THE CIVIC CULTURE REVISITED edited by GABRIEL A. ALMOND. Stanford University SIDNEY VERBA ‘Stanford University “| vp ae a SAGE PUBLICATIONS ‘The Publishers of Professional Social Science Newbury Park London New DelhiChapter ¥ Political Culture in Great Britain: The Decline of the Civic Culture Dennis Kavanagh Chapter VI Contents - 124 ‘The United States: Political Culture under Stress. 177 Alan I, Abramowitz Chapter VIE Changing German Political Culture David P. Conradt Chapter VIIT ‘The Political Culture of Italy: Continuity and Change . Giacomo Sani Chapter IX Political Culture in Mexico: Continuities and Revisionist Interpretations. Ann L. Craig and Wayne A. Cornelius Chapter X On Revisiting the Civic Culture: A Personal Postscript Sidney Verba Index 2... 273 + 325 394 - 41 CHAPTER 1 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept Gabriel A. Almond Stanford University EARLY NOTIONS Something like a notion of political culture has been around as long as men. have spoken itten about politics. The prophets in their oracles, exhortations, and anathemas impute different qualities and propensities to the Amalekites, the Phils: tines, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians, The Greek and Roman historians, poets,.and dramatists comment on the culture and character of the Jonians and Dorians, Spartans, Athenians, and the Rhaetians, Pannonians, Dacians, Parthians, ans. ‘The concepts and categories we use in the analysis of pol culture—subculture, elite political culeure, political soci tion, and culture change—are implied ih ancient writ Jacob on his deathbed foresaw differing fates and roles his. twelve sons, whose offspring were to constitute the tribes of Is Reuben would be as “unstable as water” and would not ve eminence; Simeon was an angry man who would be J; Issachar would bow “his shoulder" and would become a “slave at forced labor.” As for Judah, “Tite scepter Copyright © 1980 by Gabriat A, Atinoin2 The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept shall not depart fram Judah,/nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, . . , bbe the obedience of the peoples.” + And so an. The great families and gentes of Athens and Rome the Eumolpidae and the Butadae, the Claudii and the Jul each had its founder its sacred fires, its traditions, and its ly cosmopolitan royal court engaged in war and diplomacy, pitted against the prophets and their ‘supporters affirming and perfécting the Sinaitic revelations and covenant; and the Jerusalem priesthood and temple officialdom pitted against the’ surviving local cult leaders of the “high places.” ‘The notion of political culture change is one of the most powerful themes of classical literature. Each Greck city-state had its memory of an austere Solonic or Lycurgan past by which to measure the corrupt present. Both the older and the younger Gato. were celebrators of the frugal, martial, and civic virtues of the early Roman republic. The Greeks had a cyclical theory of political change, and explained the rise and fall of political constitutions in social psychological terms.* Nowhere do we find a stronger affirmation of the importance of political culture than in Plato's Republic when he argues “chat governments vary as the di is of men vary, and that there roust be as many of the one as there are of the other, For we cannot suppose that States are made of ‘oak and Tock’ and not out of the human natures which are in them.” tudes, ion experiences of the second. In ways that surely would igue, if not embarrass, our contemporary psychohistorians he explains the qualities of the aristocratic, oligarchi democratic polity by the pre which are in turn explained by typical family constellations with cultivated, glory-seeking, or money-grubbing fathers, dominant, compliant, or complaining mothers, and the like. And just as he es Plato in enormous weight on political +» [OJE all animals the boy is the most un- The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept 8 manageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him ao a a a insubordinate of animals. Wherefore he must be bound many bridles... "* Mothers and nurses, fathers, tutors, and political officials all have the obligation to guide and coerce the incorrigible animal into the path of civic virtue. The last book of Aristotle's Politics, a fragment to be sure, was devoted to ion. Plutarch reports how Lycurgus engineered the Spartan character fom the moment of birth, so t0 speak, coun seling the women to bathe their newborn sons in wine, rather than in water, in.order to temper their bodies. The nurses used bands; the children grew up free and uncon- limb and form, and not dainty or fanciful about a rea ce te eee eae alee me out that the ee aaa Ts Ra to ut no res etn: Sem soot Nee oes ao iunurious tant they have not gor ued (0 res a yo4 The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept government.* Aristotle's conception of mixed government dominant middle class is rel: years have characterized as a substantial consensus on the | and the direction and content of public p. lerance of a plurality of interests and bel bil and mutual trust in the citizenry. Political historians and philosophers who observed and wrote in the more than two millennia that elapsed between Aristotle and century dealt ization themes, none of them le's sophistication and rigor. Indeed, a few ‘ams with causal arrows would turn Aristotle's theory of constitutional government, and its cultural components, into at would meet the contemporary standards of the American Political Science Review, though the great philosopher might have thought that the delivery of these ideas as lectures in the Lyceum in Athens was a sufficient honor. Surely Machiavelli, in his contrast between the vigor and probity of the citizens and leaders of republican Rome, and tl Y, and fickleness of the populace of the was sharply aware of ‘ical-cultural variables, of moral values, lentity and commitment for p for grandeur and decay. In this connection sion of Roman history in the Discourses o ‘Whoever runs through the vast number of exploits performed by the people of Rome as a whole, or by many of the Romans individually, will see that its ns were more afraid of breaking an oath than of breaking the law, since they held in The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept 5 the power of Gotl than the power of man. while emphasizing political culture and socis tion themes, tends to treat them anecdotally and illustrat rather than analytically as do Plato and Aristotle. Two centuries ‘later Montesquieu, feflecting similarly on Roman history as a way of deriving generalizations about ibutes the triumphs of republican Rome to the passion of the Roman citizenry fostered by theit reli- gion, by a constant pursuit of military conquest, and by a lively antagonism between the patriciate and the plebs. The cor- andl empire he attributes to the opening of Roman citizenship to the culturally heterogeneous Italian and non-Italian peoples, and t ming of the simple virtues of the republic by the conquests, spoils, and comimerce of fai gions. While it is clear in his reflections on the Roman experi- treatment of French culture and society in The Letters, and particularly in Montesqu ion of the State, takes on citizens. This forms ws decay or die out, every day new opinion. . ‘Tocqueville's analysis of American democracy and of the origins of the French Revolution are among the most sop!6 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept cated treatments of these themes. In Democracy in America he points out: the manners of the people may be considered as one of the great general causes to which the maintenance of a democr: republic customs with the meaning which word mores; for I apply it not only to manners properly so called—that is, to what might be termed the habits of the heart— but to the various notions and opinions current among men and term, therefore, the whole moral -ctual condition of 2 people.1? ad a ‘His analysis of the political attitudes of the French bourgeaisie, and aristocracy on similar masterpiece of beginnings of modern political saciology, which we discuss below, ENLIGHYENMENT AND LIBERAL VIEWS If the notion of political culture has in some sense always been with us,"* how do we explain its sudden popularity in the 1960s and the proliferation of research dealing with it in recent decades? We suggest that the failure of enlightenment and liberal expectations as they related to political development and political culture set the explanatory problem to which political culture research was a response, and the development of social theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of sacial science methodology after World War II (particularly survey methodology) provided the opportunity for solving this problem. The intellectual challe: ments and methodological inver this field of inquiry. ‘The enlightenment and liberal theories of political develop- ment of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were essentially political socialization/political culture theories. Science and the spread af secular knowledge were to lead, on the one hand, to. the increase in the wealth of nations and the spread of welfare and, on the other, to the rationalization of government organi- zation and law, and to democratization. Whether in its natural ‘The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept Jaw/natural rights aspect @ 1a Locke-Condoreet, or tarian aspect 4 la Helvetius-Bentham, enlightenment pol -al political theory deriving and just ‘ion from man’s nature as an inalienable “right-bearing” creature, as a hedonic pain avoider and pleasure seeker, and as 2 creator, transmitter, and consumer of knowledge. Ft the nineteenth century these belies, and political progress pushed forward by the pr and the spread of reason that underlay the disci ive government and politics as it emerged in the late nineteenth century. : z ‘Woodrow Wilson wrote with sublime confidence in 1898: tocraey scems about to dlsappesr, Democracy seems about iy t2 prevail Ever since the rte of popular education in the las century and jis vast development since have assured inking weight to. the gas of the people everywhere, the vance of democratic opinion andthe spread of democratic iMedtutions have been most marked. and most significant. They have destroyed almost all pure forms of Monarchy and by iowrodcing into thea imperative forces of popular thought hal the concrete instition® of popular represent Promise to reduce politics co a single pure form by Elnor governing fores and institutions but those of « wide surge thn aulemovrate represemation -by reducing all forms of govern- ment to Democracy." But this confidence in inevitable incremental progress at this time of Wilson's writing had already been challenged by the Marxist version of enlightenment expectations, and was about to be challenged by the disillusioned clitists of the turn of the century. Marx was surely in the tradition of the enlightenment, save that he arranged the theoretical variables differently and viewed the historical process in dialectic rather than incremental terms. Instead of intellectual improvement pressing forward material and political-moral progress in a benign sequence,8 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept material improvement produces three political subcultures: an exploitative and ever concentrating capitalist class; an exploited, propagandized, and coerced working class; and an enlightened organization of revolutionaries. As the processes of material concentration press forward to their logical conclusions, the popular masses shake themselves free of 1 lutionaries acquire resonance in the working class, and the ruling class is swept aside, making possible the enlightenment culture and society of mass welfare and political rationality. ‘The “elitist” political theorists—in particular Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Roberto Michels—attacked both th and the Marxist versions of inevitable progress in culture and organization, picturing permanent elitist exploitation and a 8 different set of psychological and sociological premis ‘This European pessimism had its echoes among Bi American political theorists. Graham Wallas even before World War I challenged the complacence of the assumption of increas- ing rationality and spreading democr mm, and in the 1920 edition of his book pointed ou he affirmed the thought and action: “men often act in p mediate stimulus of affection and instinct, may be directed toward political ent ferent from those facts in the world aroun: ality by developing a cogni which stressed the discrepancies between ity itself, concluding that popular government could succeed in beco: rested publics on the nature of political re their political interests.#° ‘Woodrow Wilson were less complacent than he, registering the theoretical challenges of both antiliberal writers, and of threat- The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Gonvept 9 ening and sioning events. James Bryce, writing on the future of democracy in the immediate aftermath of World War I—some thirty years after Wilson's textbook on comparative government had appeared—found it possible to express merely hope rather than. confidence in the future of democracy. the 1920s still could echo Wilson's imed: “It is hardly an exaggeration democratization of the entire civilized science.” But the p! government text writers of the 1980s—Herman Finer and Curl J. Friedrich—were deeply troubled as liberal expectations were challenged first by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the afumph of Fascism in Italy, and mote fundamentally by the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Finer concluded his massive work on a note of exhortation to the forces of good—education—to over- Friedrich concludes the preface of fant reaffirmation of enlightenment ifetime of this generation, the present will be abandoned, and finer, more noble conceptions Other students of politics in these decades, as we have sug: gested, began to go beyond these reaffirmations of enlightenment faith and hope as they confronted overwhelming evidence that forces at work were more complex and ambivalent. ical trend was in the diréction of democracy, then Revolution and its otuteome, and big doubts began to trigger many smaller doubts. Eni expectations didn’t even hold fully in such a country as France, the persistence of alist, the in- and the ins of its cabinets, or as England with its aristocratic institutions and Toty working ‘lass, or as the United States, where participation in enlight- enment values was denied to people of color. Tt was not that the jons of studlents of com: parative polities like iner, and Friedrich were10 The Intellectual History of the Givie Culture Concept and groups. On the contrary, their stock in trade was the explication of differences in the concentration and dispersion of power among nations, differences in electoral arrangements, Party systems, legislative organization and procedure, bureau- qratic arrangements, and judicial structure and process. But the differences they discovered could be ordered according to their approximation to ar deviation from “emergingenlightened” political forms—universal suffrage, representative government, I decision through rational deliberative processes, rational and efficient implementation of law, and the protection of rights against arbitrary actis ions could be explained by historical experience and by the groups, which had been ments and their histories. Munro refers to the racial ge and Salvader de Madariaga discuss in some det national characters of such peoples as the English, the French, the Americans, and the Spanish. But the powerful transformative engine of education and the spread of knowledge was presumed to be moving mankind in the direction of these cnlightened norms. The deviations were residuals or pathologi the expected or hoped-for convergence toward political norms would never be complete, national character, or the social character of groups, was a distinctly minor explanatory theme. ‘THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGY As the discipline of sociology developed in the course of the nineteenth century, the importance of subjective variables in the explanation of social and recognized. He The Intellectual History of the Givie Culture Concept u heim based his conception of social solidarity on the “conscience colle: or the system of values, beliefs, and sentiments shared by the members of societies* And Pareto’s concepts of logical and nonlogical action, of “residues” and “derivations,” were Parts of a substantially psychological theory of sociopolitical structure and social change.** But of all the European the shaping of research on pol yey had to be an ich attitudes, feelings, and values were bles. Perhaps Weber was the first is concepts were empirically inventive and sophi developed a fon jc field observation. was a response to ‘economic structure— 1¢ basic formative influence on “s comparative study of the the most influential in important explanatory vari truly modern social scient grounded; he legal, and the three ideal-typi e ; Jowers, the three ideal-typical bases of political legitimacy. 1 differences among political systems are treated as ly subjective categories. ‘cording to authority 1 order tra-human written, ratio is the extraordinary characterized by a qualities of a leader.* qe Hee ‘Weber's typology of political parties again is based on the subjective reasons for membership and support. Class parties superhuman or2 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept 18 social psychology has employed as building blocks are those which recruit supporters on the basis of habit, sentiment, to class interest. Pa parties are those wi appeal to but the mainstream of soci unit of analysis, The concept heredity ot environment bias implied inet and Habit, and also avoided the the concept of sentiment. As defined ind! value rationality— of development and modern- i culture research, the United States was Talcott work elaborated and specified ization which entered into pol Weber's principal interprete Parsons, His early theoreti categories. Thus, for example, to perceive, interpret, and act toward a particular object in 's categories of orientation to action and his pattern Particular ways. As the discipline became increasingly empirical, * are quite clearly elaborations of the Weberian experimental, and rigorous in the 1940s anid 19505, it began to and political attitudes were formed. effect of group structure and. communi. te structure and interrelations of atti- categories of types of social action. Parsons in his concept of explore how partic orientation to social action speaks of cognitive, affective, and and transformed evaluative modes of orientation. Parsons's pattern variables—his pairs of contr influence of 1g modes of orientation to action-—reflect the fh Weber and Durkheim; from the perspective of ‘Two studies of great importance, stemming out of the issues ity, universalism, achievement motivation, and and problems of World War II, were Thi are properties of rational culture and struc- sonality and The. American Soldier. The fuseness, particularism, ascriptiveness, and affec- ality research represented a ity. These Parsonian categories disciplinary effort to explain racial and ethnic prejudice through i¢S_ Of political modernization research strategy which combined the methods and theories psychoanalysis. The American ly pioneered in the development of played an important role in st and in the research design of the Civie Gulture study. of psychology, soci Soldier research ‘THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY social psychological method and theory, applying them to prob. intellectual stream entered into political culture con- Jems of military morale and the effects of communications on ion and research—that of social psychology. This soldier attitudes and behavior.** ine emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century During World War IL anid the early postwar years, systematic largely out of efforts among sociologists and psychologists to Survey research on voting behavior had its beginnings in the understand and explain the social and political catastrophes of work of Paul Lazarsfeld and his associates, Here the effort was voters’ choices in terms of demographic character- tics, attitude patterns, and exposure to-cominuttication.” These al social-psychological researches in the 19408 important implications for studies in political those years: the bloodshed and destruction of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depréssion, the rise of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, racial antagonisms, and other empii and the like. Social psychology represents an effort to under. and 1950s ha stand and exp! w and why the attitudes and behavior of attitude formation and for the understanding of the demographic ‘duals are conditioned and influenced by the presence and correlates and the internal composition, structure, and consis, ;pact of other individuals and social groupings. The units of tency of political attitudes.4 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept (THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOANTHROFOLOGY A fourth intellectual stream entering into political culture coneeptualization and research was that of psychoanthropology, stemming from the work of Freud and his disciples and joining with anthropology in the 1980s in what later became known as the psychocultural approach. Freud himself commented on man’s political fate but from a psyd ji he nor his students dealt the special char nations and groups. It was the general fate of mai his instinctive endowments and_psyel provided the themes for Freud and the early psychoanalytic theorists. The merger of pschoanalysis with the social sciences began in the 1920s and 1930s with the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Harold Lasswell.*° Produced primarily by motivation, and_psychological mechanisms. During and im- mediately after World War II, efforts were made to charac- terize and explain the psychological propensities of the major nations at_war—Germany, Ri Am: pant But this effort to of large and complex with the heterogencity of culture in large societies by intro- ducing the concepts of subculture, role, and status culture. Inkeles and Levinson brought the psychocultural approach to a full statistical formulation, arguing that only rigorous sampling techniques with carefully formulated and tested questions could subgroups within them. ‘THE DEVELOPMENT OF SURVEY RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ; But as so often has happened in the history of scientific work, ew research technology was the catalytic and. research ce he increasingly evident failure sent eapectations and the incapacity of a com Mie pane on these. expectations t0 explain the nomena help ts understand the motiva eo political cule re complex and soph wed paychologieal theory wa, becoming patterns of pl velopment of survey yesateh whether here were ational characters It had ‘The development of st je to establish the patterns of interaction among a ‘tural and demograph e relations of atti science research technology had some four components: (1) the develo} precise sampling methods, making it fea: .rge populations; (2) the increa methods to assure greater reliability in velopment of t Co ee Sg a a a et16 ‘The Intellectual History of the ivic Culture Concept materials, or from behavioral tendencies. To be sure, the data yielded by survey research were created by the instruments and Procedures of the researcher, by the questio dents, by his sampling decisions, and by his and inference. As experience in voting studies, attitude studies, and market research accumulated, these sources of error came under greater control, although, to be sure, they cin never be fully eliminated, ‘THE CIVIC CULTURE MODEL The Civic Culture study drew on al From enlightenment and liberal political theory “rationality-activist model” of democratic ci of a successful democracy that req involved and acti model of democratic citizenship was one ivic culture, but not one. Indeed, rationalist model of citizenship could sustain a stable democratic government. Only when combined in some sense with its opposites of passivity, trust, and deference to authority and competence was a viable, stable democracy poss study was conceived in the aftermath of War II. The events of the 1920s and the 1930s and the ns of soci political theory. German democracy an destructive manias, and: tual History of the Civic Culture Concept 7 The Civic Culture The theory of democratic stability to wh contributed is in the most ancient of int We have already suggested that the Gisic Culture m related to the mixed-governm: Polybius, and Cicero, and later of separation-of-powers theory. Ari ely to sustain such a mixed polity: » interpersonal trust, and even a certain diffidence ion, Agiin in the aftermath of the Third Punic War and in the Rome of Scipio Africanus, the Greek Stoic Polybius draws the lessons of the tragic Greek and particularly Athenian experience for his Rotman masters, stres ing the virtues of mixed government, which he finds exem| fied in che Spartan and Carthaginian constitutions and in d contemporary pre-Grac Cicero, Rome of 1 save the repu nor Cicero explicates the psychological aspects of politics and of varieties of political systems in the way that Plato and particularly Aristotle do. Aristotle elaborates the bese real cons of oligarchy mocracy in a society in which the middle classes predominate, cither in the sense of being more numerous than the rich and t least numerous enough to ind of mixed-goverament/ political leaders and government officials; a kind of p involvement which is neither fully pragmatic nor simply passion- ate; and a form of partisanshipThe Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept vivid memory of passionate and bloody civil disorders in demo- cratic Athens and democratizing Rome, their treatment of the mixed constitution tends to be mechanical and structural rather than psychological. It may be that they assumed that a mixed constitution would require a Stoic culture to produce it; or that such a ‘ational arrangements would encourage moderation, and in which the moderation of its members would contribute to preserving the institutional arrangements. ‘The French Revolution, the Ame and the democratization of Of opinion and political culture revolution, spells out the very obverse of the civic culture in his cffort to explain the collapse of the ancien régime, the destructiveness af the revolution, and postrevolutionary regimes: the irrespon: the intense jealousy among lege, the rancor and wrath tion, and the seltintoxication of the French intellectuals with their grand and abstract theories and designs. ‘Tocqueville, seeking to allay anxiety about the prospects of democracy in America, in effect repeats the mixed-government/ civieculture theory of his predecessors. The tyranny of the majarity and the dangers of mass democracy are contained in America by the institutional separation of powers, but in addi. tion by a “legal aristocracy.” He points out that “he aristocracy of America is on the hench and at the bar. . . ."" It has a kind of corporate quality in common with aristocracies and it is the “only aristocratic element that can be amalgamated without violence with the natural clements of democracy and be ad- vantageously and permanently combined with them. ... Men who have made a special study of the laws derive from this occupation certain habits of order, a taste for formalities, and a kind of instinetive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflecting passions of the multitude.” « The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept 19 aristocratic admixture as an acterization of assurance of stability, Tocque American political culture, He attributes the sta! democracy to its geography and ecology, t i laws, but most important of all to its customs, by which he moral and intellectual characteristics “of ‘men, in ci raves no doubt about the importance he attaches tovwnse we wou eal yr 'lf 1 have hitherto ‘making the reader feel the important influence of the the opinions, in short, o! customs of the Americans upon tutions, I have failed i He then goes on to des. “can pursues Troderation,” and “sel-comman " Tn the proces of democratization in Biitin fa the cous inetcenth century, John Stuart Nill reacted agains ‘den Seance ue e earlier English radicals, recognizi langers of majority tyranny and moral eee ina tales of d cy without regard Se oe eee ace Se ae ge ee ha al xd by the dread, ired by Tocquevil of the tyrani that the majority mainly im minorities, and hat every posible means ought 9 went the ignorant majority from abusing it power na retented = long the clea, the confident and the dogm: he charac- jalter Bagehot, later in the century, reflecting on t spies and of discussion” comes very close to the “balanced of the civic speaks of the importance of “animated mod:20 The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept discussion,” a “vigor- ination of energy of harder to kee ous moderateness,”” “ and balance of mind, hard to attain an \et_ government rust among the voters, a “‘calm rational mi spread knowledge and anal yy, and deference to rank and authority, enabling the government io govern ‘The rise of totalitarian movements after World War Il pro- duced another wave of 1 i economic organi and industri nses agai integra- tion and anomic consequences of the forees of modernization. Alexis de Tocqueville had, of course, attributed the success and y and collapse, The role of interest groups ii the demands and needs of different social groups, # of individuals with a variety of interest groups as tending to reduce the intensity of interest group lites was said to mitigate the consequence of mass society. In the prescriptions proposed by social and p. much in common with the mixed-con: The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept a yn that we have just reviewed. Thus Joseph Schumpeter, drawing the implications of the political developments of these decades, proposed five “Conditions for the Success of the Demo- cratic Met iese was a set of politicians, not only of good dle of projects a some measure umpeter also argues that “The voters outside of parliament must respect the division of Iabor between themselves and the p ns they elect. They must not withdraw confi dence too easily between clections and they must understand It is easy to see from Schumpeter’s analysis that he has in mind primai and to a lesser extent American, clemoc- racy in sp five requirements, and that his negative fnovlels are ‘Germany, France, and Italy, He wae aking. the question that most if not all political and social scientists were asking in the decades immediately prior to and after World22 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept War Ul. Why did democracy survi States, and why did his answer falls into the mixed. i mixed-government/civie-culture tradi- tion which we have traced back to the origins of humai a tion about politics. eee in Britain and the United THE CIVIC CULTURE: RESEARCH DESIGN _ The authors af The Civie Culture were intellectual tradition and were seeking to stable democracy in the dramatic laboratory of rece British and American democracy had somehow weat ‘rises of the 1920s "animated moderat of Eckstein in the suc ihe authors of The Givie Culture \ypotheses and theories of political sociology, social prychol yp and hai of oii cy cel pol available to hem the research technology of sample surveys, which led them to a much sharper specification and 2 of the subjective dimensions of stable democr original Pe ted States, ‘ely stable democracy; France and Ger- historical records of democrat Sweden, as an example of a stable democracy wi system, Since France was in the earl regime, her party system in disarray a in doubt, the a ted loping, non-European counayy with n ian features might furnish some interesting con he European and American cases ‘The decision to use a national probability sample of only a The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept 23 thousand interviews in each country was based on the experi- mental character of the undertaking and on considerations of cost. The study was a pionecring venture, a kind of pilot investi gation. We wanted to have a sample large enough to per inferences about national populations as a whole, and some ch as the educated and the un- it educated, occupational an young and old, and the like. This decision, based on consi tions of risk and cost, turned out to have been an unfortunate one, since it limited our capacity to deal with the phenomena of subculture. With a sample of a thousand cases, if we tried to control for more than one demographic variable we rapidly ran out of cases. Our American sample yiclded only under a hundred black respondents, hardly representative of the black population. Hence we failed to deal with the political attitudes of American jough we appreciated their importance, jude special samples designed to get at the cant “types” of respondents in each country. These “political lifes terviews were used for illust purposes in repor xerpreting the study's findings. ‘The intellectual currents discussed here contributed to the form and content of the study. The enlightenment theory of tical culture was tested by several sets of questions dealing ic competence and participation. The ‘ies were more like each other in these ce the uneducated resp in their brought to , confidence in understanding pol to be politically effective. Higher education ‘ficantly affect attitudes toward ci and other democratic values, nor did it affect attitudes of24 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept political trust and partisanship. Here national historical experi- special patterns in which education seemed But taken alll in all, some aspects of enlightenment politi culture theory were substantiated by’our study. Later studies have overwhelmingly confirmed the importance of education as an explanatory variable for civi ities." However, our study showed that education in the formal sense does not necessarily produce the affective and evaluative components of a civic culture, such as ion and trust. These icantly affected by national ce. Sociological theory entered into the study in part through stress on the stratification variables of occupation, income, and education. The intercorrelation of these three aspects of stratifi- cation (as other studies have shown as well) was found to be strong, but education was found to be the most powerful pre- dictor of less it was clear that position in the occupational and income hierarchy independent of educa- ion was associated with civic competence and activi pluralist hypothesis received some test and confirma ‘There was in Britain and the United States ence of organizational affiliation and acti more widely distributed sense of cooperative in Germany, Italy, and Mexico.** ‘The sociological concepts of Weber and Parsons provided the major analytic categories employed in the study. The interview instrument was designed in such a way as to make it possible to separate the cognitive, affective, and evaluative aspects of orientations to political objects, and to ascertain the interrela- tion among them and their association with demographic vari- ables, The Weberian types of authority and the Parsonian pattern variables entered into our major categorization of types of political culture—parochial, subject, and_participant—and hence provided the conceptual bits out of which the civieculture mix was constructed. It was the persistence of traditional and parochial attitudes and their fusion with partic explained the balanced disparities of the civic culture—the combination of political activity, involvement, and rationality ompetence, than ‘The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept 25 / twaditionality, and commitment to parochial Psychoanthropological hypotheses were tested in dhe Civic Gulture study primarily dirough a series of questions on experi. gnees with authority patterns in family, school, and workplace, ‘The difficulty with this part of the interview was that it asked individuals to rec life and the structure of schoot authority. Recall data of these kinds are known to be unreliable. ‘The longer the time lapse of the recall the less reliable the Tesponse. Thus our findings in these areas are open to question, For what they are worth, they suggested that authority struc. ture in the family had only a weak relationship to adult parti Pant propensities, that Tater experiences in school but partic. ularly in the adult workplace were more closely correlated with political competence and ® We also noted that membership and act independently ivic competence." Though we sought to test psycho. potheses in our study, we canmot claim to have tested Y effective way, not only because of the unreliabitity of recall data but also because our study fociised on system and > and not on policy properisities. Psychological theory on The Civic Cut- ture was manifested in those parts of the study which were concerned with the internal Structure of political attitudes. Thus we employed Guttman scaling in developing a measure of subjective competence, which showed that the capacity to tics was related to 4 sense of ability to influence to examine the interconnection of atti- c on to politieal behavior were not exploited in the first report of the Givic Culture data because of the state of the survey analysis art in the early 1960s. The computer Tevolution was in its beginnings. There were no computer Programs available specially adapted to our material; The Civic Culture was perhaps the last major social investigation to be86 ‘The Intellectual History of the Givie Culture Concept analyzed by 2 statistical sorter. Thus simple considerations of time and cost limited the indulgence of our imaginations and the richness and rigor of our analysis. Similarly, statistical analysis was moving into its more powerful phase of multi- variate, regression, and path analysis. Leafing through the pages of The Civie Culture fifteen years after its pul i something of a sense of archaism. The tables, charts, and graphs oF represent raw percentages and simple one-level 2ss0- siations for the most part. POLITICAL GULTURE, AND POLITICAL THEORY Political culture is not a theory; it refers to a set of variables which may be used in the construction of theories. But insofar as it designates a set of variables and encourages their investi. gation, it imputes some explanatory power to the psychological ‘or subjective dimension of politics, just as it implies that there are contextual and internal variables which may expla ‘The explanatory power of political culture variables empirical question, open to hypothesis and testing, causal properties. culture are in most cases Prethearetic categorizations intended to affirm the importance 9 these cultural variables in the explanation of pol nomena, or preceding empiri aspect ox aspects of politi drawing on the work of Talcott Parsons, I defined orientations to political phenomena, distributed in national Populations or in subgroups, and then I proceeded to suggest some cultural hypotheses which might explain the differences in performance among Anglo-American, continental European, totalitarian, and preindustrial political systems. In a formula. tion published around the same time, Sam: ep. Talcott Parsons, angued that a poli! ture orients a People toward a polity and its processes, providing it with a Culture Concept 2 The Intellectual History of the Ci system of, beliefs (a cognitive map), a way of evaluating its operations, and a set of expressive symbols. In The Civic Culture the definition of the concept was adapted 1 properties assumed to be asso- lity. Consequently the elaboration rticipant, tow: ical parties and elections, bureaucracy, Tia like. Tite fr mo. stems was placed on auiindes toward In a major collaborative investigation of varieties of political culture, Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba offered more comp sive elaborations of the concept. Pye, focusing on politica femes, discussed the variety of ways the concept in_ developmen several types of political or ing an patterns of political partisanship. The first of these is orient tion toward the political system as a whole, which affects txtent and ist S qavional tocleyy attitudes toward coopera in general : the natn and venation toward probe wing (5 tihether it is pragmatic or ideological), Zone of pale parte, He ten| proceeds fo show how Ghee ates may fect the polices sid sat of iiStemente drawing. for illustrative purposes from case tories of the United States and a number ef Western European serie recent formulation, Almond and Powell elaborate the Bee es ie eae on SE ee aa weer Se Oe ce maa a28 The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept culture wot have to concern itself with all three. From the point of view of substantive content we may speak of “system” culture, “process” culture, and “policy” culture. The system culture of a nation would consist of the distributions of atti- tudes toward the national community, the regime, and the authorities, to use David Easton's formulation.® These would include the sense of national identity, attitudes toward the i i tutions, and atti- tudes toward the legitimacy and effectiveness of the incumbents of the various political roles. jon of preferences regarding the outputs and out- the ordering among different groupings in the population of such political values as welfare, security, and liberty. Orientations toward these system, process and policy objects may be cogniti 1g of beliefs, information, and analys ings of attachment, aversion, or isting of moral judgments of one kind or another. A third aspect of political culture would be the relatedness or systemic character of its components. Philip Converse ® sug- gested the concept of “constraint” to characterize situations in Which attitudes toward pol together. Thus, in a given population, attitudes toward foreign policy, domestic economic policy, and racial segregation may be parts of a consistent ideology; for most individuals in this group, if one knew how they stood on foreign policy one could Predict their views on taxation, on bi and the like, In other groups these attitudes might be independent. information, beliefs, feelings, and moral judgments are related. Generally speaking the political cultures of nations and groups may be disting according to their internal constraint or consistency.” ‘The principal criticism of the pol that it imputes a causal direction ture and structure, implying that culture literature is relation between cul- culture produces the The Intellectual History of the Givie Culture Concept » structure. Brian Barry in a detailed critique argued chat the actual causal pattern might be one in which satisfactory democratic experience produces the civic culture in a rational, earned way.** Richard Fagen, in a study of the political calvare ‘of Cuba, argues that the very separation of the attitudinal dimension from the behavioral dimension tends to give & con- tical culture research, attributing great 1d tends to overlook the countries. Robert ‘Tucker argues a sitnilar position also with reference to the culture-seructure relation sn of The Civie Culture that it argues that political culture causes political structure is incorrect. Throughout study the development of specific cultural countries is éxplained by reference to pa periences, such as the sequence of Reform Ac ‘American heritage of Britis ns, the Mes tion, and Nazism and defe: It is quite clear that political culture is treated as both an independent and a de le; as caitsing structute and a being caused by diffusely formulated to be acceptable as explanatory theory. He argues that there are clear-cu nal relationships becween socioeconomic, ethnic, and réligious interests and political80 The Intellectual History of the Civic Culture Concept Structure, and that a rational individualist explanation of political structure is a more powerful and parsimonious theory than political culture theory." ‘This polemic about the explanatory significance of political culture as defined in The Givic Culture can only be resolved by empirical research, and such research as has been done suggests that Ragowski's position is not sustainable by evidence. Much ef human history stands in disproof of the argument that the structure of political institutions and their legitimacy can be terest. Surely terest of social class and of et and conflicts, and contrib comes. But patriotism, commu: simple habit and tradition obviously enter i ‘9f political structure and legitimacy. Fagen’s emphasis on the plasticity of political a the importance of deliberate efforts to transform ported in only quite limited ways by mn the malleability of human that attitudinal differences are the sim comparison of al culture in communist societies with the official culture may be a kind of test of the ex- planatory power of cultural variables. Brown puts in com. the con- s in Communist societies” and ly avert and conscious attempt to create i. cal values and to supplant the old. Indeed, the val concept of political culture tested until it bas been used in a comparative study of Com- munist states, for if the political cultures of societies which have become Communist can be readily moulded into a new shape with old values cast aside, the explanatory value of political culture may reasonably be regarded as marginal.” ** ‘This recent study of communist political cultures concludes ‘The Intellectual History of the Civie Culture Concept tha there die two party cultnres—an sepirational an” culture, and a, tacit “operational code” con: actual working rules and beliefs of the system. On the central jure of the massive communist a countries effort to transform les in the seven coun! included in the study (USSR, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China, and Cuba), the scholars who examined the admittedly inadequate data on political attitudes came to the following tentative conch question as to the “The attempt to create a new soc a depressing - and "economism" encouraged. It is quite clear thi part in the political changes world. I and significant influence puts and these countries (Chin which are independent. The degree of divergenc is very great. Guba may be a case merely of incomplete ¢ vergence, but in the other two countries free of Russian dor ‘ommunist system has been wholly remodeled |My influenced by national tradition.*? aps the most important conclusion which pa there there has in the past been experience speting interests, weakened but strengthened the conviction among the popul freedom brings both greater justice and gres nance the ‘This study does indeed lend confirmation to the argument that political-cultural variables, and the socialization processes which create and maintain them, play an important part in