POLITICAL CULTURE

Introduction
* The people are taught about politics in a formal sense, but also what they come to feel for
and regard as natural about the society in which they live. The term used by students of politics
to denote such values is political culture.
* There are notable variations in the ways in which politics is conducted from country to
country. Therefore, the point of investigating politics through the lens provided by a cultural
approach lies in the ways that culture can be used to give a conceptual grounding to the
designation of difference.
* Political Culture = distinct norms, rules, habits, traditions and belief systems sit at the heart
of each political system, shaping the behaviour of the main participants in the political process.
* Defining political culture is a controversial business. Dennis Kavanagh has written widely
on political culture. His preferred definition seems to be the following:
For our purposes we may regard the political culture as a shorthand expression to
denote the set of values within which a political system operates. It is something
between the state of public opinion and an individual’s personality characteristics.
* Another famous definition was that provided by the American political scientists
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in their major work The Civic Culture. They wrote of
political culture as the ‘pattern of to political objects among the members of the nation’.
By ‘political objects’, Almond and Verba meant institutions such as parliaments and
political parties, as well as less tangible aspects of a nation’s political life such as the
conventional account of its history. Political culture is not simply to do with what we
believe, but is also bound up with the ways in which we (particularly collectively) behave
politically. So political culture can also be understood in terms of the political practices
rituals of a given community.
*Dennis Kavanagh has frequently stated in his work that ‘political culture’ is a new term
for an old idea. We can go back to the writings of Plato (427–347 BC), commonly thought
of as the founder of political thought, to find explicit statements about what we now know
as political culture.
* Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 BC) brought his taxonomic way of thinking into the
study of political culture. In his Politics Aristotle tried to discern the most suitable form
of human government. To achieve this end, he did not focus simply on institutions but
also on social structures and their attendant value systems.
* In modern political thought very few key writers failed to make the connection between
the dispositions of people and the sorts of political system in which they lived. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, writing in the eighteenth century, wrote much on the importance of
morality and custom as the basis of political stability. From a different perspective, the
most famous critic of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, placed considerable

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emphasis on the vital importance of tradition and the destructive consequences of the
uprooting of well-established political norms.
* The purpose of investigating what we now know as political culture has predominantly
been to establish the nature of the relationship between regime stability and the structure
of beliefs, values and traditions at any given time. The claim being made is that political
culture filters our perceptions, influences our attitudes and has a large say in the extent
and manner of our political participation.
* It is assumed that there is an identifiable political culture into which individuals are
socialised. Moreover, the approach assumes that the constitution of a political culture
will influence patterns of behaviour within a political system and that these behavioural
patterns, in turn, have a major influence on the stability of a regime.

CIVIC CULTURE

* The entry of the concept of political culture into the lexicon of political studies is most
associated with the rise of the behavioural movement. The attractiveness of the idea of
political culture to behaviouralists should be obvious.
1. The promise of finding correlations between certain sorts of cultural conditions
and various levels of political stability dovetailed well with the behaviouralist’s
quest for scientific precision in explanation.
2. Also, the study of attitudes and beliefs about politics amongst citizens was
testimony to the behaviouralists emphasis on non-institutional forms of politics.
* The paradigmatic example of the behavioural study of political culture remains ‘The
Civic Culture’ by the American political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba,
which was first published in 1963. The Civic Culture was a report on an extensive survey
carried out in five countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy the Federal
Republic of Germany and Mexico—in 1959.
* The aim of the surveys was to acquire a mass of comparative data on public opinion
from which conclusions about political culture could be made.
* Respondents—of whom there were roughly 1,000 in each country —were asked three
sorts of questions about their attitudes to political objects.
1. Cognitive questions were used to test the respondents’ factual knowledge and
beliefs about their respective political systems.
2. Affective questions dealt with the ways in which those surveyed felt about those
political objects— their attitudes to their political system.
3. Finally, evaluative questions sought to ascertain opinions and judgements about
the political objects, a test of wider political values.

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* Armed with their data, Almond and Verba went on to make some influential and
provocative statements about political culture. They identified three ideal types of
individual and collective (national) political culture: parochial, subject and participant.
1. A parochial political culture was characterised by general ignorance about
political objects and a consequent lack of involvement in political activity.
2. Subject political cultures were characterised by widespread knowledge about
political processes, but a disinclination to participate in political activity, often
because of feelings of powerlessness.
3. Participant political cultures combined knowledge about politics with a
willingness to participate in the political process. In such situations, people feel
able to affect change; that their political activity will make a difference.
* It is important to remember two points.
> First, Almond and Verba regarded these types of political culture as the properties of
both individuals and political systems as a whole. It was thought possible to aggregate
individual orientations. The assumption, therefore, is that it is possible to link the micro
and the macro aspects of politics.
> Second, the three categories are ideal types. This means that they represent an attempt
to impose a classification upon the disordered and messy reality of the human world. This
is said to aid investigation and to further knowledge by providing order to our thinking.
Political culture would invariably appear as some sort of mixture of these ideal types and
this is very much what Almond and Verba’s research showed.
* In fact, Almond and Verba concluded that all three ideal types would be unsatisfactory
as cultural underpinnings for a stable democratic polity.
1. Parochialism was a characteristic of ‘traditional’ societies and not of mature
democracies, where developed institutions require a qualitatively different sort of
value system.
2. Subject political cultures were also deemed unsuitable. While citizens in such
situations possessed the requisite political knowledge, they did not possess the
sense that they could be effective democratic actors.
3. On the other hand, a participant political culture carried with it the danger of a
kind of democratic overload. Too many citizens trying to effect change through
mass participation would be a source of instability which could seriously
undermine the normative ideal of democratic stability.
* Thus, in terms of their normative conclusions Almond and Verba argued that the best
sort of political culture for a stable democratic system would involve a mix of subject
and participant elements. They labelled this mixture the civic culture.
1. In the civic culture, citizens would possess high levels of knowledge about the
political process and feel empowered as political actors.
2. Crucially, however, they would recognise the legitimacy of elites to make
decisions on their behalf.
3. At the same time, elites would be sensitive to the preferences of the mass
population.

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The resultant system is a balance (a conclusion which echoes that of Aristotle, a point
acknowledged by Almond himself). Almond and Verba argued that the political cultures
of the United States and, particularly, the United Kingdom came near to the civic culture
ideal.
Criticism of Civic Culture
* The work of Almond and Verba was subjected to much scrutiny. In particular, The Civic
Culture appeared to be vulnerable to five sorts of criticism.
(1) The first, and perhaps most obvious, line of objection concerned the apparent Anglo-
American bias of the study.
> the explicit claim is made that the political systems of Germany, Italy and Mexico lack
the necessary cultural basis for democratic stability. The US and Britain clearly have what
it takes for democratic stability to prevail in the long term.
> Arend Lijphart noted that certain societies with explicitly non-consensual political
cultures were able to achieve democratic stability. This suggested that the structure of
political institutions could intervene to overcome divisiveness and hostility in the
political culture. Lijphart’s argument was that consensual behaviour among political
elites with appropriate institutional support could ensure the effective governance of
societies that were divided on religious, ideological, linguistic, regional, cultural, racial
or ethnic lines. This form of democracy was labelled consociational democracy. The
two key criteria for the successful operation of a consociational democracy were
identified as (i) the existence of a segmented society, where those segments are largely
autonomous, and (ii) the existence of executive power-sharing among political elites.
> Apart from questioning a tendency towards the wholesale dismissal of continental
European polities as unstable, Lijphart’s important contribution also raises more
profound questions of explanation in political science. In essence Lijphart is saying that
institutions matter and can ameliorate the impact of political culture upon the political
system, whereas Almond and Verba’s version is that institutions are largely derived from
a cultural base. For Lijphart there is no direct connection between the shape of a political
culture and the stability of its governance.
(2) This concerns the deeper-lying issue of the sorts of causal relationships that were
being assumed by the authors of The Civic Culture. Some of the most cogent criticisms
of the study argued that Almond and Verba had assumed that political structures could be
explained with reference to political cultures. In other words, the allegation is that the
authors of The Civic Culture understood degrees of democratic stability as being
determined or caused by political culture. Two alternative positions exist.
✓ First, the chain of causation could be turned around so that we could explain the
level of civic culture in a society with reference to the level of democratic
stability.
✓ Second, there is the more complex position developed by Carole Pateman (1971),
which argues that culture and structures are interdependent and mutually
reinforcing. And in any case, how is democratic stability to be measured?

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(3) The third criticism of The Civic Culture compares the claims made about political
culture to the size of the sample interviewed. In his critique of Almond and Verba, Dennis
Kavanagh makes several challenging points along these lines. Around 1,000 individuals
in each country were interviewed. This is a reasonably large sample, but not enough to
allow the confident construction of a general theory of political culture.
> Kavanagh’s argument is that such a sample size does not produce valid sample sizes of
the various subgroups in each country. The broader point which is raised by Kavanagh’s
examination of the sampling deficiencies of The Civic Culture is the probable co-
existence of a range of subgroups within any given country which may exhibit a plurality
of political cultures and identities. The mistake may be to assume that there is such a
thing as a national political culture which can be revealed through scientific
measurement.
(4) The fourth objection relates to the difficulty of establishing the meaning of responses
to surveys. The designer of the questionnaire has an agenda. The purpose of conducting
surveys is to test hypotheses and so the questions seek to extract information from
respondents that might help in the confirmation or refutation of those hypotheses. There
are three particular dangers here.
✓ First, the respondent may also have an agenda and may interpret the questions in
a way which is completely at variance with the purposes of the questionnaire.
This clash of interpretations may not be revealed overtly; it may be invisible. The
consequence is a distortion in the results.
✓ Second, the Civic Culture interviews asked people a very detailed list of questions
about their political orientations. The danger here is that the interview process
may actually construct political orientations in individuals which may have been
either not coherent or not present prior to the administration of the survey.
✓ Third, there is the possibility that the meaning of responses is non-fungible—that
is to say, that the same response to the same question in different countries may
not have equivalent meanings (problem of functional equivalence).
(5) Political cultures evolve and any attempt, no matter how successful, to measure
political culture can only be a snapshot of political culture at that particular time.