THE POLITICS OF POST-INDUSTRIALISM: A COMPARATIVE INQUIRY.

Abstract

The study of political change and development has customarily focused on Third World rather than advanced industrial nations because it has been implicitly assumed that the latter are stable and modern. Recently, however, scholars have begun to re-examine customary ideas about the stability of modern democracies and have suggested that they may be entering a new era of change. This era is commonly termed post-industrial. This dissertation explores some of the political?as opposed to economic, technological, or social--features of post-industrialism. Because so few of the studies of post-industrialism go beyond an investigation of the United. States as a post-industrial society and are consequently non comparative in nature, the present study includes cross-national data wherever possible. Post-industrialism is defined in terms of labor force: in a post-industrial nation, the largest segment of the labor force is employed in the service sector. This differs from the pre-industrial society, where most of the workers are farmers and miners, and the industrial society, where factory workers comprise the bulk of the labor force. As defined above, eight nations are post-industrial: The United States. Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Sweden and Japan.