Modernization theory
Modernization theory, or modernisation theory, is a sociological and comparative political science theory positing that processes of structural socioeconomic development, including industrialization, urbanization, rising per capita income, and rising levels of education, generate systematic transformations in political culture, institutional structure, and value systems, culminating in the consolidation of liberal-democratic governance and rationalist-bureaucratic forms of authority. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset, drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons.