—a collection of “weightless” knowledge products such as software, the Internet, and electronic databases. It is closely connected to a weightless political concept called the credible polity, which is a government that creates institutions that credibly protect property rights and are also transparent in their functioning to all members of its society.

• modernization theory
• classical modernization theory
• contemporary modernization theory
• economic development
• democratization
• weightless economy
• credible polity
• social modernization

Introduction

Fundamentally, modernization theory studies the process of social evolution and the development of societies. Given the complexity that arises from tracing the multidimensional development of social processes, the goal of discovering a single definitive social theory of evolution is perhaps the most ambitious research goal in all of social science. It is therefore unsurprising that, with the benefit of hindsight that is advantaged by cumulative research, we find classical modernization theory unsatisfactory due to its Western bias, capitalist ideological underpinnings, and an overall social Darwinism in its logic. Most troubling, though, is that it displays a poor understanding of the socioeconomic development process, especially when it comes to issues such as economic sustainability, political freedoms, and social emancipation. Empirically, too, the logic of classical modernization theory has been shown to be unsophisticated at best and expressly erroneous at worst. So there is a strong case to be made for arguing that, in fact, modernization theory is extinct and hardly deserves an essay devoted to it in this compendium.

However, this essay looks ahead and suggests a considered methodical resuscitation of social evolution theory – a new modernization theory that attempts at providing a social-scientific metastructure within which the constituent development processes relevant to sociologists, political theorists, and economists all form contributory substructures. As such, it suggests salvaging not the message, but rather the spirit of classical modernization theory, which attempted a single conjoint explanation for social development processes, democratization, and economic growth.

This essay consequently requires the reader to be ready for a distinct change of gears from the survey it presents of modernization theory in its classical form to the basis for a research program it proposes for continuing research into a modernization theory for the future. The suggested approach is based on social choice theory and more recent insights gained from political and economic development theory. It is meant to be accessible to any social scientist with an interest in this area. It is presented as one possible and exciting way forward and as a call for addressing key weaknesses in classical modernization theory by using a tractable formal structure that remains true to the eclectic social scientific research that classical modernization theory spawned, and not to introduce needless overformalization.

Classical Modernization Theory

Contributions to classical modernization theory can usefully be studied as belonging to two levels of analysis. At a finer level are the microcosmic evaluations of modernization that focus on the componential elements of social modernization such as urbanization, gender and income inequality, skills acquisition and education, the role of political communication and the media, bureaucratic corruption, and so on. At a broader level are the macrocosmic studies of modernization focused on the empirical trajectories and manifest processes of the modernization of nations and their societies, economies, and polities. While this characterization is not absolute, and indeed both levels of analysis are actually linked in that theoretical constructs from one hold logical implications for the other, such a categorization perhaps makes it easier to understand the emphasis and primary focus of a given modernization theorist.

Why the timing of the birth of classical modernization theory spans the late 1950s to the 1970s is in itself an interesting question worth addressing. Arguably key contributions at both the micro and macro levels came around the time the behavioral revolution was sweeping across the social sciences, albeit at different rates in economics, sociology, and political science. It essentially espoused the merits of methodical analysis and treating social science as a science of social processes, and naturally the study of development took center stage in this ambition. The benefit of the behavioral revolution to the study of modernization was in social scientists recognizing that it deserved a treatment that prevented variegated and ethnocentric interpretations for the definition of “modernity” from overwhelming its practical usefulness. In a review published in 1976 , Portes noted this fundamental difference between the more contemporary studies on social development and those that came earlier, and interestingly attributed the drive for the methodical study of development to discovering systematic sociological differences between the Western developed European societies and the underdeveloped societies around the world (Portes 1976 ).

At the level of the microcosm of modernization, emphasis was therefore focused more squarely on characterizing the modern social entity, be it an individual, a family, or even a firm. Sociologists with an interest in sociometry devised surveys to study the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the acquisition of skills on the development of a modern social being that shared certain similarities across nations (Smith and Inkeles 1966 ; Inkeles 1969 ) and generally discovered emergent social values that evolved from the process (Feldman and Hurn 1966 ). Pinning down changes in social values resulting from the idea that an increasingly specialized modernizing society can effect is understandably an arduous task owing to the complex dimensionality of social change. However, this complexity is also interesting in that it reinforces the humanistic reality of modernization that macro studies simply cannot address. For instance, in an interesting study, Delacroix and Ragin ( 1978 ) conducted a panel regression analysis on the effects of schooling and the cinema on the development process in third world countries. They reaffirmed the observation made by classical theorists that schooling helps modernization but attributed this to schools being generally secular institutions; in contrast, they suggested how cinemas may hinder growth by promoting Western social values that are not compatible locally.

With respect to the macrocosmic studies of classical modernization, it is hardly a surprise that its primary contributors came from a time (unsurprisingly, prior to the formal publication of Godel’s theorem, which denied that such an enterprise was at all possible) when theories of everything were all the rage. Therefore, Rostow ( 1990 ) was not trying to explain sectoral transitions of economies; he was creating an all-encompassing theory of development that inexorably led to a modernization of the polity and society. Likewise, Lipset ( 1959 ) was not constructing a socioeconomic development model; he was instead positing an endogenous transition theory that explained the sociopolitical development of nations. And Kuznets, who is often forgotten for his contribution to modernization theory due to his dissenting views, was, while disclaiming the existence of a climacteric change that signified modernization (see, for instance, Rostow 1963 ), himself interested in characterizing the overarching dynamic of the socioeconomic development process (Kuznets 1955 ). Still, Lerner’s study on modernization as a process of three distinct phases was remarkable in that it was rooted primarily in micro-social processes yet attempted to explain societal evolution as a single macro-social process that transformed traditional societies into modern ones (Lerner 1958 ). It began with urbanization that led to a growing need for education and technology, which in turn created the demand for mass communication and a more efficacious media sector. His phase theory culminated in one of the earliest characterizations of modernity based on an institutional explanation because for him a modern society was one that eventually had modern institutions that facilitated political participation.

In contrast to these macro-level grand theories, it is fair to say that contemporary eclectic social scientific study of the modernization of societies has sputtered to a halt, and there are two chief reasons for this. First, the study of each of the constituent social dimensions of modernization theory has advanced independently and created significant barriers to entry for anyone who wishes to retain the social-scientific perspective to modernization rather than select and commit to a component area and concentrate his or her efforts from the perspective of either a social development theorist, a democratization scholar, or a researcher on economic development or economic growth theory.

Second, the foundations of modernization theory are now considered questionable, a charge based more significantly on its inadequate empirical validity rather than its underlying logic. Most political scientists would consider the most important contribution in this regard as being that of Przeworski and Limongi ( 1997 ). However, it is equally illuminating to realize the significance of the emergence of the endogenous growth literature in economics (beginning with Romer in 1986 ), which started suggesting the relevance of government policy and even social behavior in creating an environment for households and firms in which to determine their savings, investments, acquisition of skills, size of their family, and so on. With the multifactoral endogeneity across the numerous variables spread over the various social sciences that classical modernization theory necessarily implied, it is very easily shown to be lacking in any exercise that takes empirical validity as a benchmark for success.

As a result of these developments, the status quo for classical modernization theory is that it is discounted as being overly deterministic in its logic. Ironically, the endogeneity that made modernization theory in its classical form an interesting unifying theory in the first place appears now to be its principal failing because that makes it too deterministic in the eyes of any empiricist worth his or her salt. Additionally, it is also critiqued as simply being unable or at least wanting in its ability to be reconciled with the various empirical truisms that have been established through specialist study of the political, social, and economic strands since its advent.

How, after all, can a political scientist make peace with a theory that is unable to explain the process of probabilistic regime transition negotiated by key political actors in one instance and by exogenous forces in another? How can an economist allow a theory to suggest that no process of economic growth can be studied without taking sociopolitical developments as prior, and, therefore, all growth theories must ideally inform themselves with social transformations and political realities? Indeed, how can a social development researcher agree to a theory that suggests social development is necessarily conditioned by political process and economic structure? These are all uncomfortable requirements that ask too much of a social scientist. It is easiest to start with a subset of social science and study its modernization in isolation, assuming independence from other social dimensions.

One may hold the view that ignoring the holistic and eclectic view of classical modernization theory and emphasizing the separate strands of social, economic, and political development has yielded much insight and, ergo, if modernization theory must be sacrificed at the altar of scientific progress then so be it. I agree wholeheartedly with the first part of that statement but would argue that the conclusion it arrives at sets the bar too low. The beauty of classical modernization theory is that it forces the researcher to study development as a social process. Just as no theory of development within each of the social sciences is considered as being definitive and is thus constantly revised, neither was classical modernization theory a definitive theory of social development and also deserves more constant attention than it gets.

Classical Modernization Theory Facing New Evidence

There are a few significant changes worth reviewing here that have breathed new life into the prospects of modernization theory reemerging as a pursuit worthy of its own dedicated researchers. The far more advanced state of understanding that we can now draw on – some 50 years after classical modernization theory was initially formulated – about the individual development processes that must inform each other in the revision of modernization theory is an obvious advantage, but there are also other factors.

Primary among those is the econometric sophistication and the quality of data now available to social scientists, which has made it far easier for us to reassess the validity of the trends we observe and then establish the factual basis for what a theory of modernization must explain.

A concrete illustration of this sort of thinking comes from both the economic growth literature and the political science literature. In economics, in a series of articles, chiefly Quah ( 1993 ; 1994 ; 1996 ) among others suggested that, in per capita income, countries do not all necessarily converge to a single steady-state future like many before them had argued (see Solow 1956 ; Mankiw et al. 1992 ), which had inspired the idea of unconditional convergence by Barro ( 1991 ; 1999 ), Barro and Sala-i-Martin ( 1992 ; 1999 ) and Sala-i-Martin ( 1996 ). The economies of countries might, on the contrary, be forming two distinct clubs of convergence, a club of high-income countries and a club of low-income countries, with any middle-income groups disappearing over time as the global system approached a steady state. So while there is convergence within each of those clubs, the world, on the other hand, is characterized by divergence as the difference in economic income between the clubs increases. Exactly what causes this surprising outcome is not entirely resolved in the economic growth literature and remains somewhat of a puzzle. The controversy is summarized rather well in Durlauf ( 1996 ).

In political science, since Huntington ( 1991 ) gave us the now well-embedded idea that democratization comes in waves and that we are riding the crest of the third such wave, the implication drawing considerable interest has obviously been whether this latest wave, too, will subside as the two that have come before it or whether, on the other hand, this time the wave is here to stay. The notion that it will stay and culminate in the global convergence to a Western form of liberal democracy across all nations is itself an empirical extension of Francis Fukuyama ’s idea that we have arrived at the End of History, as it were, as far as the ideological evolution of the forms of political regimes is concerned (Fukuyama 1992 ).

These two observations pertaining to economic incomes and political regimes are usually seen in isolation. While the former is debated in a relatively more methodical manner using the more precisely defined standards for convergence versus nonconvergence, the latter can essentially be formulated in similar terms as well. In fact, Goorha ( 2007 ) reviews and discusses them together using similar methodological perspectives. It presents an empirical investigation employing Quah’s suggestion on economic income dynamics to test for nonconvergence in the ergodic distribution of political regimes and shows that twin clubs of convergence in the attainment of democracy do indeed appear to be forming over time. This result of polarization in regimes appears to be rather robust under a variety of specifications, and seems to be even more exaggerated in the post-war years. Convergence to perfect democracy for the global distribution of political regimes does not appear imminent at all. While Goorha ( 2007 ) is certainly not a definitive characterization of the ergodic global distribution of political regimes, the message of twin clubs of convergence in political regimes it provides is quite clear.

Second, and rather obvious, is the fact that the number of political and economic transitions over the preceding two decades has refocused our attention as social scientists on the process of development. From the reunification of Germany, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the enlargement of the EU to the overwhelming relevance of the BRIC countries in global economic growth, relatively recent global developments have, time and again, reminded us of the need for a better understanding not of political regime transitions or socioeconomic development, but of the links between them. We are clearly living in a period of history where we have moved beyond a simpler preoccupation with an understanding of the process of economic growth or democratization to one where we need to understand social development in its entirety.

An area where this has led to a renewed interest is in the characterization of the relationship between economic development and democratization, and the trend this has recently taken is related intrinsically to the first point about the empirics of convergence. One of the methodological criticisms leveled at the analysis of convergence in economic incomes over time is that when it is based on cross-sectional rather than time-series data, the inferences are unreliable. Similarly, studying the democracy and economic growth relationship faces the most basic problem of reverse causation, which leads to inconsistent estimation unless the system of equations can be identified using an informative instrumental variable. This, in principle, has been tried in earnest only very recently, most notable among which is Acemoglu et al. ( 2005 ), which reinforces the view that the direct effect of economic income on democratization is negligible. However, while modernization is not their focus, even if it were, this approach would still not pay enough attention to the role of the identifying assumptions made by the researcher simply because the complexity of relationships is multiplied when the question is broadened from that of democratization to that of a general theory on the evolutionary process of an entire society.

Embedding Institutional and Instrumental Perspectives in Modernization Theory

The responsibility that studying modernization theory places on the shoulders of its researchers when it comes to having a sound understanding of economic development theory cannot be overstressed. Geddes ( 1999 ), summarizing the state of the literature in 1999 , highlighted the point that the most significant established contribution of the literature has been in suggesting a nonlinear relationship between the probability of democratization and economic development. This can, of course, be viewed as more than merely a statistical artifact if it is in fact structurally induced at the level of institutions – in the tradition of North ( 1981 ). While there are numerous studies in new institutional economics that link the polity and the economy, Acemoglu and Robinson ( 2005 ) is an especially notable recent contribution for our purpose since it emphasizes the role of institutions simultaneously in shaping private as well as economic and political interactions.

The strictly structural view institutional approaches often seem to present might not appeal to those interested in seeing the bottom-up (or instrumental rational actor) counterpart to social change that modernization suggests. Constructive contribution to increasing our understanding of the modernization process, especially given its increasing complexity in contemporary societies, can only be made if the structural and instrumental perspectives can be reconciled with each other and informed by one another. Here, Williamson ( 2000 ) remains a very worthwhile contribution in its suggestion that the level of institutional “embeddedness,” which is a function of the length of time over which the process of change needs to be studied, determines the sort of institutional analysis that is required. At one extreme the best manner of approaching the analysis is standard neoclassical agent-based economics, and at the other extreme, sociological and even anthropological explanations might be far more useful. This perspective, in the true spirit of what is required to advance modernization theory in the twenty-first century , explicitly encourages the researcher to recognize the limits of any given traditional approach. Moreover, it encourages donning a basic social science perspective – one that espouses methodical and tractable interdisciplinary analysis – to study the variegated social processes associated with all levels of modernization and at different amounts of embeddedness.

Therefore, when political scientists are looking at parametric changes across broad classifications of regimes, they are usually operating at a high level of institutional embeddedness and must consequently look over a longer period of time to study their change. A classic example of this is Huntington ( 1991 ), where the interpretation and explanation of an empirical regularity – essentially that of a periodicity in the time series of political regime – in regime change is the impetus. However, this obviously does not restrict general political analysis of regimes strictly to the temporal domain provided the order of the analysis is made explicit at the outset. For instance, still at a high level of embeddedness, a researcher may study institutional or regime transitions at the level of the country or polity, where he or she may concentrate on debating and evaluating the relevance of the various factors germane to regime change. After all, classics in comparative political analysis such as O’Donnell et al. ( 1986 ) or Rueschemeyer et al. ( 1992 ) are illustrative examples of this type of regime-change analysis; the former considers the role of the economy, the military and its junta, the structure of the bureaucracy, the private sector, and the international environment, whereas the latter concentrates on the role of the middle class in its relation to other social classes. This sort of research is fundamentally an effort at specification of the general structural model and as such remains vital when conceptualizing the parameters of the social evolutionary process. At a lower level of embeddedness, the researcher switches interest to the comparative statics of the specification, dealing, therefore, with higher order conditions. An excellent example of this is Geddes ( 1996 ), where the approach is expressly built on assessing behavior derived from studying the compatibility of incentives that political actors face.

The essential point is that a contemporary theory on modernization must ideally be able to relate structural change at a higher level of analysis to instrumental action at a lower level of analysis, but do so within a stochastic framework rather than the deterministic one that classical modernization theory implied. While this would then allow it to explain variable real-world outcomes and is obviously preferable, it is no mean task given that modernization theory is a holistic theory of general social evolution and as such sets the bar very high for a methodologically sophisticated and tractable yet flexible model. Let us take three specific examples that suggest the scale of this task.

First, an understanding of the role of social capital in modernization is very relevant to any contemporary effort on studying modernization as a general theory. Definitionally, however, it encompasses an uncomfortably large swathe of ideas ranging from more esoteric ideas such as trust and respect to somewhat less contentious ones such as group cohesion and cooperation. Yet, owing to the burgeoning weight of evidence suggesting the relevance in societies of its stock, its depletion, and its changing nature, research suggesting the impact of social capital on even the most general dimensions of modernization pertaining to democracy, economic development, and social welfare cannot be ignored. This requires looking at its logical and empirical influence on societies and cultures at the highest level of institutional embeddedness as well as studying its role on private market and civil interactions at far lower levels of institutional embeddedness – indeed, at the level of an agent. Its manifestation at higher levels of analysis has been studied for a very long time, but most recently and significantly by Robert Putnam ( 1994 ; 2001 ). However, the conceptual link that social capital has with social network analysis and thereby a whole host of other scale-free networks in numerous spheres of the natural and social sciences allows it to be more succinctly and systematically considered in more general and formal models. After all, Metcalf’s law and Reed’s law on networks suggest that the “value” of a network increases in proportion to the number of users the group has; social network theory allows studying social capital as an intrinsic feature of a social network with a defined architecture, and allows interpreting less and more interconnected nodes in the network as individuals or social organizations all operating within the same social context.

A second such valuable link across institutional levels of analysis that a contemporary theory on modernization could benefit from is provided by the efforts within social choice theory to transform the institutional structure into a simple tractable parameterization of rational actor optimization behavior, be it a political actor or an institutional collective actor. The contributions of social choice theory are of fundamental importance owing to their concentration on how the regime structure specifically affects the first principles of political competition itself. Perhaps the most well known application of this in political science has been the veto player terminology developed by Tsebelis ( 1995 ) for a variety of political institutions using spatial voting theory. The use of social choice theory in understanding the basics of political regime operation also hints at why the mechanism design approach to studying endogenously evolving institutions and constitutional design simultaneously with political and social learning forms a very sound basis for the analysis if not the basic formulation of a social modernization theory. See Mantzavinos et al. ( 2004 ) for recent discussion of this view. The language in such analysis changes from the economist to the political scientist, but its relevance is rarely debated.

As an application of this, consider Shepsle and Weingast ( 1984a ), who suggest the role of self-interested rational actors as the basis for the evaluation of public sector institutions since the adoption of such an approach facilitates an evaluation of public sector institutions not too unlike their private sector counterparts. McKelvey and Ordeshook ( 1984 ) then support the suggestion that when rules engender political constraints that lead to results that are not to the liking of politicians, they (political groups) are able to bypass such constraints. They are unable, however, to support a stronger version of the hypothesis that institutions are therefore subservient to political actors to the extent that they can permit certain equilibria not to obtain in spite of the original institutional design. To this, Shepsle and Weingast ( 1984b ) answer that rules have consequences and therefore politicians are indeed interested in them in accordance with their preferences. They believe that their first hypothesis is necessary but the second fails due to a sufficiency condition not being met – that of Coasian transactions costs, which themselves are a product of the mechanism design or “rules of the game.” If these are incorporated, then we find that certain institutionalized procedures are more susceptible to manipulation by motivated politicians than others. It is precisely this sort of interpretation of the politician as a rule creator as well as a player of the political game that is very enlightening in developing the basis for social modernization, as is illustrated below.

The third and final example of an issue that any modern theory on modernization must be able to comfortably deal with is actually related to two strands of literature within political science and economics. Broadly, this is related to the debate among political scientists about the ability of political development processes to endow stable and consolidated regimes with accountable institutions and veto players, and the debate among economic growth theorists regarding the process of convergence in economic income mentioned above. The point is that a logical connection between these largely separated literatures is needed for any contemporary modernization theory that jointly deals with the dynamics in both economic growth and political development. Gladly, this logical link does exist and is a product of the research done on the reasons for failure and success of macroeconomic stabilization programs, which have increasingly recognized the importance of sociopolitical issues in equal measure as the economic ones. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the insight comes from the development economics literature this time, where Rodrik ( 1989 ; 1992 ), Calvo ( 1989 ), Dornbusch ( 1990 ; 1993 ), Garrett ( 1998 ), and Dixit ( 1992 ; 1993 ), among others, have suggested that countries undergoing economic reform (without much attention to regime) face a polarized outcome too. Unreformed countries form one group and reformed ones form the other. Those countries that are reforming must credibly suggest their sincerity to the domestic private sector and foreign investors in order to successfully jump from one group to the other. If reform is seen as fleeting or “incredible” then distorted incentives will cause capital flight, mobile capital investment (which is less complementary with long-run growth), intertemporal substitution in consumption, and so on, which, in turn, is likely to hinder the progress of reform. This credible commitments idea gives us the virtuous versus vicious cycle theory, a dynamic relevant for modernization theory since it makes economic and political outcomes logically codependent.

It is easy to see that this argument is obviously closely related to the economic convergence literature. Simply, the idea is that virtuous cycles are virtuous for the reason that they reinforce economic reform, which eventually leads to higher growth; it takes no far stretch of the imagination to see that these countries are liable to be the ones that form the high-income convergence club. Likewise, the low-income convergence club is composed of the countries facing a vicious cycle of pathetic reinforcing economic performance, which in steady state should be a stable group if the cost of reform outweighs those elusive benefits accrued even in the slightly longer run that initially tend to be a significant component of the lure toward reform. But, crucially, there is no deterministic link in this with political regime types; a virtuous cycle may include nondemocratic countries provided their polities have the ability to make credible commitments.

Revising and Continuing the Classical with the Contemporary in Modernization Theory

The preceding discussion has emphasized the benefit of a social modernization theory while simultaneously acknowledging the problematic elements of classical modernization theory. Before we turn to a suggested future research plan for modernization theory based on trends in the existing literature, it is worth reiterating the key sources of problems with classical modernization theory that contemporary modernization theorists would need to take a view on and address in their work.

Those difficulties pertain primarily to two key issues. The first is the determinism implied in the logic of modernization. Partly this criticism of determinism is justified since economic modernization indeed cannot deterministically create a democracy if democracy itself is predicated on more requisites than those obvious ones visible at a higher level of analysis (and highlighted by classical modernization theorists), such as increasingly specialized and organized economic activity and social groups capable of informed collective action. It often has to contend with time inconsistent political actors at a lower level of analysis or cultural incompatibilities at a much higher one. However, this is also a somewhat unfair criticism simply because we are evaluating a long-existing theory with the benefit of a better understanding of game theory, nonlinear dynamics, better data (both in terms of our datasets as well as many more observations that have created more variance in the variable of interest), econometric sophistication, and so on. This is not an excuse for classical modernization theory, but rather an effort to suggest that those tools should be brought to bear on understanding whether an endogenous social modernization theory can in fact be formulated rather than dispensing with the whole idea in favor of an exogenous view to social modernization processes.

The second issue relates to the specific development patterns that modernization theory must contend with. That the economic development path selected by a country is increasingly a sociopolitical issue just as much as an economic one is very evident in the recent debates on defining, agreeing to, and implementing a sustainable development plan that reengineers traditional economic development, and also in the debates on knowledge-based growth or clean development. It is for these reasons that for research on modernization theory to progress into the next century, it must be able to produce an endogenous social modernization theory that, while being internally consistent, can also produce varying outcomes and is empirically testable.

A New Modernization Theory through a Credible Polity and a Weightless Economy

We can now turn to a review of how a new modernization theory might be constructed addressing the problems with the classical version discussed above as well as being able to tractably study the role of embedded social institutions as well as instrumental rational action. We build this perspective with the logical link identified above in development economics on the polity’s ability to generate credible signals for the economy. In doing so, we will also take a necessary detour to study the crucial role of information and knowledge since social modernization is, now more than ever before, characterized by more informed societies.

What is peculiar about knowledge that requires cognizance by the modern modernization theorist is that it fundamentally changes the pattern and nature of development. Knowledge has two basic features. First, it is a resource that paradoxically grows when exploited (and therefore features the comedy of the commons rather than the traditional tragedy of the commons we are familiar with). Second, it requires a credible regulatory structure that allows demand aggregation, and therefore a society that has experience in creating social institutions that do this more effectively is more likely to be able to exploit the benefits of knowledge more rapidly.

Regarding the first of these features, it does not require long hours of deliberation to understand that knowledge is accumulated with increasing returns. Most phenomena we study as advanced students of a field are ultimately related to a smaller and smaller set of basic principles and it is, in turn, the effective comprehension of those principles that enables us to expand our knowledge exponentially. This temporal “path dependence” creates the potential for increasing returns and positive network externalities in acquiring knowledge. It is thus the nature of knowledge that it is best when it is cumulative and there is therefore a reason why MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, Boston College, Boston University, Tufts University, and almost 60 other academic institutions thrive within the Greater Boston area while the entire northwestern region of the United States suffers from a paucity of first-rate colleges. Generally, clustering and spatial agglomeration of knowledge-based economic activity is not uncommon, ranging from the various fashion capitals of the world to the various Silicon Valley look-alikes.

The transformation of knowledge into economic development can be manageably examined by looking at the idea of a weightless economy. The weightless economy, in its purest meaning, is a collection of “weightless” (in a rather literal sense of the word) knowledge products such as software, the Internet, and electronic databases, and the continual expansion of its share in total output generated by many advanced economies of the world demonstrates how intensive the role of knowledge capital has gradually become. Since some authors, e.g. Shapiro and Varian ( 1998 ), have argued that the information economy is not entirely unique and is in fact governed by standard economic theory dealing with physical capital, we can employ the language of the weightless economy concept in recognizing the distinct impact that knowledge – a largely invisible product – has on the structure and size of an economy.

Now, one of the most interesting features of the weightless economy is that for it to have maximal impact on the state of economic development in a country what is essential is an effective demand aggregation mechanism, for it is the nature of a knowledge product that suboptimal demand will prevent it from becoming fundamentally and continuously effective in facilitating long-term overall economic development. A preference for the use of copyrights for certain knowledge products over patents, for instance, allows for more demand-side flexibility in the consumption of a knowledge product, in its subsequent improvement, and consequently in extracting maximal benefit from it for the economy as a whole by popularizing its usage. UseNets and beta versions for various software products illustrate significantly the fact that producers realize this phenomenon full well.

However, as researchers on social modernization, it is important not to see the weightless economy as disjoint from the otherwise tangible portion of an economy or its society and polity. In fact, the weightless economy is closely connected to a weightless political concept we can call the credible polity. Just as essentially intangible knowledge products are the produce from a weightless economy, similarly intangible credibility capital is the produce from the credible polity. Both evolve symbiotically, and are inextricably related. Studying aspects of either is inherently incomplete unless the other is also considered, and doing so within the unifying framework of a modernization theory is intrinsically logical. While we are looking here at the weightless economy for its neat analogy to the credible polity, for the purpose of this essay at least – which is to introduce the concept of a credible polity to a new breed of researchers on modernization – the distinction between weightless and tangible sectors of the economy is ultimately negligible at least in their relation to the genesis of a credible polity. The reason we use the idea of a weightless economy to introduce the credible polity is because it is more intuitive to understand the significance of the credible polity from this analogous perspective.

Politics in Knowledge Centers

A key feature in at least Lerner’s and Lipset’s perspectives on modernization theory was that of urbanization and specialization being a prerequisite for the successful modernization of societies. Urbanization is fundamentally just a social agglomeration process, and agglomeration and the clustering of economic activity in cities, regions, and nations have been studied extensively in the literature. Agglomeration is typically shown to be related to minimizing both transportation costs for a production line and the negative externalities of proximal production while concomitantly maximizing the advantages of increasing returns through scale and scope economies (see Krugman 1991 ; Venables 1996 ). Interestingly, though, it seems to be an idea that was initially suggested by Simon Kuznets , who was mentioned above as an important early contributor to modernization theory for his crucial attempts to link development dynamics and socioeconomic outcomes (Kuznets 1966 ).

On the whole, this agglomeration dynamic, while very relevant for modernization in the industrial era of the twentieth century , does not seem wholly appropriate for knowledge products of a weightless economy that theoretically incur negligible transportation costs. Indeed, as mentioned above, what is different about agglomeration in the weightless economy is that it seems to be driven by consumer demand instead. A high consumer demand for a knowledge product implies its popularization, which in turn leads to improvements and enhancements in a cumulative path-dependent manner. A low consumer demand or controlled consumerism would thereby increase the long-term cost of adjustment and this would lead to clustering. Spatially, this represents itself in the form of cities while temporally this provides some motivation for observing nonconvergence in economic income across countries.

It is instructive here to remind ourselves of the failed industrial revolution in fourteenth century China, where the possible long-term advantages of being a vastly technologically advanced society of its time went to waste due to a monarchy that regulated consumer demand closely. And once such an opportunity is squandered, over time the problem of extrication becomes more substantial for the country; Eeckhout and Jovanovic ( 2002 ) suggest how even exclusive free riding off the innovators can still lead to inequalities since the effort expended by the laggards is suboptimal.

The studies reveal a fascinating empirical regularity. If consumer demand is taken to be pivotal in developing knowledge clusters that enable rapid modernization then it is natural to ask how this consumer demand fosters in one society continually and even how it can be nurtured by a government seeking reform. The answer provided by one of the early authors of the weightless economy appears to be twofold – devolution of power to city governments and, generally, minimalist and noninterventionist government that provides the meta-structure for the unfettered functioning institutions (Coyle 1998 ). There is definitely merit in these suggestions; however, they seem rather cursory for a topic of the magnitude of societal evolution and provide little if any help for the systematic analysis of development processes. We can approach the issue by juxtaposing the weightless economy with a similarly unadorned concept that can perhaps provide a more systematic answer to studying the role of political and social institutions in contemporary modernization processes: that of a credible polity.

The Credible Polity

Numerous studies in the Northian tradition (North 1981 ; 1993 ) have mentioned the importance of credibility in political institutions in creating positive economic development outcomes. For some interesting examples see Weingast ( 1993 ), Ruge-Murcia ( 1995 ), and Leblang ( 1996 ). A credible polity is thus simply a government that creates institutions that credibly protect property rights and are also transparent in their functioning to all members of its society. Therefore, studying the weightless economy and the credible polity in conjunction with each other provides a useful construct for the modernization researcher.

In the abstract theoretical construct, a credible polity is simply one that abides by two simple principles. First, a credible polity has complete political representation and has zero barriers to entry in being represented directly. And, second, a credible polity is characterized by political representatives with only one objective – maintaining power. A polity satisfying both conditions completely is a credible polity in pure form – or a fully perfect credible polity – and, arguably, is more than what is required to generate the symbiotic relationship between the political and the economic spheres, which leads to that clustering of economic activity that aids political and economic development and the modernization of a society. Let us begin with an important remark. The credible polity is independent of a specific political regime type even though a fully perfect credible polity has close resemblance to an ideal form of democratic government and a fully imperfect credible polity has implications that make it appear remarkably like a textbook autocratic government. The credible polity is for this reason a useful tool for studying the relationship between political regimes and economic development without falling into the trap of selecting on the dependent variable that has brought many such analyses under embarrassing scrutiny.

We can now start by examining the major characteristics of a fully perfect credible polity. The political entity in charge – let us simply call it the government – in such a polity receives no economic rent since there are zero barriers to entry and all supernormal profits are therefore driven away by competitor governments. All governments thus face a perfectly elastic demand for their services. Imagine that a real-time election process is at work even while a government is in office with an infinite set of governments in the running. It also represents the entire population directly and there are thus no brokers between a citizen and the political entity. The government itself has no objective other than staying in power – it desires no legacy (for there is no term limit), has no charisma (since all governments are identical), and certainly enjoys no loyalty, say in the form of a sticky partisanship effect.

The name, fully perfect credible polity, of such an unexciting polity derives from the fact that the government will have an infinite stock of credibility with its population since the threat of recall is immediate and perfect. An even more interesting feature is that the stock of credibility is set to its maximum possible value at the start of time, and even a theoretical change in government, owing perhaps to a shift in preferences, would not alter its value since adjustment to a new government would be instantaneous.

Now let us consider the fully imperfect credible polity, which in turn is a polar opposite of its fully perfect version. The government in this equally colorless setup is a perfect monopoly and thus never has any competitors to contend with. It creates impenetrable barriers to entry into the political sphere at zero cost to itself and extracts maximum rent by virtue of it having a monopoly status. The government, of course, represents no one from the general populace yet the population has a perfectly inelastic demand for this government. Credibility in a fully imperfect credible polity is an oxymoron. The population has no threat of recall ever and the stock of the credibility it thus provides its government remains at the lowest possible value indefinitely.

While a more exact derivation of these results would be a needless digression due to their obvious reliance on standard microeconomic theory, it is still instructive to understand intuitively some more formal foundations for these hypothetical cases. The usefulness of this abstract construct will hopefully become more transparent if we understand its origins.

Let us employ the language of spatial voting theory in our analysis, famously done by Tsebelis ( 1995 ), as mentioned above, in his development of the veto player construct, simply because it forces us to start from the very first principles of political competition. Assume a simple two-dimensional issue space (packages of guns and butter perhaps being the only choices) with preferences measured in Euclidean distance. In this setup, it is possible to define two concepts. The first is that of a yolk (see Miller et al. [ 1989 ] for a formal presentation on this and other elementary concepts in spatial voting theory). The second, owing to remarkable work by Wuffle et al. ( 1989 ), is that of a finagle circle. While these concepts are theoretical constructs primarily useful to studying majority voting behavior, they also provide some useful insight here as well. A yolk is simply a circle that contains a minimum set of ideal points or preferred positions represented in the issue space that cannot be beaten by any and all ideal points outside of it. A finagle circle, by contrast, is a much smaller circle within the yolk that outlines all points that would allow a political incumbent – who is assumed to have the valuable advantage of rallying her supporters after all her competitors have done so – to finagle or adjust her position infinitesimally to beat a competitor – even one that is situated within the yolk. So it suggests all points that one could finagle to and successfully beat all competitors. The finagle circle has two further characteristics of relevance here. First, the radius of the finagle circle outlines the population’s tolerance for political finagling, and, second, minimizing the distance an incumbent must move preserves his credibility with his electors.

Consider now how things might play out over time. Clearly, it behooves a political entity to locate his election position within the yolk. The trouble is that there exists no strict and direct connection between the number and position of ideal points represented in the issue space and the size of the yolk. Therefore, infiltration into the issue space (positive and negative) through enfranchisement or, generally, any increase in the number of preferred positions represented in the issue space over time should not be expected to have a discernible and tractable affect on the behavior of the politician. If, however, we assume, as we have done in developing the credible polity argument above, that the government’s sole objective is to remain in power then it is better served by locating within the smaller subset of points in the yolk or the competitive solution set known as the finagle circle. In fact, with this objective – rather like Milton Friedman ’s pool shark who unknowingly learns how to solve complex geometry and physics problems to pocket a shot – we can rest assured that the successful politician will learn to locate within the finagle circle in a long-term evolutionary sense. While adopting a strategy of being in the yolk might provide for a win in an election and is thus necessary, adopting a strategy of being in the finagle circle guarantees it and is thus sufficient.

Now we can return to the analysis of the credible polity again. Note that the position of the finagle circle will likely alter with any positive rate of infiltration into the issue space over time or a change in the preferences of those already represented, and a concomitant rate of adjustment to the finagle circle becomes an issue in determining the length of time the polity stays out of equilibrium and perhaps loses credibility. In a fully perfect credible polity, of course, a rate of issue space infiltration is not applicable since everyone is represented at the start of time. The radius of the finagle circle remains unchanged and, under some conditions, is actually zero, with the finagle point and the median voter being superimposed. Similarly, in a fully imperfect credible polity, the rate of issue space infiltration is zero since everyone is disenfranchised forever and any change in the preferences of the population is disregarded. The radius of the finagle circle is the maximum possible value allowed by the issue space since the government can “finagle” to whatever part of the issue space it pleases, provided, of course, that it is feasible.

In a polity that exists anywhere on the spectrum between these extrema the rate of infiltration into the issue space and any shifts in preferences (perhaps simply from economic development raising social awareness) would matter. An example would be illustrative here. Assume that such infiltrations happen in discrete time and at regular intervals. Elections might be a helpful imagery to have in mind. Every time there is an issue space infiltration or a shift in preferences, the position of the finagle circle is perturbed. Even with politicians actively seeking to rediscover the position of the finagle circle, for any time spent politicking from outside the finagle circle or, for that matter, even possibly the yolk, the polity is in disequilibrium and the government loses credibility and popularity. The speed of readjustment is a function of the level and quality of information the polity has about such changes. Disenchantment with the new government in many countries undergoing economic and political transitions occurs precisely because of the poor quality of information politicians have access to at a time when the shifts in preferences and the rates of issue space infiltrations are large and frequent.

Only in a fully perfect credible polity is there no disequilibrium since information is always and forever perfect. In all other cases disequilibrium is managed either by gathering information directly or enlarging the size of the yolk itself. Information can obviously be gathered through polling, canvassing, interviewing, and the like. The size of the yolk can be enlarged by making issue space infiltration rates artificially smaller through the creation of parties or interest groups that internalize the ideal points of their members. Institutional issue space infiltration then allows for far more flexibility in terms of a larger set of feasible solutions and a more forgiving size of the finagle circle. Shifts in underlying preferences or any change in the composition of members of such institutions would of course change the size and location of the finagle circle (through a change in the institution’s own internal finagle circle); however, the degree of complexity in finding its new location is reduced appreciably.

The Credible Polity and the Weightless Economy

In this discussion on modernization theory, the emphasis on credibility is in no small measure also a means of critically assessing the latent processes behind the development and aftermath of that very climacteric event, which causes a shift in political regime and, in so doing, makes the entire process much smoother in our understanding. And this emphasis on credibility is not new nor is it unfounded. We have seen that scholars in development economics have long recognized its importance as a tool to enable economic reform. In macroeconomic growth theory and political science it has been studied in relation to central bank independence, debt, and stabilization, and, relatedly, in comparative politics it has been considered crucial in wage bargaining. The issue of credible commitments to party platforms has been well studied in political science in relation to everything from roll-call voting behavior to convergence properties in multidimensional spatial voting models. In international relations, credible commitments have been studied in relation to deterrence theory and the ability of political actors to make agreements at the international level in a two-level game with nontrivial national politics.

Usage of the term credibility in such a plethora of contexts gives it a very amorphous character, thus making it uncomfortable for some to see it as a crucial factor in the construction of a contemporary theory of social modernization. But in this variety of applications, the fundamental common factor is the effect of risk, ameliorated by credibility, on the variable of interest. That is, in essence, also the driving force behind the credible polity and precisely why it is so closely related to the weightless economy. The credibility capital of a polity determines the political risk investors and consumers perceive, and risk in any form dictates where productive capital (in any form) is employed. A polity, for instance, that fails to employ its credibility capital in guaranteeing ownership of a knowledge product and subsequent right to the income stream it produces, cannot sustain a weightless economy and thereby hampers the process of the modernization of its society. After all, if a weightless economy could grow independently of a credible polity, it could in theory thrive in North Korea and Cuba to the same extent as it does in the US or Germany.

Some Remarks

The credible polity construct is more than just a method of introducing political relevance to economic development simply for the benefit of researchers on modernization theory. It is, in itself, also a framework for analyzing transitions in political regimes. And it does so without simply ordering existing regime classifications and providing an argument with deterministic step functional form. The credible polity is a continuous latent process that does not come to life only in times of transition in economic systems or political regime. Note that we can start from any specific location on the imperfect to perfect credible polity spectrum less than the perfect and, by application of its two principles, converge toward a perfect credible polity directly, without oscillation and theoretically in one shot.

Another implication of the analysis here is that as democracies start becoming more and more perfect in the sense implied by credible polities, we should start witnessing fewer and fewer changes in government and a convergence of all candidate governments to the center.

Some Concluding Thoughts

This essay has deliberately not looked at modernization theory as a constant theoretical idea that was proffered in an inviolable format to social scientists. Instead it has favored a view to modernization theory that, while in its classical form is indubitably in need of reformulation, is a twofold gift to social scientists. First and foremost it provides an endogenous theory for social modernization. The gauntlet that empirical discoveries of irregularities and fifty years of research on social, economic, and political development has laid down is a significant challenge for constructing a contemporary endogenous modernization theory, but it is a task worth pursuing and, as this essay hints, not entirely insurmountable. Second, modernization theory is not the purview of political science, sociology, or economics. Seen as such it will fail to progress into the next century and will likely be seen as an amusing exercise in grandiose theorizing by our predecessors. Progress will likely be most fruitful when provided through the minds of rigorous and methodological social scientists who borrow from the traditions of social science without bias and fear of unorthodoxy.

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Links to Digital Materials

Professor Witold Henisz ’s POLCON Dataset, Wharton Management Faculty, University of Pennsylvania. At www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/henisz , accessed Mar. 6, 2009. The POLCON or Political Constraints Index Dataset is an exhaustive dataset that measures the ability of a regime’s political and legal institutions for creating credible commitments to policy. For anyone interested in studying the role of credibility in modernization empirically, it is an excellent resource.

NBER Working Papers Series. At www.nber.org/papers , accessed Mar. 6, 2009. The NBER has a working paper series that includes many of the contributors cited in this chapter, and others well known for their work on economic growth and development theory, as well as on the political economy of growth.

Professor Danny Quah, London School of Economics. At http:/econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/dquah/index_own.html , accessed Mar. 6, 2009. Professor Quah’s website at the London School of Economics includes useful and interesting articles, commentary, and blogs related to economic growth, income inequality, and the weightless economy, as well as some lighthearted material.

Social Capital Gateway. At www.socialcapitalgateway.org/index.htm , accessed Mar. 6, 2009. Any empirical study of modernization must grapple with the effects of the nature, stock, and flow of social capital in a society over time and space. The Social Capital Gateway is an excellent resource with new and archived papers on the subject of social capital as well as links to databases, conferences, and educational resources.

Online Publications on Social and Cultural Evolution. At http:/socio.ch/evo/index_evo.htm , accessed Mar. 13, 2009. Maintained by the Sociology Institute of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, this database contains a truly impressive list of resources. It covers theoretical and applied aspects of social evolutionary theory. A modernization theorist would find a lot of useful material, ranging from traditional approaches to sociocultural evolution to modern views of cyber-evolution and even the emerging link between modernization and social network theory.

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1 Modernization Theory: Does Economic Development Cause Democratization?

José Antonio Cheibub, Mary Thomas Marshall Professor in Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University.

James Raymond Vreeland Georgetown University

• Published: 03 August 2016
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This article examines the link between economic development and democracy. Drawing on modernization theory, it considers whether democracy is more likely to emerge in a country that modernizes economically. After discussing various criticisms against modernization theory, the article reviews statistical evidence to determine whether economic modernization gives rise to democracy. It argues that the correlation between economic development and democracy stems from the survival of democracy and that a poor authoritarian regime is not likely to turn into a democracy even if it receives economic assistance, either in the form of foreign aid or access to markets through trade. The article highlights the correlation between economic level and survival, rather than between economic growth and survival, noting that economic growth can be helpful only if it is sustained.

Introduction

Theories about democracy—its emergence, sustainability, and breakdown—have long influenced U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps the most well-known—and the most debated—is called “modernization theory,” which emerged around the same time that President Kennedy initiated the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961. Modernization theory derives from a straightforward observation: The correlation between economic development and democracy. That democratic countries are—on average—richer than authoritarian countries is one of the best-established facts in political science. This observation has led many—theorists and practitioners alike—to conclude the following: Democracy becomes more likely to emerge as a country modernizes economically. Yet this conclusion, while intuitive and plausible, provides only one possible causal path to explaining the correlation between economic development and democracy. Scholars have proposed several other explanations, and the true reason for the apparent connection is widely disputed. Our goal in this chapter is to lay out the debate and discuss the evidence. Why is there such a strong connection between economic development and democracy?

To anticipate, our conclusion is this: Economic modernization does not cause democracy to emerge. Rather, the correlation between economic development and democracy derives from the survival of democracy. Democracy emerges under all sorts of circumstances, and it often collapses. But democracy is more likely to survive at higher incomes. Specifically, democracy has never collapsed above the per capita income of about $8,165, measured in 2005 constant purchasing power parity prices. 1 Sophisticated scrutiny of the existence of such a threshold suggests that it is statistically significant.

With this conclusion in mind, we suggest that providing economic assistance to a poor authoritarian regime—either in terms of foreign aid or access to markets through trade—is not likely to cause democracy to emerge. Indeed, there is evidence that authoritarian regimes with thriving economies are actually unlikely to transform themselves into democratic regimes. Efforts to promote democracy, therefore, should be devoted to helping poor, existing democracies to survive. Note, however, that the correlation is not between economic growth and survival, but rather between economic level and survival. This means that only sustained economic growth can be helpful. The poorest democracies require the most help—more help, in fact, than any single governmental donor is willing to provide, according to a recent comprehensive evaluation of the USAID Democracy and Governance program. 2 The greatest impact that a donor might have, therefore, is to focus on middle-income democracies—those that are nearing the $8,000 threshold. Economic assistance to these developing democracies should prove the most fruitful, according to the statistical evidence we review here. Still, it is not obvious that economic assistance can promote economic development; thus, our ultimate position is that policy-makers should approach the promotion of democracy with a great deal of humility.

Modernization Theory

Most scholars credit Seymour Martin Lipset’s study, published in 1959 in the American Political Science Review , as the first to demonstrate the existence of the correlation between economic development and democracy. He interpreted it as evidence in support of a causal relationship; in so doing, he was one of the first to articulate the specifically political tenets of modernization theory. Much has been written about modernization theory, and we can refer the interested reader to thorough and systematic accounts of its underpinnings, history, and pitfalls. 3 Here we simply want to highlight a few of its features.

Modernization theory is based on the classical social theories of Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons, all of whom emphasized, albeit in different ways, the distinction between tradition and modernity. As distilled as a set of propositions about how societies leave their traditional ways and embrace modernity, the theory can be crudely depicted as an account of the psychological, social, and political consequences of capitalist development. Once societies start to develop economically—that is, once technological advances and the specialization that results from division of labor leads to the expansion of economic output—a series of interrelated and self-reinforcing processes are set in motion, culminating in democracy.

In his 1959 article, Lipset spelled out these processes in some detail. 4 According to him, economic development sets in motion a process that instills individuals with the values that are necessary for democracy to exist. Development increases the level of education, and, in Lipset’s words, “education presumably broadens men’s outlooks, enables them to understand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains them from adhering to extremist and monistic doctrines, and increases their capacity to make rational electoral choices” (1959, p. 79). Economic development also shapes every segment of the social stratification structure in such a way as to make them compatible with a democratic regime. Thus, because it increases incomes and provides greater economic security, development increases the time horizons of the lower classes and their acceptance of “more complex and gradualist views of politics”; development swells the middle class, which “plays a mitigating role in moderating conflict since it is able to reward moderate and democratic parties and penalize extremist groups”; and development affects the psychology of the members of the upper classes because, by reducing the differences in the lifestyle of those at the top and at the bottom, it makes them more willing to share power (1959, p. 83). Finally, economic development entails the appearance of myriad interest organizations, which indirectly serve a number of democratic functions. As Lipset puts it, “They are a source of countervailing power, inhibiting the state or any single major source of private power from dominating all political resources; they are a source of new opinions; they can be the means of communicating ideas, particularly opposition ideas, to a large section of the citizenry; they serve to train men in the skills of politics; and they help increase the level of interest and participation in politics” (1959, p. 84). 5

Each of these processes is broad, and one can easily see how they resonate with themes that are, to this day, central to the research agenda on democracy and democratization. Questions concerning the relationship between development and culture as well as between culture and democracy, about the importance of interpersonal trust and social capital, about the deleterious role of ethnic and other identity-based cleavages, and about the strategic interactions between the different social groups can be seen as pertaining to issues raised by the process of democratization. The generality of what goes by “modernization theory”—or the fact that virtually anything is compatible with modernization theory—is, in our view, part of the reason it is still alive and kicking, in spite of the fact that, as we will argue, the evidence to support it is, at best, weak.

Political Order before Change

In the wake of Lipset, scholars produced a flurry of papers seeking to document the relationship between development and democracy. 6 Modernization theory, however, did not go unchallenged. The strongest criticism came from those who focused on the very premise of the theory—namely, the notion that development is unilinear. Both dependency theory and world-systems theory called attention to the idea that the trajectory of economic transformation differed significantly and systematically as a function of the way that countries were inserted in the international system. Modernization did not necessarily mean ever-expanding economic output across all countries and, even when it did, certainly not the widespread sharing of its benefits.

But even the narrower question of whether economic development is causally associated with democracy was challenged early on by authors such as Barrington Moore Jr. (1966) , Samuel Huntington (1968) , and Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) . Moore argued that there is more than one path to modernity and that these paths do not always end in democracy. The circumstances that in England led to the marketization of labor relations and the dilution of the landed aristocracy’s power in response to the stimulus of capitalist development were unique and were the only ones that would “naturally” lead to the emergence of democracy. Absent an exogenous shock that would destroy the repressive system of labor relations—such as the one that happened in 1789 France—capitalist development would either lead to “modernization from above,” characterized by an alliance of the state with the landed aristocracy to repress labor and guarantee economic development, or to a “communist revolution,” where labor would take over the state to repress the landed aristocracy. Neither of these two alternatives is democratic, even though they result from the emergence of market relations—that is, from the very process of economic development.

Huntington, in turn, called attention to the importance of political institutions in the process of modernization, which he saw as inherently unsettling of existing social relations. In the absence of strong political institutions able to absorb, control, and guide the newly emerging social relations, he argued, modernization leads to praetorian politics. Improving economic circumstances leads to mass economic and political demands that an underdeveloped state cannot meet. Since inequality makes socialism attractive, leading to the establishment of a one-party socialist state, Huntington’s advice during the Cold War was thus to support noncommunist one-party states, encouraging the development of robust political institutions able to withstand the destabilizing force of rapid economic development. 7 He did not promise that economic development would lead to democracy; for Huntington, whereas modernity may be associated with democracy, modernization is not necessarily.

Interestingly, while Huntington cast himself as against modernization theory, he did so because he viewed economic development as a nonsufficient cause of democracy. In other words, economic development might not lead to democracy in all cases. Yet he did not challenge the idea that economic development might be necessary for democracy. He added that political development was also required, but did not challenge the basic correlation between economic development and democracy. There still seemed to be something to the idea that as a country develops economically, democracy somehow becomes more likely.

Finally, O’Donnell argued, not unlike De Schewnitz (1964) , that “dependent development,” such as experienced by Latin American countries in the 1950s and 1960s, eventually faces constraints that can only be overcome by the force of an authoritarian regime. After an “easy” phase of economic development driven by the local production of previously imported consumer goods (called import-substitution industrialization, or ISI), countries face a bottleneck that cannot be addressed in the context of a democratic system that is based on a nationalist ideology and the political mobilization of urban workers. A “coup coalition” thus emerges that is ready to implement the bitter policies necessary for further economic development. Democracy actually becomes a casualty of modernization. Thus, he argues that dictatorships emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay not because of their lack of development, but rather precisely because they were successful in generating a domestic industrial sector. These dictatorships emerged as the vehicles for the implementation of the next development phase.

Distinguishing Dynamics: Emergence versus Survival of Democracy

Whether development causes the emergence or the survival of democracy—or both—is left ambiguous by Lipset, as well as by other writers associated with modernization theory. At moments Lipset refers to the emergence of democracy, as when he argues that increased wealth changes class structure and is thus “related causally to the development of democracy” (1959, p. 83). 8 At other times, Lipset seems to mean that economic development affects the prospects of existing democracies, as when he states that “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy” (p. 75). 9 As it turns out, however, the distinction between the impact of economic development on the emergence versus the survival of democracy warrants greater scrutiny and more theoretical rigor.

The process of democratization encompasses both the emergence and the sustainability of democracy. Yet these processes are not equivalent. We say that a country democratized or became a democracy, or that a democracy emerged in a given country, when political actors decide that the choice of rulers will proceed through competitive or contested elections. The emphasis on competitiveness and contestation is meant to draw attention to the idea that not all countries holding elections qualify as democratic. The legislature and the executive must be filled by elections, and there must be viable alternatives presented in these elections. Importantly, when incumbents lose, they must abide by the results and allow alternation in power. Contested elections are ex ante uncertain, ex post irreversible, and repeatable ( Przeworski et al. 2000 , p. 16). The question about the emergence of democracy is: What accounts for the relevant actors’ decision to allow such a process to begin? Thus, when considering the impact that economic development may have on the establishment of democracy, or, equivalently, on the emergence of democracy, or, still equivalently, on the breakdown of a dictatorial or authoritarian regime, the question is: Does economic development make it more likely that the relevant actors will decide to choose leaders through a contested election?

Democracy is sustained when the actors who were involved in allowing a competitive election to take place choose to abide by the results and, after the agreed-upon term of rule expires, choose to allow another competitive election to take place and, following that election, choose to abide by the results, and so on. Thus, when talking about the impact that economic development may have on the sustainability of democracy, or, equivalently, on the survival of democracy, or, still equivalently, on the emergence of a dictatorial or authoritarian regime, the question is: Does economic development make it less likely that a democratic regime will breakdown into a dictatorship?

Economic development needs not have the same effect on both the emergence and the survival of democratic regimes. The first to recognize this were Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi in their 1997 article, “Modernization: Theories and Facts.” Until their study, most people thought about the correlation between development and democracy in one of two ways: Either development causes democracy, or democracy causes development. Przeworski and Limongi challenged this way of thinking by introducing into the debate the dynamics of democracy. They recognized that the pattern of political regimes around the world is a function of two processes: the emergence of democracy and the breakdown or survival of democracy. They hypothesized that even if the emergence of democracy were completely random with respect to economic development, the well-established pattern of richer countries experiencing more democracy than poorer ones could still be observed. The pattern could simply result from democracy regularly collapsing in the poor countries where it had emerged, but consistently surviving in countries with higher income levels.

The intuition behind these ideas is complicated, so consider some examples. The Republic of Congo saw democracy emerge in 1960, when it became independent, and then again in 1992; the Central African Republic experienced a transition to democracy in 1993; Myanmar in 1948 and 1960; and Sudan in 1956, 1965, and 1986. So, despite being among the poorest countries in the world, democracy has emerged in all of these cases. But, as we know, it has not survived very long: Democracy broke down in the Republic of Congo in 1963 and 1996; in the Central African Republic in 2003; in Myanmar in 1958 and 1962; and in Sudan in 1958, 1969, and 1989. The pattern is not limited to Africa. Democracy also emerged a few times in France during the nineteenth century (1848 and 1870), but also collapsed into nondemocratic regimes (1852 and 1940). Then it emerged after World War II, and France soon reached a high level of economic development; democracy has survived ever since. When France was poor, it saw democracy emerge, then collapse; but once it reached a certain level of economic development, democracy finally survived. A similar story can be told for many countries (consider Brazil, Chile, and the Czech Republic). An interesting case is Argentina, which has seen democracy collapse at the highest level of income in the world, $8,165 in 1976 ( Heston et al. 2011 ). Even in this case, however, since democracy has reemerged in 1983, it has been sustained, in spite of profound bouts of economic crises. A controversial case is Venezuela, where the Chavez administration abridged media freedoms, property rights, and amended the constitution to allow for reelection (with the last actually not being undemocratic at all). The administration won contested elections to assume and maintain power, however; at the end of Chavez’s time in office, Venezuela again chose the next government through a contested election. So, while democracy has emerged at many levels of development, it has never collapsed above an income of $8,165 (measured in 2005 purchasing power parity).

In subsequent work Przeworski and co-authors showed that the only causal pathway that connects development to democracy is through the survival of democracy ( Przeworski et al. 2000 ). Specifically, they showed that development does not cause democracy to emerge and that democracy does not lead to higher levels of economic development. Rather, they provide robust evidence that democracy is more likely to be sustained at higher levels of economic development.

In substantive terms, the theory of democratization that emerged as a result of these studies can be stated as follows. At a general level, democracy emerges either because one actor who happens to prefer democracy is politically successful or because there is a balance of forces among relevant actors so that no one can impose his or her preferences over the others. There are multiple reasons why the existence of such an actor or of such a balance of forces may exist. Sometimes it is because economic development favored a democratic actor (the working class, according to Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992 ; the middle class, according to Lipset 1959 ). But at other times, the reasons have nothing to do with economic development: The military government decides that the political system is too centralized and sets in motion a process that, against its own preferences, ultimately leads to an alternation in power via competitive elections ( Lamounier 1984 ); geopolitical considerations importantly shape the decisions of the dominant party to implement political reforms ( Dickson 1998 ); the military, which is unable to govern the country or win an international war of its own making, gives up power (like in Argentina, according to Munck 1998 and Karl 1990 ); a civil war ends militarily in a way that induces warring factions to accept power-sharing agreements ( Mukherjee 2006 ); neighbors and regional partners become increasingly democratic ( Gleditsch 2002 ; Brinks and Coppedge 2006 ; Elkins and Simmons 2005 ; Pevehouse 2005 ; Donno 2010 ); the leader allows elections to happen as an attempt to avoid civil war ( Cheibub, Hays, and Savun 2013 ); there is an international norm that favors democracy ( Hyde 2011 ); and so on. Whatever the reason, there is nothing predetermined about the outcomes of interactions revolving around the establishment of democracy. Transition games are characterized by a multiplicity of equilibria, including both the establishment of a democratic regime and the perpetuation of an authoritarian one ( Przeworski 1991 ).

For whatever reason that democracy emerges, however, if competitive elections are held in countries that are sufficiently rich, it is likely that democracy will remain the method that will be adopted again to select the next leader, and so on. Democracy survives in rich countries. The same cannot be assured for poor ones.

Why would democracies survive in rich countries, while those in poor countries face manifest risks of reverting to an authoritarian regime? Przeworski (2005) addressed this question formally (see also Benhabib and Przeworski 2006 ), and here we simply present the intuition behind the argument.

The fundamental fact about democracy is that those who lose elections peacefully accept their defeat and wait for the next round of elections to compete again. We take this fact for granted, in part because most of us who write and read papers like this one are lucky to live in countries where this happens routinely. But the most important event in a democracy is the moment after elections are held, the results are announced, and those who occupy office leave and pass the keys to those who have been newly elected. This is the moment of truth, without which no democracy could ever exist.

One way to interpret elections is to think of them as contests over the ability to decide how to distribute income. In every election, those who take part must decide between two choices about what to do: (1) They can choose to comply with the verdict of the election (in which case, they will get some share of the income to be distributed, but certainly not all of it). Or (2) they can decide to fight to become the dictator and decide alone how income will be distributed. In the latter case, if they are successful, they will get everything that is at stake; if they are unsuccessful, they lose everything. The short of a relatively long story is that in poor countries the incentives for the political actors or the parties are such that they will more often choose to fight to become the sole decision maker rather than comply with the results of the election and get only a part of the pie that is to be divided. As they fight, democracy obviously breaks down. In rich countries, even losers are relatively well off, and fighting is extraordinarily costly. In a rich country, if but a pair of buildings topple, billions of dollars worth of capital may be lost, valuing more than the annual income of a poor country. The all-or-nothing option simply becomes untenable at a certain level of development.

Why will political actors in poor countries choose to fight rather than comply with the outcome of the election? The reason has nothing to do with cultural proclivities of politicians in these countries, any lack of knowledge or experience on their part, or the lack of political cunning. It is not that political actors in poor countries “just do not get it,” are “used” to violence, or do not “have what it takes” to live under a democracy. Instead, the reason political actors in poor countries often choose to reject the results of elections—for example, when incumbents try to steal the election or announce that they will not leave office, or when the opposition seeks support from armed groups to overthrow the incumbent—stems from two economic facts that distinguish poor and rich countries: first, the value of an extra dollar is smaller for those who already have many dollars; second, recovery from the destruction of physical capital that fighting necessarily entails is faster in poor than in rich countries.

These two factors imply that, in poor countries, the value of becoming a dictator is relatively high, and the cost of fighting is relatively low; in wealthy countries, in turn, the gain from getting all rather than only a part of the income is relatively small, and the cost of fighting to become a dictator is relatively high. This explains why we see more coups and democratic reversals in poorer than in richer countries, even if democracy is established quite frequently in poor countries. The difference is that in rich countries, when democracies are established they tend to stay; in poor countries, they tend to die into an authoritarian regime. Let us emphasize that even though the conditions in poor and rich countries, and hence the incentives political actors face in choosing how to act, are different, the people themselves are not. In both rich and poor countries, they are assumed to have the same motivations and the same capacity to evaluate their circumstances and make the decisions that are best for them.

Return to Modernization Theory

The work of Przeworski and his collaborators challenges the core premise of modernization theory: Economic development under a nondemocratic political regime will engender democracy. They offer an explanation that both is compatible with the well-documented positive correlation between economic development and the incidence of democracy and makes no reference to any process of cultural or social transformation resulting from economic expansion.

This view, of course, has not gone unchallenged. Although all the best work in political science on the subject now accounts for the dynamics of democratization, not all scholars agree that development only matters for sustaining democracy, not for bringing it about. Most concur that democracy is more likely to survive at higher levels of economic development, but some also contend that democracy is more likely to emerge as an authoritarian regime develops economically. In both cases, the survival finding is unambiguous, while the emergence finding requires some nuance.

In one study, conducted by Epstein, Bates, Goldstone, Kristensen, and O’Halloran (2006) , the nuance is gradations of democracy. These scholars show that if one accounts for an intermediate category of political regime—something between dictatorship and democracy—there is evidence that as an economy develops, transitions to higher levels of democracy become more likely. A problem we see with this study is that the authors do not rigorously define their important new category of intermediate regime. Indeed, in substantive terms, the category is not defined at all. The only “definition” one finds in the work is that partial democracies are the regimes situated in the [+1, +7] interval of the “Polity IV” measure. This interval, however, is arbitrary; it is neither justified by usage nor by authority. 10 Since there is no theoretical reason to slice the “Polity IV” scale in any particular way, the validity of the results depend on their robustness. And, as we have shown in other work (e.g., Cheibub and Vreeland 2011 ), the results in the Epstein et al. (2006) study happen to be too robust: they can choose to define the intermediate regime category all the way from the [+1, +7] to the [–9, +9] interval, and they still find a positive coefficient for economic development when predicting transitions to democracy. In the former case, “partial democracy” comprises 811 observations; in the latter, it comprises 4,503. But what does it mean substantively to say that economic development affects the probability of transitions to democracy if we consider partial democracies, when “partial democracy” can mean virtually anything? When it can be defined to comprise a sample as small as 811 or as large as 4,503?

Boix and Stokes (2003) also challenge the findings of Przeworski and his co-authors with two basic claims. 11 First, had Przeworski et al. (2000) extended their analysis to the pre-1950 period, they would have found that economic development had a statistically and substantively significant impact on the probability that an authoritarian regime will collapse and a democracy will emerge. Second, Boix and Stokes argue that some key confounding factors—such as income distribution and oil or the international system—must be included in an analysis of democratic transitions for the post-1950 period in order to detect the real effect of economic development on democratic transitions.

Regarding the second claim, they contend that the emergence of democracy is contingent on what is at stake to redistribute. Under conditions of extreme income inequality—or in countries where the productive assets are immobile, such as oil-rich countries—democratization could lead to incredible economic upheavals through the redistribution of income or assets (or both). 12 Because of this threat, elites in such societies are willing to pay a high price for repressing democratic movements. The emergence of democracy may be stymied despite economic development because of the political consequences in these countries. 13 Similarly, they argue that the effect of development on democracy emergence would have been observed in the post–World War II period had it not been for the Soviet Union’s role in crushing several democratizing movements in the rapidly developing countries under its influence. Once such cases are controlled in the data, Boix and Stokes argue, one should see that economic development does play a role in promoting the emergence of democracy: In non–oil rich countries with relatively low levels of income inequality, economic development leads to democracy.

Just as original modernization theorists made compelling arguments about the transformation of culture and society as a function of economic development, Boix and Stokes provide a compelling rational-choice mechanism linking development to the emergence of democracy. The weakness of this research is once again that the findings are not robust. That is, if we change the way the variables are defined, so as to include or exclude marginal cases, if we introduce other variables, or change the sample of cases, the main finding on economic development does not hold. Indeed, in other work we have shown that Boix and Stokes mistakenly treat three observations in their sample. 14 The technical mistake is understandable and unintended. Surprisingly, however, if we correctly address these three observations, then the statistically significant effect of per capita income on the emergence of democracy disappears. The original result is thus fragile.

Moreover, the extension of the analysis to the pre-1950 period is also problematic. Using the same data as Boix and Stokes, one can see that even during the 1901–1949 period, statistical analysis reveals no relationship between economic development and the emergence of democracy. There is some evidence of a correlation during the 1850–1900 period, but one must base conclusions on a handful of cases, and data on potential control variables are unavailable for this historical period. 15 The analysis thus leaves us with some skepticism.

In more recent work, Boix (2011) introduces two further factors on which to condition the effect of economic development on democracy—one “endogenous” and the other “exogenous.” The endogenous factor is that there are diminishing returns to income. Beyond a certain level of income, he contends, further economic growth has little impact on democratization. The exogenous factor, which actually generalizes the argument made about the role of the Soviet Union in preventing democratization in countries that would have otherwise democratized, is the international system. He notes that waves of transitions to and from democracy have accompanied major changes in global power. Waves of autocracy in the 1930s and 1950s are associated with the rearmament of Germany under Hitler and the beginning of the Cold War, respectively. Democracy waves in the 1920s, late 1940s, and 1990s, respectively, are associated with the defeat of the Central European empires in 1918, the end of World War II, and the end of the Cold War. Once Boix accounts for these confounding factors, he shows robust statistically significant effect of income-level on democracy. The result even holds when controlling for country-specific factors, which we find quite impressive. We return to this issue in the next section. It is unfortunate, however, that Boix does not allow for differing effects of development on the onset and the sustainability of democracy. He does account for the fact that political regime is serially correlated by including lagged political regime in his analysis. But, ignoring the lesson of Przeworski and Limongi (1997) , he constrains the effect of income in such a way that it is captured by one single coefficient. That is, the statistical model requires that income have the same effect whether democracy is emerging or breaking down. We thus cannot use these findings to settle that debate. 16

Our objections aside, Boix’s studies ( 2003 , 2011 ) and his work with Stokes (2003) , as well as the work of Epstein and his colleagues (2006) , represent the vibrant and interesting ongoing debate that continues in political science regarding the determinants of democratization.

Country-Specific Factors

Acemoglu and his collaborators ( 2007 , 2008 ) have, more recently, altered the debate considerably by rejecting the entire correlation between economic development and democracy as spurious. They argue that the apparent correlation between development and democracy actually derives from country-specific factors dating back centuries. Focusing on former European colonies, they claim that the institutional structure built at the moment of colonization—which they see as a “critical juncture” in the history of these countries—created divergent development paths, which persisted through time. In inhospitable environments (e.g., the South American Andes), Europeans set up repressive political structures to extract economic benefits from their colonies. Thus, one path was characterized by economic failure and autocratic forms of governments. In more hospitable environments (e.g., the northeast of the present-day United States), Europeans established settler societies aimed at developing sustainable economies with more participatory forms of governance. So the other path was characterized by economic success and democratic forms of government—in particular, forms of government that impose constraints on the executive power. Once these divergent paths are taken into consideration, they suggest, the relationship between development and democracy disappears: development affects neither the probability of transition to democracy nor the sustainability of democracy.

Yet, further research is needed in order to substantiate this claim. The empirical evidence provided by Acemoglu and his colleagues comes from the estimation of regime-transition models that include country fixed-effects. 17 They find that, once country fixed-effects are allowed, the impact of per capita income disappears entirely. They further support their claim that these fixed-effects capture the historical events that took place around critical junctures by showing that they, the country fixed-effects, are themselves correlated with variables that are correlated with the institutional structures created at the moment of European colonization and the development paths that countries embarked on at that time. Specifically, the country fixed-effects are correlated with (1) settler mortality rates at the time of colonization, (2) indigenous population density in 1500, (3) the average constraint on the executive in the country’s first ten years after independence, and (4) the date of independence. The intuition behind their argument is that two major contributors to democratization are the strength of civil society and the structure of political institutions (meaning the constraint on the executive branch of government), and—due to exogenous factors—these developed the furthest in Western Europe. Where Western Europeans settled in large proportions and survived, so did their civil society and institutions. These factors contributed to both economic prosperity and democratization.

The estimates of country fixed-effects, thus, play a crucial role in the analysis of Acemoglu and colleagues; not only do they use fixed-effects to eliminate the findings that per capita income causes democracy to emerge and survive, but also to support their alternative claim that what matters is the developmental path that countries embarked on at the moment of European colonization. Yet this approach does not allow one to distinguish the civil society and institutions that settlers bring with them from any other factor associated with the country, such as its resource endowment, latitude and longitude, size, strategic importance, etc. Part of the reason fixed-effects are used is to capture the effect of factors—whatever they are—that are unique to each country and that may be affecting the dependent variable. Interpreting fixed-effects as evidence that a specific factor is at work should be done, at best, with a high degree of caution.

The use of country fixed-effects in the estimation of models of political regime change is also problematic for statistical reasons. Some countries, such as the United States and some in Western Europe, experienced a transition to democracy relatively early, and then never changed. Others came into existence as independent entities under a nondemocratic regime and have remained a nondemocracy (albeit of a different type in some cases) for the rest of their history. 18 Because they do not vary over the periods covered in specific analyses, these cases effectively do not count when a country-fixed-effects approach is employed. One can think of the problem this way: What is the probability of observing a transition to democracy given that a country is always observed as a dictatorship? The answer is zero. What is the probability of observing a transition to dictatorship given that a country is always democracy? Again, the answer is obviously zero. We appear to “learn” nothing from these cases, so they drop out of the analysis. But do we really learn nothing from these cases?

Note, importantly, that the countries for which there is no variation in regime are not randomly distributed around the world: the countries that established a democracy and remained democratic for the period considered in most analyses tended to be relatively wealthy, whereas the countries that were first observed as dictatorships and remained dictatorships tended to be relatively poor. So, when we introduce country fixed-effects, we drop key cases with respect to the question of economic development and democracy: we effectively dismiss a large number of poor dictatorships and rich democracies, and therefore we disproportionately base the estimation of the impact of per capita income on transition to and from democracy on observations of countries with middle levels of per capita income. Given this country-fixed-effects set-up, the lack of a statistically significant impact of per capita income should come as no surprise. 19

That said, more recent research has actually reestablished a correlation between development and democracy, even when controlling for country fixed-effects. As noted in the previous section, Boix (2011) controls for country and year fixed-effects and further accounts for the possibility of diminishing returns from income and for international factors in his analysis. In this context, he shows that per capita income is correlated with political regime. Another study, authored by Benhabib, Corvalan, and Spiegel (2011) , also finds a positive and statistically significant correlation between economic development and democracy. Their innovations include a newer data set than used by Acemoglu et al. (2008) ; importantly, they employ methods (e.g., the Tobit model and the two-sided estimator) that explicitly account for the fact that regime transitions are typically censored. This approach addresses precisely the problem highlighted previously, that we do not observe countries for sufficient duration to know if or when they would transition from one political regime to the other.

Our disappointment in these recent studies, which have reaffirmed the old correlation between development and democracy, is that they have forgotten the lessons of Przeworski and Limongi (1997) . On the bright side, all of the recent work accounts for the fact that a country’s past political regime influences its future. They do this by including the lagged political regime in their statistical models. In this sense, the models are “dynamic.” Yet, they do not allow development to have different effects on (1) the emergence of democracy and (2) the survival of democracy. In technical terms, allowing for two effects would require “interacting” the lagged measure of democracy with per capita income. This approach would allow per capita income to have differing effects in autocracies and democracies. As the new models stand, they control for whether the previous regime was an autocracy or a democracy, but they do not condition the effect of income on the previous regime.

Our goal is not to dismiss the contributions of any of these authors. We find it exciting that the debate has so many sides. On one side, some believe the correlation between development and democracy is spurious. On the other side, among those who believe there is a robust and statistically significant correlation, there are those who interpret it as implying that development causes democracy to emerge (modernization theory), while others do not. We continue to find most convincing the evidence that democracies survive at high levels of economic development. Thriving and imaginative as the development and democracy research agenda is, we are far from reaching a consensus over why we observe a correlation between the two variables.

What Can Be Done?

If one were to search the literature for the factors that have been found to affect democratization, one would end up with quite a long list. One would think that with an extensive catalog of “determinants,” we would have an effective model of democratization. This model might tell us when to expect the emergence of democracy, and when to expect its collapse.

Yet, this is not the case. In spite of all the work that has been done on the subject, all the brainpower and the resources that have been dedicated to figuring out the conditions under which democracy emerges and survives, we are utterly unable to predict when a regime change will occur. No one predicted the fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989–1990, but they gave way to democracy. Many expected the downfall of democracy in countries such as Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s and 1990s, and yet democracy in these countries has survived well in the midst of challenging social and economic conditions. Given the level of mobilization of civil society in Myanmar, few expected that the military would ignore the results of the 1990 election and reverse the process of democratization. The survival of democracy in India, with its low per capita income and high degree of ethnic and religious fragmentation, is still a source of puzzlement for anyone considering the conditions under which democracy emerges and survives. And there were few observers who believed that democracy would come to Mexico in the peaceful way that it did in the 1990s.

Our predictive power with respect to the emergence of democracy is virtually zero. Part of the reason is, to a large extent, the fact that transitions from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones are extraordinarily uncommon. In our data set, which covers 140 authoritarian regimes that have existed between 1946 and 2008, democratic transitions occur about 2 percent of the time. 20 Transitions to democracy, thus, are rare events; as we have seen, they occur in all sorts of contexts. Moreover, many of the facts considered to be important are not ones over which anyone can have much control. For example, there is mounting evidence that countries with oil are less likely to experience democratic transitions, but there is not much that a policy-maker can do about whether oil is under the ground in a country. 21

As the emergence of democracy is so uncertain an event, we question the efficacy of many democracy-promotion efforts. This skepticism does not imply, however, that we think countries and international organizations should abandon democracy-promotion altogether. Rather, we suggest that the best way to promote democracy might be to aid in the survival of democracy. We do know something useful and robust about the survival of democracy: It is more likely at higher levels of democracy. Moreover, we know that the chances of democratic breakdown reduce to near zero beyond a per capita income level of about $8,000 (again, measured in 2005 constant purchasing power parity prices). We derive this approximate threshold from observational data, and its statistical significance is supported by rigorous analysis (for more precise details, see Przeworski et al. 2000 ).

Table 1.1 thus provides an explicit list of “democracies at risk,” specifically identifying the currently existing democracies that are below this income threshold. 22 We suggest that the impact of assistance may be strongest for the countries near the top of the list. The very poor democracies have such a long road to travel that it would take the commitment of multiple generations of administrations to really have an impact. We speculate that the magnitude, sophistication, and level of commitment similar, for example, to the one demonstrated by the United States with the Marshall Plan that helped with European reconstruction after World War II, might yield more favorable results in poor democracies. This, however, is not a realistic expectation.

We expect, instead, the continuation of democracy-promotion programs as they exist today—that is, at low levels of financial commitment by the rich democracies. Democracy promotion is now a relatively large industry: there are many agencies and organizations and many people who depend on the continuation of existing programs for the overall policy to be changed in any significant way in the short run. But it might help to keep in mind that the impact of these programs is, at best, small and that, as a consequence, one should be cautious about what one tries to accomplish with them.

Notes: Per capita income is measured in 2005 constant purchasing power parity prices, and the observations are from the year 2009.

Thus, we would like to conclude by summarizing the practical implications of our analysis: Scholars may know a lot about democracy, but this knowledge does not allow us to predict its emergence in any significant way. We do know that democracies survive in richer countries. The policy prescription that follows from this piece of information is that the best way to support democracy is to support the economic development of poor democracies.

This is the per capita income of Argentina in 1976, the wealthiest democracy to ever have succumbed to a dictatorship. The income data come from Heston et al. (2011) .

The study, by Finkel, Pérez-Liñán, and Seligson (2007) finds that the USAID program has a positive but negligible effect on a recipient country’s level of democratization. The study measures democracy on a scale that ranges from 1 (least democratic) to 13 (most democratic); it shows that an additional 10 million dollars in democracy and governance spending would increase the level of democracy by .25 points on this democracy scale ( Finkel et al. 2007 , p. 424). During the period covered by the study (1990-2003), ninety-three countries receive an average of two million dollars in democracy aid through the USAID program. Given this result, in order for democracy to increase by .25 points on the democracy scale, the average level of funds would have to be five times larger than it actually is. The average amount of resources that is actually spent on democracy promotion can be expected to move a country by .05 points on the scale. Thus, for democracy promotion to be able to move existing democratic regimes on the 13-point democracy scale in a significant way, the amount of resources available must increase substantially. Given the current state of economic affairs in the United States and in other rich democracies, it is hard to imagine that support for such an increase will be forthcoming any time soon.

An excellent review of economic modernization and criticisms can be found in Oman and Wignaraja (1991) . Critical discussions of modernization and other development theories include So (1990) , Roxborough (1988) , Valenzuela and Valenzuela (1978) , Tipps (1973) , and Rustow (1968) .

See also Lipset (1960 , ch. 2).

See Diamond (1992) for a similar reading of Lipset.

See Cutright (1963) , Neubauer (1967), Cutright and Wiley (1969) , Smith Jr. (1969) , and Jackman (1973) .

On the role of modernization theory in policy-making, see Packenham (1973) and Gilman (2003) .

See also the passage in which Lipset (1959 , p. 85) summarizes the “historically unique concatenation of elements” that linked the development of capitalism and the emergence of democracy in “northwest Europe and their English-speaking offspring in America and Australasia.”

Bollen (1990 , pp. 15–16) took Lipset and other early empirical researchers to task for confounding the two. See also Bollen and Jackman (1989) .

Other work that classify partial democracy on the basis of Polity tend to use the interval [–5, +5] (e.g., Fearon and Laitin 2003 ; see Vreeland 2008 for a discussion). The authors of Polity recommend that one dichotomize the measure at +6 or +7 ( Marshall and Jaggers 2000 ).

See also Boix (2003) .

For related work on income inequality and political regime, see Rosendorff (2001) and Desai et al. (2003) .

See, however, Houle (2009) for compelling evidence that income inequality is not related to the emergence of democracy, but strongly related to its survival.

Bulgaria in 1990, Czechoslovakia in 1990, and Hungary in 1990. See Cheibub and Vreeland (2011 , pp. 165–166).

Again, see Cheibub and Vreeland (2011 , pp. 162–164).

One explanation for this change in analytical position can probably be explained by the fact that, unlike in Boix and Stokes (2003) , the target in Boix (2011) is the work of Acemoglu and Robinson who claim that per capita income is only spuriously correlated with democracy. His concern, therefore, is to demonstrate that this is not true. He does so by instrumenting per capita income. We are not entirely convinced that the instruments he uses are adequate.

For readers unfamiliar with this jargon, a “fixed-effects” model is equivalent to including a separate variable that uniquely identifies each country. So, if there are 135 countries in the sample, 134 additional variables are de facto included to “control” for the “Algeria” effect, the “Angola” effect, all the way to the “Zambia” effect, the “Zimbabwe” effect.

This is true whether one uses a dichotomous regime measure or, say, Polity, a 21-point scale. Some countries achieve the highest score and remain there, or never move from the lowest.

The data Acemoglu and his associates use to support their claim about the importance of critical junctures, specifically, the critical juncture represented by the onset of European colonization of the rest of the world, are not entirely free of problems. There is an ongoing debate regarding their coding decisions, which we avoid here. Albouy (2006) , probably the most systematic of the critics of their data efforts, however, calls attention to the fact that there may be a bias in the coding decisions of the settler mortality rates toward assigning high values to countries that have “bad” institutions today. See Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2006) for their reply to Albouy’s critiques.

Specifically, we observe 5,041 country-years of authoritarianism with 102 transitions to democracy ( Cheibub et al. 2010 ).

See, for example, Ross ( 2001 , 2008 ), Boix (2003) , Boix and Stokes (2003) , and Gassebner et al. (2013) . For recent research with contrasting views on the importance of oil, see Dunning (2005) , Bazzi and Blattman (2011) , and Liou and Musgrave (2012) . For a qualitative study of authoritarianism in the Middle East, see King (2010) . For broader studies of the survival of autocracy, we also recommend Quinn (2009) and Gandhi (2008) .

At our first writing, Mali was on our list as it had a democratic regime and a per capita income listed as $999. We had listed it as the ninth most at-risk democracy in the world (it was ninth from the bottom on our list of fifty-one poor democracies). The recent collapse of democracy there has led us to remove it from our list of at-risk democracies. The risk has already been realized.

Acemoglu, Daron , Simon Johnson , and James Robinson ( 2006 ). Reply to the revised (May 2006) version of David Albouy’s “ The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Investigation of the Settler Mortality Data. ” Unpublished manuscript. Cambridge, MA. Available at http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/212 .

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Modernization Theory

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• Christin-Melanie Vauclair 3 &
• Maksim Rudnev 3 , 4  

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Industrialization theory ; Social transition theory ; Urbanization theory

Modernization theory within the discipline of social gerontology is the idea that the transformation of traditional agrarian communities to modernized industrial societies leads to various socioeconomic changes that diminish the status of older people.

Modernization theory has been classified as one of the core theories within the sociology of aging (Alley et al. 2010 ). Even though the central idea had been suggested as early as in the 1940s (Linton 1942 ; Simmons 1945 ), it was Cowgill ( 1974 ) who formalized the theory. Modernization theory aims to explain why the status of older people decreases over time and differs across societies. The central claim is that traditional societies, which usually coincide with agricultural and craft production, assign older adults with an important role and, therefore, status in their families and communities. In contrast, when societies are modernized...

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Achenbaum AW (1978) Old age in the new land. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

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Vauclair, CM., Rudnev, M. (2019). Modernization Theory. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_750-1

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Modernization Theory

Literature review and theory 3 introduction, 3.1 literature review, 3.2.2 modernization theory.

Modernization Theory is a main branch of economic liberalization and development, it started in the 1950s rooted on capitalism. This framework to some degree explains Africa–China relations (Matunhu, 2011). Tipps (1973: 200) trace well the origins of Modernization Theory and states that:

32 The proximate origins of modernization theory may be traced to the response of American political elites and intellectuals to the international setting of the post-Second World War era. In particular, the impact of the Cold War and the simultaneous emergence of Third World societies as prominent actors in world politics in the wake of the disintegration of the European colonial empires converged during this period to channel-for the first time, really- substantial intellectual interest and resources beyond the borders of American society, and even of Europe, into the study of the societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. During the two decades after the war, American social scientists and their graduate students, with the generous support of governmental and private agencies, turned increasing attention to the problems of economic development, political stability, and social and cultural change in these societies.

The above statement proves that Ndlovu-Gatsheni is correct when stating that theories within Development Studies are designed to treat Africans as subjects rather than actual participants. In the wake of the African decolonization process and post–cold war period, Americans and Europeans took the responsibility of reconstructing Africa and generally third world countries. The Modernization Theory, in this regard was seen as an opportunity for third world countries to catch up with Western countries.

Modernization agitators were and are still of the view that Africa is underdeveloped. Therefore, for Africa to develop and to modernize, Africa should adopt and replicate Western strategies of development. Such strategies that African countries need, should follow the Rostowian theory, which assets that underdeveloped societies should go through a number of stages to achieve development (Matunhu, 2011). There are five stages that Rostow (1959) believes can transform societies from underdevelopment to be more developed, modern and affluent societies.

These stages are, 1) Primitive society: This first stage is based on barter exchange and subsistence farming. 2) Preparation for take-off: Where production, specialization, skills development and infrastructure development is encouraged. 3) Take off: This stage, switches from agriculture to manufacturing. 4) Drive to maturity: In this stage, a society is well off and less reliant on foreign imports. 5) High mass consumption: The service sector dominates this stage and a nation is highly developed (Matunhu, 2011). These stages for Modernization theorist are stages that any underdeveloped society should go through before becoming developed.

Interestingly enough, the misgivings of these stages are well located in the Chinese hegemonic rise. China did not in any way go through this set of suggested stages, yet it modernized dramatically in the turn of the twentieth century. However, Western countries still enforce development along the lines of Rostow philosophy. Green (2008: 1) places the Modernization Theory in the context that it is a “transformational process which enables traditional societies to become modern societies.

33 Modernisation Theory can be related to the Theory of Evolution.” The evolution that modernization espouses must take place in the scientific area, technological advancement and infrastructure development. A society should advance in these eras for it to ascend as a modern society. Therefore, in the eyes of the West, Africa is a backward continent on many important areas used to measure development, modernization and to an extent civilization.

Many Western countries, even international institutions such as IMF and WB, hold the view that underdeveloped nations have to go through the Rostow stages of development. For this reason, and historically for that matter, Western countries made it their task to craft Africa as a replica of their own world. To achieve such a mission, from conquering tactics - such as enslavement in the 1600s and the subsequent colonization in the 1800s-, to contemporary neo–colonialism and imperialism of African people were and are still strategies systematically employed in every form and shape. This is done by Westerners enforcing their values, identities, cultures, traditions and their own languages on Africans (see Ngugiwa Thiong’o: Decolonizing the Mind. The politics of language and culture). Modernization Theory - approved through policy influence - and aid precondition in Africa - influenced by the Marshal Plan doctrine - caused extreme poverty, underdevelopment and perpetuated inequalities at a mass scale (Matunhu, 2011). As a result of these severe consequences, African countries are sceptic of Western assistance because of the mistrust that emanates from classical colonialism. Contemporary interventions to Africa - by both old and new powers - continue to use Modernization Theory as a guiding principle. For example, Chinese investment in Africa focuses on infrastructure modernization and technological development. Green (2008) captures this well as he makes an interesting link of Modernization Theory and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs, like Rostow’s stages of development, failed to address the socio–economic development of African countries.

By linking Modernization Theory and MDGs, Greens shows that socio–economic measures within MDGs were still focusing on the same measures that many African scholars contest. MDGs were using HDI as its prime measure of poverty reduction, life expectancy and adult literacy (Green, 2008). Critics of Modernization Theory, point out that third world nations cannot follow the Western development trajectory. Third world countries are still experiencing exploitative stages, having started from slavery to current imperial domination. Western countries on the other hand, did not experience what Africa went through. So it would be difficult for Modernization Theory to work for Africa. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) highlights the verity that colonial powers went further than colonizing Africa and Asia by positioning their cultural values to make them superior to others. Former colonial systems and structures are still prevalent and intact in post–colonial Africa, and it

34 seems the continent is battling to undo colonial and imperial structures that come along with modernity (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).

China is developing and modernizing rapidly, and thus employing colonial tactics in African countries is to some extent problematic. As argued above, China provides aid and loans in exchange of and access to raw materials. It is appropriate to argue that Dependency Theory, a critique of Modernization Theory is applicable to describe Chinese modernization, which is premised on exploitation and imperialism.

• Perspectives from the South
• Modernization Theory (You are here)
• Dependency Theory
• China’s foreign policy towards Africa: Continuity or Change
• China’s economic and energy diplomacy towards Africa
• African growth rates per regions
• Africa–China: Varieties of Capitalism, Communism and African Renaissance
• Evolution of Sino–Nigeria relations
• ANALYSIS OF THE STUDY AND CONCLUSION 6 Analysis of the Study

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• Published: 22 May 2024

Discourse construction of Chinese modernization from the perspective of Malaysian media

• Dongping Wang 1 &
• Siping Liang 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  653 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies

This study uses corpus critical discourse analysis to examine the reporting strategies and affective attitudes of Malaysian media towards Chinese modernization. The analysis is based on 192 related news reports and aims to reveal how Malaysian media interpret and construct the discourse of Chinese modernization. The study finds that Malaysian media reports show a diversity of attitudes, with positive and neutral reports dominating and negative reports occupying a small proportion, which needs counter-stigmatization. The study emphasizes the importance of constructing the discourse of Chinese modernization and points out adopting flexible and diversified strategies to construct a foreign discourse system. This study provides new perspectives for understanding the concept of Chinese modernization in the context of globalization and highlights the importance of strengthening media exchanges and cooperation between China and Malaysia.

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Introduction.

The concept of modernization, traditionally dominated by Western paradigms, has witnessed a significant shift with the advent of Chinese modernization. This unique path to modernization, highlighted in the report of the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on October 16, 2022, depicts a model of socialist modernization that integrates universal processes with distinctly Chinese characteristics (Xi, 2022 ). Chinese modernization, as a socialist modernization model, has become the focus of international attention. It not only illustrates China’s development achievements but triggers discussions about the sustainability and universality of its development model. In the context of globalization, news communication plays a key role in shaping the image of a country (Xu, 1996 ), and the coverage of Chinese modernization is one of the important aspects. It reflects perceptions and evaluations in a particular cultural and political context (Foucault, 1979 ; Gelcich et al., 2005 ; Michel and Colin, 1980 ).

Amidst the backdrop of the 50th anniversary of China–Malaysia diplomatic relations, the bonds between these nations have deepened through extensive political, economic, and cultural exchanges. Malaysia’s role as a central player in China’s Belt and Road Initiative further accentuates the need to scrutinize how Malaysian media discourses construct and interpret Chinese modernization. Such an inquiry is timely and necessary, considering the potential for misunderstanding, prejudice, and stigmatization of Chinese modernization in the international media, often influenced by Western-centered modernization discourses.

This study attempts to explore the discourse construction and reporting strategies of Malaysian media on Chinese modernization through Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (Baker et al., 2008 ). As Fowler ( 2013 ) stated, news is a product of social construction, reflecting and shaping the dominant values of society. In recent years, researchers have increasingly combined corpus methods with news value analysis (Bednarek et al., 2021 ; Potts et al., 2015 ; Zhang and Cheung, 2022 ) to make up for the shortcomings of qualitative-only methods in terms of representativeness and generalizability. This study also follows this trend, provides a new perspective for understanding the representation of Chinese modernization in international media through a systematic analysis of 192 related reports in Malaysian media, promotes cultural exchanges and mutual understanding between the two countries in news reports, improves the effect of foreign communication, builds a foreign discourse system of Chinese modernization and enhances China’s international discourse power.

Literature review

Against the backdrop of globalization, the discourse construction of Chinese modernization has emerged as a significant topic within the international academic community. The term “modernization,” originating from the Renaissance period, initially referred to the spirit and characteristics of a new era transcending the medieval. Western modernization has progressed through three phases: the British Industrial Revolution and French Democratic Revolution, German industrialization, and the American Democratic and Industrial Revolutions, characterized by capitalist private ownership, a free market, and a modern state institution, either decentralized or centralized, thus forming Western capitalist modernity (Parsons, 1953 ). However, Chinese modernization presents a pathway distinct from the Western model. Apter ( 1965 ) emphasizes the uniqueness of the Chinese model in the political realm. Concurrently, Gasan ( 2022 ) criticizes the modernization concept as equated to Europeanization, highlighting the distinctiveness of the Chinese path. International scholars study political discourse (Van Dijk, 1993 ) and nation image (Saunders, 2013 ) communication strategies, providing a basis for research on Chinese modernization in an international context. However, research on the discourse construction and communication strategies of Chinese modernization by foreign scholars remains relatively scarce. Rozman ( 1989 ) believes that the process of Chinese modernization has integrated experiences from other countries, creating a unique development path. Domestically, Dai ( 2023 ), Li and Liu ( 2022 ), and Huang ( 2023 ) have discussed the internal discourse construction context, connotations, and values of Chinese modernization, emphasizing the importance of constructing a discourse system with Chinese characteristics.

Construction strategies in media discourse are pivotal for maneuvering public perception and influencing the framing of international events and policies. These strategies, rooted in the principles of framing theory and narrative construction (Entman, 1993 ; Goffman, 1974 ), enable media outlets to highlight certain aspects of Chinese modernization while potentially sidelining others, thus steering the discourse towards particular interpretations or conclusions. This selective representation is instrumental in constructing a narrative that aligns with specific ideological or national interests, contributing significantly to the shaping of the nation’s image on the global stage. At the heart of this discourse lies the pivotal role of media in shaping perceptions of China’s modernization efforts, spotlighting the environmental, economic, and policy narratives that collectively paint a comprehensive picture of the nation’s developmental ethos (Yang and Wang, 2023 ; Su and Hu, 2021 ; Wu et al., 2022 ). Particularly in Malaysia, the interplay between media narratives and Chinese modernization emerges as a testament to the deep-rooted economic and cultural ties that have historically underpinned Sino-Malaysian relations. This relationship, enriched by student exchanges and economic cooperation, not merely promotes bilateral exchanges but also serves as a conduit for demonstrating China’s soft power and its path toward a unique model of modernization, distinct from the Western paradigm (Lin, 2008 ; Shi, 2003 ; Zeng and Wang, 2010 ; Zhou and Hu, 2010 ).

Methodologically, the corpus-based critical discourse analysis stands out for its ability to unravel the linguistic and narrative strategies that underpin media discourse, offering a granular exploration of how language use, framing, and thematic emphasis shape the portrayal of Chinese modernization in the Malaysian media landscape (Qian, 2010 ; Yang and Wu, 2012 ; Liu and Han, 2016 ). This approach not merely enables a detailed examination of the media’s role in shaping narratives and ideologies but also facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the dialogic interplay between domestic imperatives and international perceptions. The integrated analysis thus reveals the complexity and multidimensionality of the discourse surrounding Chinese modernization, highlighting the nuanced ways in which media reports construct and convey social issues and news values in a rapidly globalizing world.

The domestic and international literature review shows that there are some accumulated results in the study of Chinese modernization. Related theoretical research provides some theoretical support for this study, but there is a lack of comprehensive and systematic research on the international communication of Chinese modernization. This study explores the issue of meaning construction in Malaysian media reports on Chinese modernization discourse, using corpus critical discourse analysis for a comprehensive analysis of Malaysian media reports, striving to enrich and deepen the application of case studies on the international communication of Chinese modernization, and providing new theoretical and empirical perspectives for cross-cultural media research.

Methodology

This study uses corpus critical discourse analysis, which combines qualitative discourse analysis with quantitative corpus analysis techniques. This method can overcome the limitations of subjectivity and selectivity that traditional qualitative analysis may bring (Widdowson, 2000 ) and, at the same time, provide statistical data support through a large number of texts in real contexts, thus realizing objectivity and systematicity in discourse research (Du, 2021 ), which provides a comprehensive and objective methodology for in-depth investigation on the construction of Chinese modernization discourse in Malaysian media. The detailed steps of this study are as follows:

Step 1: Research contextualization

In terms of contextualization, this study examines how the concept of Chinese modernization is presented in Malaysian media. Considering that Chinese modernization is not only a narrative of China’s own development, but also a focus of attention for the international community, especially for countries that have close ties with China, such as Malaysia. Therefore, Malaysian media reports may reflect the country’s perceptions and evaluations of China’s political, economic, and social development, and these reports themselves constitute the interpretation and construction of Chinese modernization.

Subsequently, previous studies in the field are reviewed to identify knowledge gaps and research gaps in the existing research. Through the literature review, it was found that although Chinese modernization as a research topic has been explored in various fields, relatively little research has been conducted on how the Malaysian media constructs related discourses. This finding led to the specification of the research objective, which is to explore and reveal how the Malaysian media represent, interpret, and shape the discourse of Chinese modernization.

After defining the context and objectives of the study, specific research questions were formulated that would guide the subsequent corpus compilation, keyword analysis, and qualitative analysis. The research questions include:

RQ1: What discourse strategies have been employed by Malaysian media on the topic of Chinese modernization?

RQ2: What are Malaysian media’s attitudes towards China’s modernization?

RQ3: How is the discourse system of Chinese modernization constructed in Malaysian media?

By examining these questions, this study seeks to advance knowledge of Chinese modernization in international communication while also offering fresh viewpoints on cross-cultural interactions and mutual comprehension in news reporting between China and Malaysia.

Step 2: Data collection and sample selection

A total of 192 media reports related to Chinese modernization were meticulously selected from influential mainstream media in Malaysia, covering a period from October 16, 2022, to October 16, 2023. This selection was strategically chosen to align with the significant political event of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party (2022.10.16–2022.10.22) of China, aiming to capture the immediate media discourse surrounding Chinese modernization. And the coverage is shown in Fig. 1 . These stories cover reports from 14 different media in Malaysia, which are KXG Alloy, Sabah Media, Cision PR Newswire, Malay.people, RayHaber, Sicopro, The Star, New Straits Times, Malay Mail, The Sun Daily, Sinchew Daily, China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau, and Oriental Daily, with a total of 192 articles, totaling 138,647 words, as shown in Table 1 .

Statistical chart of Malaysian media coverage of Chinese modernization.

The reports cover Chinese, English, and Malay languages. Google and deepl translations were utilized to help convert the Chinese and Malay reports into English to maintain consistency in the analysis. All reports were saved in text format, with non-textual elements removed, to self-construct an English corpus for subsequent analysis. All reports were preliminarily reviewed to confirm the relevance and categorize sentiment tendencies (positive, negative, and neutral) based on the content of the reports. To enhance the methodological rigor and ensure the reproducibility of the study, the following criteria were employed for manually categorizing the media reports into positive, negative, and neutral sentiments:

Positive reports

These include articles that portray Chinese modernization in a favorable light, highlighting successes, advancements, and positive outcomes associated with China’s development model. Reports that focus on cooperation opportunities, economic growth, technological advancements, or positive diplomatic engagements related to Chinese modernization were classified under this category.

Neutral reports

Reports considered neutral offered objective viewpoints without overtly favoring positive or negative perspectives. These articles typically presented factual information, statistical data, or a mix of opinions that did not lean distinctly towards either a positive or negative portrayal of Chinese modernization.

Negative reports

Articles that critique or question aspects of Chinese modernization, including sustainability, human rights, or geopolitical tensions, were categorized as negative. Reports emphasizing challenges, problems, or controversies associated with China’s modernization efforts fell into this group.

Statistical chart of Malaysian media coverage of Chinese modernization is as follows:

As shown in Fig. 1 , with the convening of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Chinese modernization has gained widespread attention from international media. Malaysian media coverage of Chinese modernization emerged at the first peak in October 2022 with as many as 20 articles focusing on the spirit of the 20th National Congress, the concept and interpretation of Chinese modernization. Influenced by Sino-Malaysian meetings, the Boao Forum for Asia, and the “Chinese Modernization and the World” forum, Malaysian media coverage saw a second peak in March and April 2023. The fluctuations in report volume in Fig. 1 reflect the sensitivity and attention of Malaysian media to the topic of Chinese modernization.

As shown in Table 1 , the data in the table reflects the level of attention various media outlets have towards the topic of “Chinese Modernization”. When it comes to covering China’s modernization, Nanyang Siang Pau, China Press, The Star and Sinchew Daily are the media with the most extensive coverage. Overall, the data shows the diversity in attention and reporting styles of Malaysian media on the topic of Chinese modernization.

Step 3: Keyword analysis

According to Yu ( 2023 ), keywords are prominent words that reveal the dominant discourse in a corpus. In this study, keyword analysis will be used to explore the ways in which Malaysian media cover the topic of Chinese modernization and the contexts in which it is discussed. At the core of this analysis is the creation of a comprehensive word list covering all the words in the research corpus and their frequency of occurrence. By counting the frequency of words and examining the co-occurrence and collocation patterns of these keywords with other words, the construction of Chinese modernization in Malaysian media can be more accurately identified and understood.

In order to conduct an in-depth keyword analysis, the British National Corpus Footnote 1 (BNC) was chosen as the benchmark for generating the keyword lists in this study. The BNC was established in 1994 and is widely regarded as one of the largest and most representative corpora in the world. It contains over 100 million words of data, of which approximately 90% is derived from written texts such as newspapers, books, and essays, and the remaining 10% from spoken language such as government debates and television talk shows. This corpus brings together a rich sample of late twentieth-century British English, covering a wide range of text types, and is therefore highly representative in its coverage.

In this study, the target corpus was compared with the British National Corpus (BNC), and AntConc 4.2.4, a state-of-the-art corpus analysis tool, was utilized to determine and rank the critical values of the keywords and then to generate a list of keywords. By revealing the key terms used in the coverage of Chinese modernization, the main narratives and frames of Chinese modernization in Malaysian media are understood in depth, thus providing a solid foundation for further textual qualitative analysis.

Step 4: Qualitative analysis

Based on Fairclough’s ( 1989 ) model, this study uses the critical discourse analysis (CDA) technique to qualitatively assess how Chinese modernity is constructed and portrayed in Malaysian media. This analysis focuses on how language choices, syntactic structures, metaphors use, and narrative strategies work together to shape and convey specific discourses about Chinese modernization. By using this approach, the study hopes to uncover how Malaysian media define Chinese modernization, how they express their evaluations and attitudes through specific descriptive language, and how they use various linguistic resources to construct the narratives of their reports. This qualitative approach illuminates potential ideological and cultural trends underlying the textual construction of the Chinese modernization discourse in Malaysian media, in addition to aiding in our understanding of how it is constructed. By analyzing these practices in depth, this study will provide new insights into how the notion of Chinese modernization is understood and interpreted in a cross-cultural context.

Keyword analysis

This study used AntConc 4.2.4 software developed by Anthony ( 2023 ) to search for the keyword Chinese modernization. This software is often used for quantitative research and provides functions such as indexing, word lists, and keyword lists. In this study, a list of relevant keywords was generated by comparing the target corpus containing 192 news articles (see Table 1 ) with BNC as its reference corpus. The results of the analysis are as follows:

Word frequency analysis

The report of the 20th CPC National Congress points out that “Chinese modernization is socialist modernization pursued under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Chinese modernization is modernization with a huge population. It is the modernization of common prosperity for all. It is the modernization of material and cultural-ethical advancement. It is the modernization of harmony between humanity and nature. It is the modernization of peaceful development” (Xi, 2022 ). Based on the connotation of Chinese modernization, among 20 high-frequency words only 19 words related to Chinese modernization were manually screened from the top 100 lists of terms, as shown in Table 2 .

The frequency analysis of words related to Chinese modernization in Table 2 reveals the full range of attention given to this topic in Malaysian media. The 2745 occurrences of “China” show the prominence of China as the centerpiece of the discussion. The occurrence of “Chinese” 1116 times further emphasizes the focus on Chinese characteristics and attributes. “Development” appears 983 times, emphasizing the importance of development issues. Xi’s name appears 669 times, reflecting the key role of Chinese leaders in the process of modernization. “modernization” appears 660 times, indicating a focus on modernization issues. “countries”, “world” and “global” appear 649, 646, and 272 times respectively, highlighting the international dimension of Chinese modernization and demonstrating the importance of Chinese modernization in the international arena. “Cooperation” and “relations” appear 483 and 315 times, respectively, emphasizing the importance of international cooperation in China’s modernization strategy and showing the importance China attaches to international relations. “Malaysia” and “Asia” appear 345 and 180 times, respectively, revealing concern about China’s influence in the region. “Party” and “CPC” appear 249 and 214 times, respectively, indicating the leading role of the CPC in the process of Chinese modernization. The word “economy” is mentioned 212 times, indicating the importance of Chinese modernization on the degree of economic development. The word “future” appears 213 times, reflecting the concern for the future direction of China’s development. Meanwhile, “peace” and “community” are mentioned 172 and 187 times, respectively, reflecting the concern for social peace and community development. The frequency distribution of these keywords indicates the in-depth and multi-faceted attention of Malaysian media to Chinese modernization, covering multiple dimensions such as politics, economy, society, and international relations.

Based on the criticality scores, the 100 most salient keywords were examined for the purpose of effective discourse analysis. This list of keywords serves the dual purpose of highlighting “words worthy of further study”, showing “salience” (Baker, 2023 ) and indicating “the salience of a word” (Yu, 2023 ). This is shown in Table 3 .

Keyword analysis usually emphasizes more meaningful lexical terms and focuses on the first 100 words in the list because they reflect the specific preferences of the corpus discourse for the topic being described (Baker et al., 2013 ). From the analysis of the keyword list, it can be seen that Malaysian media coverage of Chinese modernization covers a wide range of aspects. Keywords such as “China”, “Xi Jinping” and “CPC” emphasize the importance of political leadership and governance system. The words “development”, “economy” and “cooperation” reflect a focus on China’s economic development model and international cooperation. Meanwhile, the keywords “Malaysia”, “Asia” and “US” reveal the importance that the Malaysian media attaches to China’s relations with other countries and regions. Moreover, words such as “modernization”, “security” and “community” reflect the interpretation of China’s social development and modernization process, while keywords such as “Belt and Road Initiative” highlight China’s global strategic vision. The distribution and frequency of these keywords show how the Malaysian media have constructed a multidimensional understanding and interpretation of Chinese modernization while also reflecting ideological and cultural differences in reporting.

Keyword in context (KWIC) analysis

KWIC analysis reveals the specific usage of keywords in sentences, providing insights into the specific contexts of the discourse of Chinese modernization in the Malaysian media. The following examples are extracted from the corpus:

“Chinese modernization is a brilliant achievement sketched by the Chinese people under the leadership of the CPC, successfully eliminating obstacles in paving the way for development and intensifying practices.” (“Modenisasi ala China merupakan hasil cemerlang yang dilakar oleh rakyat China di bawah pimpinan PKC, yang berjaya menghapuskan ranjau duri dalam merintis jalan pembangunan dan mempergiatkan praktik.”) (Malay.people, 08/02/2023)

As shown in Fig. 2 , extract 1 provides an insightful portrayal and affirmation of Chinese modernization from the perspective of Malaysian media. In this context, the leadership role of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is emphasized, demonstrating its centrality in guiding the country’s modernization. At the same time, the active participation of the Chinese people in this process is emphasized, revealing that China’s modernization is not just an effort at the political level but also the result of the joint efforts of a wide range of people. Besides, the sentence “yang berjaya menghapuskan ranjau duri dalam merintis” (successfully eliminating hurdles in pioneering) proves the significant challenges that China has faced and overcome on its path to modernization and reflects China’s resilience in dealing with difficulties and challenges. Malaysian media thus conveyed a positive assessment of China’s complex process and multidimensional efforts to modernize, highlighting the uniqueness and achievements of Chinese modernization.

Concordances of Chinese modernization.

Xi said Chinese modernization is a new model for human advancement and simultaneously dispels the myth that “modernization is equal to Westernization,” presents another picture of modernization, expands the channels for developing countries to achieve modernization, and provides a Chinese solution to aid the exploration of a better social system for humanity. (The Star, 09/02/2023)

In extract 2, Xi Jinping’s statement on Chinese modernization was prominently featured in the Malaysian media, depicting Chinese modernization as a new model for human progress. This description challenges the traditional notion that “modernization is equal to Westernization” and emphasizes that China offers a path to modernization that is different from that of the West. It not only provides a new way for developing countries to modernize but praises China’s contribution to the search for a better path to modernization. This style of reporting shows a positive assessment of China’s role in the global modernization discourse and recognition of its unique contribution.

To achieve modernization and promote common prosperity for all the people in such a super-large economy, it is difficult to achieve it without a solid economic foundation. Chinese modernization is the modernization of common prosperity for all the people. (要在这样一个超大规模的经济体中实现现代化、推动全体人民共同富裕, 没有坚实的经济基础作为支撑是难以实现的。中国式现代化是全体人民共同富裕的现代化。) (China Press, 20/10/2022)

Extract 3 provides insights into the unique challenges and goals that China faces in its pursuit of modernization. It points out that modernizing such a large economy and promoting common prosperity for all is a daunting task that needs to be supported by a solid economic foundation. The formulation here emphasizes that China’s modernization is not just concerned with economic growth but is also geared towards the universality of economic development, i.e. common prosperity. This description reflects the Malaysian media’s understanding of the peculiar goal of Chinese modernization, which is that China is committed to achieving not only economic development but also social equity and the well-being of its people. It shows a deep insight into China’s path of modernization, which sees it as pursuing economic growth while at the same time valuing overall social harmony and balanced development.

China is expected to improve its total factor productivity (TFP)—a main gauge of productive efficiency—as the country advances Chinese modernization and nurtures new drivers of high-quality development, experts say. (The Star, 22/3/2023)

As shown in Fig. 3 , extract 4 focuses on China’s expectations of increasing its total productivity (TFP) as it moves forward with its modernization, highlighting China’s goal of pursuing economic efficiency and high-quality development. The increase in TFP, a key measure of productivity, signals China’s commitment to not merely pursuing economic growth but to improving the efficiency and quality of its economic activities. This reflects the Malaysian media’s awareness of the emphasis on innovation and technological advancement in China’s modernization strategy, as well as insights into China’s paradigm shift in economic development. By emphasizing the increase in TFP, it conveys that China’s economic development is shifting from quantitative expansion to quality improvement and efficiency optimization, hinting at China’s increasing focus on sustainable development and internal structural optimization in the global economy.

The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China clearly summarized the five aspects of Chinese characteristics of Chinese modernization and profoundly revealed the scientific connotation of Chinese modernization. (党的二十大报告明确概括中国式现代化5个方面的中国特色, 深刻揭示中国式现代化的科学内涵。) (Oriental Daily, 16/8/2023)

Extract 5 points out that the report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) clearly summarizes the five aspects of Chinese modernization and profoundly reveals its scientific connotations. This indicates that the Malaysian media have attached importance to China’s in-depth elaboration of its own modernization model at both the theoretical and practical levels. By emphasizing “Chinese characteristics” and “scientific connotation”, it conveys the idea that China’s modernization is not merely an economic or technological transformation, but a comprehensive process involving multiple dimensions and taking into account China’s specific national conditions. This description reflects an understanding of the unique path of China’s modernization, i.e., it is a unique development model based on China’s national conditions. What’s more, this style of reporting showcases the Malaysian media’s attention to China’s political and theoretical developments, as well as its interest in how China defines and presents its own path of modernization on the global stage.

China expects the EU to become an important partner in China’s path of Chinese modernization and to share the opportunities of China’s huge market, institutional openness, and deepening international cooperation. (中国期待欧盟在中国式现代化道路中成为重要伙伴, 共享中国超大市场机遇、制度性开放机遇及深化国际合作机遇。) (Sinchew Daily, 01/12/2022)

Extract 6 reveals China’s desire to seek a significant partnership with the European Union on its path to modernization and highlights opportunities to share China’s huge market, institutional openness, and deeper international cooperation. This reflects the Malaysian media’s insight into China’s global strategy that it is not only advancing its modernization domestically but also actively engaging in international cooperation, especially with important economies like the European Union. This type of coverage highlights China’s openness and willingness to cooperate in the context of globalization, as well as the international dimension of Chinese modernization. By emphasizing cooperation with the EU, it conveys that China’s modernization is not merely concerned with domestic development but also focuses on achieving mutual benefits through international cooperation and market opening. Furthermore, this description hints at China’s growing influence and active role in the global economic and political system. Some examples are from the news corpus.

We need to strengthen the alignment of development strategies, deepen high-quality cooperation, and organically combine the realization of Chinese modernization with the construction of a “prosperous Malaysia” so that China–Malaysia relations will benefit more people of the two countries. (我们要加强发展战略对接, 深化高质量合作, 将实现中国式现代化同建设“昌明大马”有机结合, 使中马关系更多惠及两国人民。)(Nanyang Siang Pau, 18/4/2023)

As shown in Fig. 4 , extract 7 emphasizes the importance of further enhancing the interface between China and Malaysia in terms of development strategies and deepening high-quality cooperation, as well as the goal of integrating the realization of Chinese modernization with “prosperous Malaysia”. This demonstrates the Malaysian media’s deep understanding of China-Malaysia cooperation, especially in terms of joint development and progress. By suggesting the strengthening of development strategies and high-quality cooperation, the passage emphasizes the importance of Sino-Malaysian cooperation while noting that such cooperation should contribute to the common prosperity of both sides. This description not only highlights China’s cooperative stance and open-door strategy in the international arena, but also illuminates China’s willingness to explore the path of development with other countries on the basis of respecting the characteristics and needs of each country. Additionally, this narrative also hints at the possibility that China and Malaysia can learn from each other in the process of their respective modernization and achieve mutual benefits through cooperation.

President Xi Jinping is taking the helm and leading the way for Chinese modernization with the sentiment and responsibility of “I will live without myself and live up to the people.”(习近平主席正以“我将无我、不负人民”的情怀和担当, 为中国式现代化掌舵领航。) (China Press, 13/6/2023)

Extract 8 describes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership role and personal commitment in the modernization of China. In this extract, the expression “I will live without myself and live up to the people” highlights Xi Jinping’s deep commitment and sacrifice to the people as a national leader and emphasizes his personal commitment and sense of responsibility in promoting the country’s modernization. This reflects the Malaysian media’s recognition of Xi’s pivotal role in China’s path to modernization as a central figure in China’s pursuit of progress and development. By highlighting Xi’s leadership role, the quote conveys an awareness of the centrality and influence of China’s political leadership in the country’s development strategy. Moreover, such a description indicates the Malaysian media’s positive assessment of Chinese leaders’ assumption of social responsibility and advancement of the well-being of all people, showing appreciation for the important responsibilities and efforts of the Chinese leadership in the country’s modernization process.

Pushing forward new urbanization measures, improving people’s well-being, and sharing fresh opportunities in Chinese modernization with the world will also be an area of interest, added Liu. (The Star, 28/3/2023)

Extract 9 focuses on a range of measures taken by China in its modernization process, including promoting new urbanization, improving people’s well-being, and sharing with the world new opportunities arising from China’s modernization. This reflects the Malaysian media’s multidimensional perspective on China’s modernization strategy, particularly in terms of urbanization, social well-being, and international cooperation. By emphasizing new urbanization, the quote reveals China’s pursuit of a more balanced and sustainable path in urban development. At the same time, the reference to improving people’s well-being shows that China’s modernization is not just concerned with economic growth but also focuses on improving people’s quality of life and social welfare. In addition, the reference to sharing the opportunities of China’s modernization with the world reflects China’s active participation in the global arena and its willingness to share the fruits of development. Overall, it conveys the Malaysian media’s awareness of the positive efforts and achievements that China has demonstrated in comprehensive development, social progress, and international cooperation.

China is advancing Chinese modernization with its high-quality development, which will bring new opportunities to cooperation between China and Ethiopia, said Chinese President Xi Jinping here on Wednesday.(The Star, 24/8/2023)

Extract 10 reflects Chinese President Xi Jinping’s discourse on Chinese modernization, with a particular emphasis on the new opportunities for cooperation arising from China’s high-quality development and what this means for cooperative relations between China and Ethiopia. This shows the Malaysian media’s awareness of the emphasis on high-quality and sustainable development in China’s modernization process and the belief that this approach to development not only benefits China itself but also opens up new possibilities for international cooperation with other countries, such as Ethiopia. By referring to Xi Jinping’s words, the quote proves the importance that the Chinese leadership places on foreign cooperation, especially in promoting co-development and building mutually beneficial partnerships. In addition to highlighting China’s proactive involvement in international development, this description also shows the strengthening of China’s cooperative ties with African nations, particularly with regard to their shared goals of modernization and development. This sheds light on the Malaysian media’s understanding of China’s significance within the global framework of South-South cooperation as well as its role as a global development partner.

KWIC’s analysis of these examples reveals the multidimensional perspective of the discourse of Chinese modernization in the Malaysian media. These reports highlight China’s involvement in the international arena and its cooperative relationships with nations like Malaysia, in addition to portraying the perception of China’s domestic political and economic progress. This diversity of coverage reveals the Malaysian media’s understanding of Chinese modernization, reflecting international perspectives and geopolitical awareness in the context of globalization.

In summary, through the corpus analysis of the topic of Chinese modernization in Malaysian media reports, it can be seen that Malaysian media focuses on China’s economic development, international cooperation, and globalization process when reporting on Chinese modernization. These media reports cover not just the economic dimension but also the political, social, and cultural dimensions, resulting in a multidimensional and comprehensive picture of China’s modernization. In addition, Malaysian media coverage of Chinese modernization indicates an awareness and appreciation of China’s growing influence in the global economic and political arena.

Qualitative analysis

Based on Fairclough’s model, the qualitative analysis of Chinese modernization involves examining the choice of language, syntactic structure, use of metaphors, and narrative strategies. Based on the content and terminology of the media reports, this paper manually classifies the Malaysian media’s coverage of Chinese modernization into three categories: positive, neutral, and negative, as shown in Table 4 .

Based on Table 4 , the study draws the following conclusions: by counting and categorizing the attitude tendency of 192 reports through the evaluation category of words that express emotions, 83.9% of the media had a positive attitude towards the reports of Chinese modernization, 10.9% had a neutral attitude, and 5.2% had a negative attitude. That means there were a total of 161 positive reports, 21 neutral reports, and 10 negative reports. Malay-language reports were the least reported, but all tended to be positive; Nanyang Siang Pau, China Press, Sinchew Daily and The Star were the media outlets with the most extensive coverage of Chinese modernization; among all media outlets, China Press and Nanyang Siang Pau have the most positive attitudes towards Chinese modernization, with 40 positive reports in China Press and 43 positive reports in Nanyang Siang Pau, while The Star has the most negative attitudes towards Chinese modernization, with 6 negative reports. It shows that Malaysia affirms Chinese modernization and China’s overall development achievements, but occasionally, there are some neutral and negative reports. The details of the reports are as follows:

Positive reporting and perceptions

In Malaysian media reports, positive portrayals and perceptions of Chinese modernization frequently surface. For instance, an article in the New Straits Times utilizes positive and affirming language to describe China’s path to modernization, such as “China’s determination to press forward to national rejuvenation through a Chinese path to modernization could be an inspiration to other countries when it comes to carving their own destinies” (New Strait Times, 28/10/2022). This expression not only highlights the model’s distinctiveness and efficacy but also communicates an inspirational message, suggesting that China’s development approach might serve as a beacon for other nations. The Star, through its headline “Embark on a new journey, benefit from shared opportunities,” employs the metaphor of a “new journey” to denote a vibrant process of progress and development. The piece details China’s developmental milestones, like the significant GDP growth from 54 trillion yuan to 114 trillion yuan (The Star, 31/10/2022), highlighting the positive image of China’s rapid economic development and social progress. “According to Ouyang Yujing, China has been Malaysia’s largest trading partner for 13 consecutive years and will undoubtedly be Malaysia’s largest trading partner for the 14th consecutive year this year”. (“欧阳玉靖认为, 中国已连续13年成为马来西亚最大的贸易伙伴, 毫无疑问今年将连续14年成为马来西亚最大的贸易伙伴”。) (Sinchew Daily, 3/11/2022) This report focuses on the economic and trade cooperation between China and Malaysia, underlining the influence and role of Chinese modernization in regional economic integration. The Malay-language report even mentions “pemodenan gaya Cina memberi pilihan baharu untuk umat manusia bagi merealisasikan pemodenan” (Chinese modernization provides a new option for humanity to achieve modernization) (Cision PR Newswire, 19/10/2022), highlighting it as a novel developmental model providing fresh perspectives and alternatives for the globe.

A unified narrative that integrates news in English, Chinese, and Malay praises China’s social and economic advancements as well as the possible global effects of its modernization. The reports construct an optimistic discourse by underscoring China’s accomplishments and portraying its development model’s uniqueness and global influence. This narrative presents China as a global leader in development models while also painting a positive picture of its achievements locally in Malaysia. More importantly, such reports reflect the multifaceted understanding and interpretation by Malaysian media of Chinese modernization. Through the depiction of China’s economic growth, social progress, and its collaborative relations with Malaysia and globally, Malaysian media demonstrate a profound insight into the complexities of Chinese modernization. Coverage spans economic, societal, political, and cultural realms, showcasing a thorough observation and analysis of the multifaceted nature of Chinese modernization.

In short, Malaysian media, through positive narrative construction strategies, communicates an endorsement of the process of Chinese modernization. This approach illustrates that media serves not merely as a conduit for information dissemination but as a constructor of meaning, shaping public perception and understanding of Chinese modernization through carefully designed narrative frameworks. By emphasizing China’s achievements in economic development, societal progress, and international cooperation, readers are offered a comprehensive view of the positive strides in China’s modernization journey. This also provides valuable insights and inspiration for media exchanges and cooperation between China and Malaysia.

Neutral reporting and perceptions

Neutral reporting on Chinese modernization in Malaysian media is usually distinguished by an impartial language presentation. According to Fairclough’s model, neutral reporting in the Malaysian media usually presents Chinese modernization through objective language. Such reports tend to provide factual information without being overly dramatic or critical but rather maintain a neutral point of view so that readers can understand the meaning and implications of Chinese modernization from multiple perspectives. In a report by The Star, such as Xi Jinping words being quoted, “From this day forward, the central task of the CPC will be to lead the Chinese people of all ethnic groups in a concerted effort to realize the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects and to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization, Xi said.” (The Star,18/10/2022) The overall content of this report objectively presents the CPC’s official stance and goals in advancing modernization without obvious tendencies or emotional overtones. In another New Strait Times report, it was mentioned that Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of maintaining peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and called for the establishment of an in-depth regional partnership of mutual trust, inclusiveness, and mutual benefit (New Strait Times, 30/11/2022). Such reports provide concrete information about China’s role and position in the international arena rather than evaluating or interpreting it. Similarly, there are reports from the Malay Mail that detail the sanctions imposed by the US on Chinese entities and the reasons behind these sanctions, such as China’s balloon program (Malay Mail, 11/2/2023). The report neither criticizes nor defends China, maintaining the neutrality of journalism. These reports tend to present the facts in a simple manner, avoiding obvious bias or emotional tendencies, allowing readers to understand the multiple meanings of Chinese modernization from multiple perspectives.

Through such neutral reporting, Malaysian media showcases a multidimensional perspective on the process of Chinese modernization, neither favoring nor critiquing but objectively showcasing relevant facts and information. This reporting style offers the public an objective viewpoint, aiding them in examining and understanding the path of Chinese modernization and its global role and impact from various angles. By displaying the CPC’s official position, China’s efforts in regional peace, and the international challenges China faces, this type of neutral reporting provides readers with a comprehensive, unfiltered insight into Chinese modernization, underscoring the importance and complexity of understanding Chinese modernization in a globalized context. This objective approach to reporting exemplifies journalistic professionalism and fosters cross-cultural understanding, contributing to building a more inclusive and deeply informed international perspective.

Negative reporting and countering stigmatization

While Malaysian media’s coverage and perception of Chinese modernization are primarily positive and neutral, negative reports occasionally appear, often resulting from misunderstandings, biases, and stigmatization. These negative reports typically originate from opposition media or specific political forces, aiming to discredit Chinese modernization and its relationship with Malaysia. For example, Malay Mail proposes China’s economic slowdown, underscoring decisions that prioritize ideology over economic growth (Malay Mail, 10/3/2023). The New Strait Times reports on the expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, emphasizing its potential global security threat (New Strait Times, 27/4/2023).

In this context, the media should adopt a more balanced and objective reporting style, avoiding one-sided criticism or stigmatization. Accurate reporting should involve a comprehensive understanding and analysis of facts, offering a fair commentary on various aspects of the events. To illustrate, reporting on military modernization should consider the overall context of regional security and China’s role in it rather than just focusing on the enhancement of military strength. In the economic realm, there should be a balanced portrayal of the diverse impacts and long-term goals of China’s economic policies. Regarding nuclear weapons, the coverage should also address broader issues of international nuclear non-proliferation while describing China’s military capabilities.

Additionally, countering stigmatization involves more than just avoiding negative reporting; it’s about providing a diverse perspective that enables the public to understand and evaluate Chinese modernization from various angles. Through such comprehensive reporting, fact-based rational dialogs can be promoted, helping to eliminate stigmatization based on prejudice and misunderstanding. Overall, Malaysian media’s coverage of Chinese modernization should strive to provide a comprehensive, objective, and diverse perspective, not only aiding in a correct understanding of China but also reflecting the reality of international relations and geopolitical complexity. Such reporting can establish fact-based and understanding dialogs, fostering broader and deeper international exchanges and cooperation.

Thus, Malaysian media reports on Chinese modernization show diverse attitudes, with positive and neutral reports dominating. These reports have constructed a complex discourse on Chinese modernization through language choices, syntactic structures, use of metaphors, and narrative strategies. Through these discursive practices, it is possible to see the Malaysian media’s multidimensional understanding and interpretation of Chinese modernization, as well as the possible ideological and cultural tendencies behind it. These findings provide new perspectives for understanding the concept of Chinese modernization in a cross-cultural context and also highlight the importance of strengthening media exchanges and cooperation between China and Malaysia.

Discussion and conclusion

The study finds that Malaysian media predominantly adopt positive and neutral discourse strategies in reporting Chinese modernization, highlighting its uniqueness and effectiveness. Concurrently, factual reporting provides a platform for a multi-faceted understanding of Chinese modernization. Specific discussions on the three questions proposed earlier in the article are as follows:

RQ1: What discourse strategies have been employed by Malaysian media on the topic of Chinese modernization? Through a blend of quantitative and qualitative analyses, including word frequency and keyword context analyses via AntConc software and a critical discourse analysis informed by Fairclough’s theory, a multifaceted discourse is shown. Malaysian media frequently commend China’s growth and global role, employing metaphors and similes to vividly portray its modernization journey, like describing Chinese modernization as a “vision that bears global influence” (New Strait Times, 28/10/2022) and “new journey” (The Star, 31/10/2022), thus conveying the global influence and dynamic characteristics of Chinese modernization. However, critical discourses also emerge, often influenced by geopolitical dynamics, misunderstandings, or the Western media narrative, indicating a complex media landscape that navigates between admiration, objectivity, and skepticism.

RQ2: What are Malaysian media’s attitudes towards China’s modernization? In terms of attitudinal perceptions of Chinese modernization in Malaysia, the study reveals a complex landscape characterized predominantly by positive and neutral attitudes, with a smaller proportion of negative viewpoints. The positive and neutral stances predominate, reflecting a recognition of China’s development as beneficial for regional collaboration. Nevertheless, critical perspectives rooted in political divergences, misinformation, or the influence of Western media highlight a diverse public discourse. This diversity underscores the significance of nuanced media engagement that transcends mere reporting, fostering a deeper, multifaceted understanding of Chinese modernization.

RQ3: How is the discourse system of Chinese modernization constructed in Malaysian media? In exploring how the discourse system of Chinese modernization is constructed in Malaysia, the study identifies a multifaceted approach characterized by diverse thematic focuses and varied narrative strategies. The Malaysian media’s content encompasses themes such as economic, political, social, military, and cultural aspects, presenting a comprehensive view of Chinese modernization. Narrative strategies range from positive portrayals highlighting China’s achievements and strengths to neutral, fact-based reporting and extend to critical analyses in less frequent negative depictions. This range ensures a rich, multi-dimensional discourse. This complex construction of discourse reflects and underscores the media’s pivotal role in shaping public perception and international discourse on globally significant developments.

The discourse construction of Chinese modernization in Malaysian media, as revealed through this study, showcases a predominantly positive and neutral portrayal underpinned by a nuanced understanding of the global significance and impact of China’s development model. The analysis uncovers the multifaceted narrative strategies employed by Malaysian media, ranging from affirmative and objective to critical, reflecting a complex interplay of cultural factors, political dynamics, and media practices. This discussion integrates the study’s findings with a broader examination of international relations, power dynamics, and the influence of media ownership and editorial styles on reporting.

The analysis reveals that the positive portrayal of Chinese modernization in Malaysian media aligns with China’s strategic use of media to project its soft power globally, echoing Kurlantzick’s ( 2007 ) observations on China’s soft power initiatives. Similarly, the nuanced and multifaceted portrayal of Chinese modernization, ranging from positive to critical narratives, can be contextualized within the framework of China’s public diplomacy and soft power exertion in the ASEAN region, as explored by Li and Chitty ( 2009 ). This suggests that Malaysian media’s discourse strategies may be influenced not only by domestic perspectives but also by China’s broader international relations strategies.

Conversely, the presence of limited negative discourse unveils the intricate power dynamics at play, echoing Western media’s skepticism towards China’s political model and global ambitions, a theme explored in depth by Callahan ( 2013 ). Such critical reports signify the geopolitical contestations between Western-led and China-led narratives of modernization, illustrating Malaysian media’s nuanced engagement with these narratives to navigate between competing geopolitical interests, thus mirroring Malaysia’s foreign policy of neutrality and non-alignment.

Besides, the varied attitudes towards Chinese modernization—ranging from positive to neutral and occasionally negative—underscore the profound impact of cultural factors and Malaysia’s diverse media landscape. Media outlets, each with distinct ownership structures and editorial directions, reflect varying degrees of alignment with governmental policies towards China, further influenced by Malaysia’s multicultural society. This societal complexity, with its web of ethnic, cultural, and historical connections to China, molds a layered portrayal of Chinese modernization, indicative of the nuanced understanding and representation of China’s global influence and its developmental narrative within the Malaysian media sphere.

In conclusion, this study highlights the critical role of media in shaping the discourse of Chinese modernization within the context of Malaysia’s complex socio-political landscape and its implications for Sino-Malaysian relations and international communication. The findings underscore the need for a nuanced understanding of the factors influencing media narratives and the importance of fostering media exchanges and cooperation between China and Malaysia to enhance mutual understanding and address misconceptions.

Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations aim to improve the communication effect of Chinese modernization in Malaysia and enhance the international influence of Chinese culture:

Firstly, to delve deeper into the portrayal and perceptions of Chinese modernization within Malaysian media, a more detailed analysis of reports on Chinese modernization in Malaysian outlets should be included. This entails examining linguistic features, narrative styles, angles of reporting, and underlying cultural and political factors. By conducting an in-depth examination, diverse attitudes and perspectives towards Chinese modernization in Malaysian media can be uncovered, shedding light on how these views are shaped against specific backdrops. Moreover, this analysis offers China vital information on improving its modernization reputation within and outside Malaysia. By identifying potential misunderstandings and biases, China can tailor its international communication more effectively, aiming to mitigate negative impacts and enhance the persuasive power of its modernization narrative.

Secondly, to further enhance media exchanges and collaboration between China and Malaysia, it’s crucial to implement strategies that foster understanding and cooperation. This could involve structured exchange programs, frequent dialogs, workshops, and co-producing content reflecting the multifaceted nature of Chinese modernization. Joint media projects might explore the benefits of China-Malaysia cooperation across sectors like economic growth, education, technology, and cultural exchanges. Such initiatives are aimed not just at improving the depth and accuracy of media representations but also at laying a solid foundation for improved bilateral relations, thereby fostering mutual respect and a shared perspective between the two nations.

Thirdly, to effectively counter stigmatization and improve the representation of Chinese modernization in Malaysian media, it is vital to adopt targeted research and develop countermeasures that address misunderstanding, prejudice, and misrepresentation. This involves analyzing stigmatizing discourse, understanding biases, and emphasizing China’s commitment to peace, development, and global cooperation. Developing comprehensive media training programs for journalists and media practitioners from both countries can enhance understanding and reduce misinterpretations of Chinese modernization. Furthermore, engaging with international media outlets can clarify misconceptions and present an objective view of China’s development. Establishing a constructive media dialog between China and Malaysia can facilitate a more nuanced representation of Chinese modernization, contributing to a respectful international discourse.

In all, this study highlights the media’s role in framing Chinese modernization within Malaysia’s socio-political context, affecting Sino-Malaysian relations and broader international dialog. It advocates for enhanced China-Malaysia media exchanges to address misconceptions and deepen mutual understanding. However, the analysis, limited to 192 reports from a one-year period, suggests the need for broader research to fully capture the discourse on Chinese modernization. Future studies should expand the dataset for a comprehensive understanding, aiding in the strategic portrayal of China’s development narrative globally.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

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DPW designed the whole study. DPW and SPL jointly collected and analyzed the data, wrote and continued revising the manuscript, improved its quality and contributed altogether to this work.

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Wang, D., Liang, S. Discourse construction of Chinese modernization from the perspective of Malaysian media. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 653 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03152-9

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Received : 31 December 2023

Accepted : 07 May 2024

Published : 22 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03152-9

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