Political culture - from civic culture to mass culture.

British Journal of Political Science

There is a tendency within political science to treat political culture like a familiar piece of furniture. Everyone is vaguely aware of its existence, but only rarely do they comment upon it (usually when they bump into it accidentally); and few bother to ask how it came to be there in the first place. Textbooks on British politics typically regard political culture as part of the backdrop, against which the main dramatic activity takes place. Political culture appears as secondary, something which, while enriching our understanding of political life, is not deemed essential to our comprehension of it. The intellectual roots of this attitude can be found in Marxism and functionalism. Both treat culture as subservient to material forces or systemic requirements. Such positions do not necessarily deny all relevance to the ideas and values which constitute political culture, but they do limit severely its role in explaining political activity. And even those who, like Brian Barry, belong to neither methodological camp believe that, compared to political culture, there are usually more parsimonious explanations for political action.(1)

Other thinkers, however, make political culture a core idea. Early in the second volume of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes:

In order that society should exist and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is necessary that the mind of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas; and this cannot be the case unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the common source and consents to accept certain matters of belief already formed.(2)

This broad suggestion, that society is forged in the interaction of beliefs, inspires those who place politicalculture at the centre of their analysis. Thus, Aaron Wildavsky argues that it is culture which generates people's preferences, and that these, in turn, drive the political process.(3)

In 1963, the argument over the explanatory usefulness of political culture was galvanized by the publication of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture.(4) Its focus on culture meshed with challenges to Marxist materialism and mechanical structural-functionalism, while its empirical methodology clashed with an emerging doubt about positivism and individualism.

Thirty years later, there are signs that culture is again becoming an important concern of political scientists. The collapse of Marxist regimes and the rise of nationalism have drawn attention to the way regimes legitimate themselves and the way citizens identify themselves, both processes which suggest an important mediating role for culture. Political culture is also implicated in the debate over the effect of mass communications on political behaviour.(5) At the same time, there has been a theoretical turn within the social sciences towards postmodernism, which, in its disdain for grand narratives and first causes, has placed increasing weight on cultural accounts of human action.(6) To observe these events and trends does not, of course, make an incontrovertible case for the reinstatement of political culture, but they do suggest that this is a good moment to re-examine its usefulness to political science. Thus, this review asks whether political culture provides more than background colour to an account of political action.(7)

If political culture has a useful role, then we need, first, to know what the term means; we then need to be able to say what role -- if any -- it plays in explaining behaviour. For political culture to have any explanatory force it must do more than simply fill out the details of political action; it must actually shape (or even determine) the character and intention of that action. A cultural theory must account for action more persuasively than do, say, materialist or rational choice theories. Or more weakly, it must demonstrate that political culture is an indispensable and decisive factor in such accounts. If either is the case, and political culture plays an important explanatory role, then there is a further question to be asked: how and why does political culture itself take one form rather than another? This review is, therefore, organized around three central issues: what is political culture? what can it explain? and how do we explain it? These questions are posed at each of three stages in the history of 'political culture'. The first is marked by the publication of The Civic Culture; the second by its subsequent re-assessment; and the third by the rediscovery of political culture in the last decade. In doing this, I will not consider elite political culture, nor will I examine the character of British (or any other) political culture in any detail. This is not to deny their importance. There are, after all, lively debates about the character of contemporary political culture(8) -- one, for instance, about the penetration of 'postmaterialist' values,(9) another about the spread of cynicism within British political life.(10) My concern here, though, is not so much with particular case studies as with the theories that underpin them. We begin with the text which focused upon this topic in the 1960s, The Civic Culture. THE CIVIC CULTURE

While The Civic Culture did much to revive a notion that had fallen into abeyance, it also provoked the sort of criticism, itself part of the reaction to positivism and functionalism, which seemed to deny its full acceptance. Almond and Verba, however, set an agenda for much subsequent debate. A brief reminder of their central theoretical claims and the resulting questions will suffice. Political culture is defined by Almond and Verba as the psychological dispositions of individuals: 'attitudes towards the political system and its various parts, and attitudes towards the role of the self in the system.'(11) These attitudes yield three orientations: (i) cognitive, (ii) affective, and (iii) evaluative. These refer, respectively, to individuals' knowledge of the system, their feelings towards it and their judgement of it.(12) For Almond and Verba, political culture is to be regarded as a set of individual psychological states which can be revealed through survey questionnaires.

From their definition of political culture, Almond and Verba move on to consider its role within the political process. Here the analysis becomes less precise, and as a result has been the main focus of criticism. At a minimum, Almond and Verba take the view that a country's political system includes its political culture, and that the maintenance of, or change in, that system is linked in some way to its culture. 'One must assume', they write, 'that the attitudes we report have some significant relationship to the way the political system operates -- to its stability, effectiveness and so forth.'(13) This thought lies behind, for example, their claim that Britain's balance of 'diversity and consensualism, rationalism and traditionalism' made possible the development of British democracy.(14) Political culture is viewed as a cross between a catalyst and a fertilizer, providing the conditions for change and sustaining the product of that change. More prosaically, political culture forms the context or environment for political action. But Almond and Verba are not happy to give political culture this rather passive role. They want to separate 'politicalculture' from the 'political system', so that they can argue that 'political cultures may or may not be congruent with the structure of the political system'.(15) Both key terms are, as Barry points out,(16) Very vague, but we can detect two underlying ideas. They want, first, to establish whether there is in any particular case a compatibility between people's attitudes and their political institutions. The second idea is that only a certain type of culture -- civic culture -- is appropriate to democracy; or put another way, different cultures fit different regimes. In the ideal democracy, there is compatibility between system andculture: 'the civic culture is a participant political culture in which the political culture and political structure are congruent.'(17) But it is important for Almond and Verba that compatibility cannot be assumed, because they want to claim that political culture is an independent variable which can account for the way people react to their polity.(18) Sometimes the people's orientations and the system's needs will not mesh.

This leads to Almond and Verba's final concern: how the political culture achieves its functional or dysfunctional effect. Why or when does a particular set of individual attitudes have consequences for the operation of politics? For Almond and Verba, the answer lies in the way that political culture links 'micropolitics and macropolitics', and thereby forges a bridge 'between the behaviour of individuals and the behaviour of systems'.(19) The attitudes that matter may not be explicitly political, but can be found in the 'nonpolitical attitudes and nonpolitical affiliations' of civil society.(20) …

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Cultural Review