Applying Hierarchical Complexity to Political Development

Abstract

Hierarchical complexity's unidimensional measurement can help rectify policy confusion and debates about democratization and terrorism reduction. Stages of political development examined using the method yield task analyses demonstrating why stages cannot be skipped or rushed. Composites of stages and societies' transitions implicate policy change for anti-corruption and nation-building. New indexes for the political domain should be developed using hierarchical complexity to account for and measure a multitude of political tasks regardless of content or context. Measurement offers a reliable, empirical basis to resist attempts to rush development. Hierarchical complexity accounts for why such efforts are doomed in advance to fail.

Rethinking cross-cultural adaptability using behavioral developmental theory: An analysis of different migrant behaviors.

“…Table 1 outlines a hypothesis for looking at cultural adaptability through the lens of hierarchical complexity across five stages: concrete, abstract, formal, systematic, and metasystematic (Commons, 2007). This hypothesis borrows heavily from Ross and Commons (2008).…”

Vladimir Putin as a political leader: Challenges to an adult developmentally-informed analysis of politics and political culture.

“…As the complexity of skills and competences rises among the followership or, in the case of political leadership, in society at large, higher stages of leadership practice are expected from leaders to be respected as leaders and thus followed at all. Moreover, sociologists of AD have often stressed that the broad public is generally attracted by leaders and leadership styles that are one level of complexity above their own, and which thus function as role models in view of more comprehensive, more efficient, more responsible or wiser answers to burning problems than the respective “audience” would have been able to come up with itself (Chilton, 1988, Rosenberg, 1988, 2002; Rosenberg, Ward, & Chilton, 1988; Ross & Commons, 2008).…”

“…While classic AD-based leadership research has come up with a considerable number of tools and strategies for measuring individual leaders’ performance, as well as for supporting their developmental growth (Reams, 2016), things are a lot less evident with regard to followers and society at large. Even though a number of pioneers have started to explore and use AD theories and knowledge for analyzing the complexity of cultures within cultures and societies (see the overview by Fein & Jordan, 2016 as well as Chilton, 1988; Fein, 2010a, 2010b, 2012; Fein & Weibler, 2014; Rosenberg, 2002; Rosenberg et al, 1988; Ross & Commons, 2008), there is as yet no widely accepted set of methods and approaches for this kind of research. Applying structural development models for analyzing the dynamics of specific sociopolitical, sociocultural and socioeconomic phenomena appears very plausible as such, given that all societies consist of individuals who are more or less developed, and the mutual interaction of whose different logics of meaning making is at the heart of many social science problems.…”

Cognitive basis for corruption and attitudes towards corruption in organizations viewed from a structuralist adult developmental meta-perspective.

“…» Moreover, adequate and sustainable solutions of the problem of corruption are likely to be reached only on the basis of at least meta-systematic structures of reasoning and performance (MHC stage 13 and higher) which are able to understand the inherent logics of corrupt behaviors and to design stage-sensitive solutions beyond "one size fits all. " At this point, we have to stress that as a rule, organizations, like societies in general, "are comprised of individuals operating at multiple stages of development in various domains" (Ross & Commons, 2008). Thus, organizations, as well as "political cultures and social systems display concurrent operations of several different stages.…”

“…If the target context is mistaken for a formal stage context, "the new forms of government or business procedure may just provide new facades to which conventional behaviors of patronage adapt and persist, usually even more effectively because access to new resources is available. Ross & Commons, 2008 argue: "For example, the formal concept of employees on payroll is used to pass resources to clients, often as 'ghost employees' who do not work for the employer. (...) Bureaucracies become engorged through such arrangements.…”