political culture
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political culture, in political science, a set of shared views and normative judgments held by a population regarding its political system. The notion of political culture does not refer to attitudes toward specific actors, such as a president or prime minister, but rather denotes how people view the political system as a whole and their belief in its legitimacy. American political scientist Lucian Pye defined political culture as the composite of basic values, feelings, and knowledge that underlie the political process. Hence, the building blocks of political culture are the beliefs, opinions, and emotions of the citizens toward their form of government.
Political culture has been studied most intensively in the context of established Western democracies. The classic study of political culture is The Civic Culture (1963) by American political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba. Based on surveys conducted in the United States, Britain, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico, this landmark investigation sought to identify the political culture within which a liberal democracy is most likely to develop and consolidate. Almond and Verba’s argument is based on a distinction between three pure types of political culture: parochial, subject, and participant. In a parochial political culture, citizens are only indistinctly aware of the existence of central government. In a subject political culture, citizens see themselves not as participants in the political process but as subjects of the government. In a participant political culture, citizens believe both that they can contribute to the system and that they are affected by it. Almond and Verba’s work attracted the attention of generations of scholars who replicated the findings, criticized the conceptualizations, and refined the theory.
Almond and Verba’s core idea was that democracy will prove most stable in societies where subject and parochial attitudes provide ballast to an essentially participant culture. This mix is known as civic culture. In this ideal combination, the citizens are sufficiently active in politics to express their preferences to rulers but not so involved as to refuse to accept decisions with which they disagree. Thus, the civic culture resolves the tension within democracy between popular control and effective governance. In Almond and Verba’s study, Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States came closest to this ideal. In both countries, the citizens felt that they could influence the government. Following the pioneering footsteps of The Civic Culture, American political scientist Robert Putnam argued that civic community, based on high levels of political interest, social equality, interpersonal trust, and voluntary association, leads to higher probabilities of effective governance and democracy.
Political culture is the property of a collectivity—for example, a country, region, class, or party. While most studies of political culture concentrated on national cultures, some studies focused on territorially defined units at the subnational level, such as the political cultures of American states, Canadian provinces, or Italian regions. Other studies analyzed the cultural attributes of social groups such as the political elite, the working class, and the like.