Political Culture Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political culture, in one classic formulation of the concept put forward by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, refers to the deeply held orientations that people have toward their political system. In this conception, which reflects the behavior list approaches of 1960s modernization and political development scholarship, political culture is a product of the history of a given nation as shaped by important events (for instance, a violent conflict such as a civil war, a revolution, or major social upheaval), and peoples’ characteristics, shared values, beliefs, and perspectives. This approach, which identifies the attitudes of individual citizens as the important indicator to be measured in the aggregate and then compared across political systems, has framed much of the subsequent research in comparative politics on the relationship between culture and politics. In its most essentialist form it has become a frame for arguing that conflict between macro cultural patterns, or civilizations, is driving global political change. In more nuanced studies, these cross-national indicators have been used to help explain how national political cultures may change over time with changes in other social, economic, and political indicators.

More recently, scholars such as Lisa Wedeen have adapted critical approaches from cultural anthropology to argue for a more interpretive framework for studying political culture. In this framework, political culture is conceived as a relational or dialectic process in which political meaning is constructed in the interplay between the practices of political agents and the language and symbolic systems in which they are embedded. This approach is less focused on citizens’ psychological attributes (that is, attitudes) or orientations toward government. Rather, it focuses on how language and systems of symbols (semiotics) may operate to create and reproduce political meaning and how choices and actions by political agents can alter or construct meanings with demonstrable political effects. Empirical investigations using this approach require the use of mixed-methods research to uncover the most salient symbols within a particular context, to map the discursive and symbolic practices at work, and to capture the dynamics driving change in them.

Political Sociology And Political Culture

Almond and Verba’s book broke ground for the concept of “political culture” as being important to the study of comparative political systems. Their work was a product of the political sociology prevalent in postwar scholarship that sought to catalog and reproduce the conditions for the spread of representative democracy. They argued that five attitudinal dimensions were most salient for assessing political culture: a sense of national identity and attitudes about the self ’s participation in politics, attitudes toward fellow citizens, attitudes about the government’s performance and output, and attitudes about and knowledge of decision-making processes. Almond and Verba defined several types of political cultures, and these are still widely cited.

One of these types is a parochial political culture, which in its most elementary form involves the least formal kind of political rule, such as an African chief or a shaman in other societies. This could be likened to Somalia in the early twenty-first century, where warlords rule without an established central authority. During the same time period in Afghanistan there have been attempts to meld warring tribes into a central political system.

A second type is the subject political culture, in which there is a specialized governmental authority with no voice from citizens. Feudal societies are illustrative this category. Citizens are “subjects” with duties, but few rights. They pay taxes—and perhaps are called on to fight in a war—but they have no voice in deciding these matters.

A third type is the participant political culture. In this culture the citizen is an active participant in the political process, expressing support for or rejection of government decisions. This type is associated with “democracy.”

These three main types have numerous variations. African nations as well as Asian, Latin American, and even European countries move in and out of these different categories. For instance, attempts to move from a parochial to a participant culture can be seen in several African societies. And in 2006 there was a military coup in Thailand that resulted in an apparent move to free and open democratic elections to determine political leadership. Latin American nations slip into and out of democratic experiments and military rule. Chile in the early twenty-first century is rated as a free political system, but this comes on the heels of a military dictatorship. France is now in its Fifth French Republic—in which the people rule—but it has slipped into emperorship and external occupation in past iterations of its republics.

Almond and Verba acknowledge that there is no pure participant political culture and describe the United States as a civic political culture in which parochial, subject, and participant types are mixed in the society. Americans can be categorized as apathetic, subject, and participant. The apathetic may rarely get involved in politics and may not even register to vote. These citizens tend to come from the less educated and lower income segments of society and may be candidates for protest movements if they are convinced that such actions will improve their circumstances. The subject citizens are trusting of the political process and are oriented toward dutifully paying their taxes, serving their nation during times of war, and voting. These individuals generally are not overly active in interest groups, and the subject citizen would hardly ever get involved in protest movements. Participants are usually more highly educated, with upper middle to high incomes, and they perceive their political involvement as a rational way to preserve their status in society. Many nations besides the United States would fit the mixed or civic culture model to varying degrees, but any such society would need a minimum number of participants to become a democratic nation. As of the early twenty-first century, Freedom House listed approximately 46 percent of the world’s nations as free. These nations have civic cultures sometimes referred to as civil societies. A civil society is one in which there is citizen and interest group autonomy from government and unhampered citizen and nongovernment organization (NGO) involvement in running the government.

Almond and Verba define the process of political socialization as shaping national political culture. The political socialization experience shapes the kind of adult citizen who exists in a particular nation. This socialization includes latent and manifest experiences that children undergo as they mature. Latent political socialization includes informal experiences with, for example, family authority patterns, whereas manifest political socialization includes overt attempts through, for example, family efforts to inculcate specific political orientations such as political party affiliation.

Political Culture And World Politics

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Samuel P. Huntington claims that since the end of the Cold War the major cleavage framing military and ideological conflict in international politics is conflicting cultures, expressed as competing “civilizations.” Civilization is a cultural concept that includes the values, intellectual endeavors, and moral qualities of a society, standing in contrast to “barbar ism.” There are Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic (Chinese), Hindu, Orthodox (Eastern), Buddhist, and Japanese civilizations.

In Huntington’s account, the world is now divided into these civilizations instead of the two opposing superpowers of the Cold War world order, and globalization has brought these cultures into closer contact. The West often is viewed as being in conflict with the Islamic and Chinese cultures; less so, but nonetheless still, in conflict with African, Hindu (primarily India), Orthodox (primarily Russian), and Japanese cultures; and not at all with Latin American cultures. The Islamic world frequently is seen as being in conflict with most of the other groups, but less so with China and Latin America.

In Huntington’s world there are “fault lines,” lines of demarcation between different groups and civilizations. For example, such a division currently exists between Western/ Central and Eastern Europe. The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania); parts of Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, and Bosnia; and all of Central Europe (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic) and Western Europe are on one side of a cultural fault line with the rest of Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Russia. Western Christianity, ideas of democracy, and higher economic development contrast with the Orthodox religion, more authoritarian rule, and less economic development.

The divide is partially illustrated in the memberships of international political and military alliances. When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) first began expanding from its original membership in the late 1990s, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland were the first former communist countries given approval to join, in part because their culture, political, and economic systems were the most in line with those of existing member countries. The fault line continued to shift as other former communist countries became more Westernized; however, Turkey is the only country east of the current fault line to be approved for NATO membership. Despite this, Turkey is not a member of the European Union (EU). While the EU has included many formerly communist Central European nations and the Baltic States and may be extended to include others in the future, Turkey has serious human rights violations with its Kurdish ethnic minorities, a severe penal system in which torture is still practiced, and an ongoing struggle acknowledging equal rights for women. Yet the inclusion of nations on both sides of the European fault line may bring more cooperation among the various nations.

That the culture clash between the West and parts of the Islamic world is a reality can hardly be debated after the September 11 attacks on the United States and the U.S. response. That it will always be “clash” instead of cooperation remains to be seen.

From The Modern To The Postmodern World

Ronald Inglehart’s 1997 Modernization and Postmodernization argues that culture developed by political socialization is a major variable in explaining movement toward democracy and postmodernization. This major cross-national study, however, includes no Islamic nations and few nondemocratic nations (the totalitarian People’s Republic of China and authoritarian Nigeria). Nevertheless, the study yields important information about the role of culture in politics and the trajectory of change for the more developed nations.

The findings, based on aggregated surveys in these nations, indicate that Northern European countries; the English-speaking nations of Canada, Britain, the United States, and Ireland; and Catholic Europe, including Belgium, France, Austria, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, are moving toward a new set of cultural, political, and economic values. A mix of shifting cultural norms and values, developed economies, and democracy are producing this change. The resulting postmodernization is a rejection of traditional values and forms of authority associated with the rise of a modern, industrial age. Postmodernization embraces a preference for nongovernmental organizations to influence politics. It is a more direct participatory form of democracy in which there is a distrust of traditional political institutions. Abortion, divorce, homosexuality, prostitution, extramarital sexual relationships, euthanasia, suicide, and soft drugs are more widely accepted under the purview of postmodernization, and postmodernists are less attached to formal religions and are less likely to attend church and state that God is important in their lives. They also are less concerned with economic well-being; that is, they are postmaterialist as well. It is interesting that postmodernists express a seemingly contradictory belief in two-parent households as best for raising children given that this is normally seen as a “traditional” value. Postmodernists enjoy a democratic political environment and economic security born of highly successful economies, and their values generally are not embraced in nondemocratic, less economically developed, and/or tradition-oriented nations.

It is also evident that within postmodern nations, especially in the United States, there is a reaction against the loss of what are considered traditional values. Age is a major factor in this regard. Inglehart gives a political socialization generation interpretation to his findings. Youth in general are embracing postmodern values, whereas older individuals frequently reject them. Other, more recent surveys show the same trend. Polls in the United States, for example, show that among Americans age 55 and older, relatively few accept same-sex marriage, whereas many who are 30 years old and younger do accept it.

The Inglehart data indicate that Nigeria, South Africa, India, Turkey, and the former communist states of Central Europe are more oriented toward scarcity values. Individuals in these countries are more concerned with making a living than with experimenting with postmaterialist values. Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico fall somewhere along the spectrum of scarcity values, traditional authority, and postmodernization. China, Japan, and South Korea have in common a high achievement motivation along economic lines, but they differ greatly on democracy rankings, with Japan and South Korea moving more toward postmodernization values.

Political Culture And Political Anthropology

For scholars who approach the concept of political culture from an anthropological perspective, the concept of political culture advanced by political sociologists downplays the importance of culture in analysis. Moreover, it incorrectly categorizes the role of political culture as a reflection of individual attitudes. For cultural anthropologists, political cultures are dynamic systems of meaning that shape and constrain perceptions of people who interrelate in political contexts. Looking at aggregated survey data may not be the best indicator of how meanings are constituted in a particular political system or subsystem or even across political systems. Moreover, the political sociologist’s tendency to treat political culture as a more or less fixed national attribute directs attention away from the variations within a nation and impoverishes the ability to explain cultural change within a polity or variations across polities with similar social or economic characteristics.

Lisa Wedeen’s conception of a critical approach to political culture is reflected in her field research in Syria and Yemen. This research attempts to explain how Yemenis form strong national attachments in the absence of strong state institutions and how Syrians under the Asad regime reinforced obedience to the autocratic leader even when they shared a recognition that the required rituals of obedience were not genuinely performed. She argues that such an interpretive approach helps uncover the semiotics at work within a cultural context. This involves using a range of qualitative methods to identify which practices, symbols, and rhetorical frames are politically significant and to narrow the range of possible meanings of those practices, symbols, or frames. The benefit of this practice-oriented cultural approach is greater explanatory power for new and persistent puzzles in political research, such as how political identities are generated, how symbols and rhetoric can generate compliance or conflict, why some political appeals work more than others, and why some ethnic identities become radicalized and others do not. “By paying attention to the ways in which certain meanings become authoritative while others do not,” she argues, “political scientists can use this [method] to help explain why recognizable events or empirical regularities occur” (714).

This line of inquiry is relatively new in political science and thus is not as established compared to the frameworks of Almond and Verba and Inglehart. Nonetheless, by paying attention to emerging puzzles and variations within type, deploying mixed-method research designs, and carving out an interpretive position on how to study the nexus between cultural and politics, it generates new and provocative questions not easily addressed by the classic approaches.

Bibliography:

Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1963
Bowen, John, and Roger Petersen, eds. Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999
Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1996
Inglehart, Ronald. Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Countries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1997
Wedeen Lisa. “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science.” American Political Science Review, Vol 96, No. 4, pp. 713–728. 2002.

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