Political culture

Political culture may be defined as the political psychology of a country or nation (or subgroup thereof). Political culture studies attempt to uncover deep-seated, long-held values characteristic of a society or group rather than ephemeral attitudes toward specific issues that might be gathered through public-opinion surveys. Several major studies using a political culture approach appeared simultaneously with the behavioral studies of the late 1950s, adding psychological and anthropological insights to statistical covariance.

The study of political culture was hardly new; since at least the time of Plato, virtually all political thinkers have acknowledged the importance of what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart” in making the political system work as it does. Modern political culture approaches were motivated in part by a desire to understand the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century in Russia, Germany, and Italy, and many early studies (e.g., “The Authoritarian Personality”) focused on Nazi Germany; one early political culture study, work of Edward Banfield “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (1958), argued that poverty in southern Italy grew out of a psychological inability to trust or to form associations beyond the immediate family, a finding that was long controversial but is now accepted by many.

Perhaps the most important work of political culture was research of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba “The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations” (1963), which surveyed 1,000-person samples in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Mexico.

Almond and Verba identified three types of political culture: (1) participant, in which citizens understand and take part in politics and voluntary associations, (2) subject, in which citizens largely obey but participate little, and (3) parochial, in which citizens have neither knowledge of nor interest in politics. The authors found that democratic stability arises from a balance or mixture of these cultures, a conclusion similar to that drawn by Aristotle.

In edited by Almond and Verba volume “The Civic Culture Revisited” (1980), several authors demonstrated that political culture in each of their subject countries was undergoing major change, little of which was predictable from the original study, suggesting that political culture, while more durable than mere public opinion, is never static. Critics of “The Civic Culture” also pointed out those political structures can affect culture. The effective governance and economic policies of West Germany’s government made that country’s citizens embrace democracy, whereas Britain’s economic decline made Britons more cynical about politics. The problem, again, is determining causality.

Over the decades Lipset, who served as president of both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association, turned from explanations of political values based on social class to those based on history and culture, which, he argued, displayed consistency throughout history. American political scientist Robert Putnam followed in this Tocquevillian tradition in “Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy” (1993), which demonstrated that the historical cultures of Italy’s regions explain their current political situations. In “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (2000), Putnam claimed that the American tendency to form citizen groups, a characteristic that Tocqueville praised, was weakening. Americans were less often joining groups and participating in politics, Putnam argued, leading to a loss of “social capital” (the collective value of social networks) and potentially undermining democracy, a worry shared by other political observers in the United States.

Adopting what became known as the “path-dependent development” approach, advocates of the historical-cultural school maintained that contemporary society is a reflection of society in ages past. The political culture approach declined in the 1970s but was later revived as political scientists incorporated it into explanations of why some countries experienced economic growth and established democratic political systems while others did not. Some suggested that the rapid economic growth and democratization that took place in some East Asian countries in the second half of the 20th century was facilitated by a political culture based on Confucianism. In Africa and Latin America, they argued, the absence of a culture that valued hard work and capital accumulation led to the stagnation of much of those regions. This viewpoint was captured by the title of edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington volume “Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress” (2000).