ABSTRACT
Political development, as a concept in contemporary American Political Science, has been continuously misused to raise the expectations of the underdeveloped countries, while the gap the political and economic cleavage between the developed and underdeveloped countries dramatically increases. The assumptions underlying contemporary theories of political development express a basic consensus in "normal" political science on what constitutes political development. The developmental paradox is founded on the fundamental dichotomy between espoused principles and their practice in the Latin American countries. Policy implementation seems to have preceded the formulations of the theoretical construct of political development. However, the policy intrinsically contained the elements which political scientists were going to incorporate into the concept of political development. Static boundary definitions generate further structural and functional limitations for the concept of political development. Political stability is the prerequisite for "balanced" political development. Political stability promotes greater structural control of the political system.
