The Civic Culture was the name given to a study based on research carried out in five countries in the early 1960s. It proceeds from the observation that political cultures vary considerably in the extent to which they encourage a sense of trust in political authority and facilitate political activity on the part of ordinary citizens. The ideal civic culture would be one in which the political ideas and values of the citizenry were attuned to political equality and participation, and where government was seen as trustworthy and acting in the public interest. This comes close in many ways to the classical Greek notion of the polis, and to Aristotle’s description of man as ‘a political animal’. In fact this sense of ‘citizen competence’ was found to vary considerably, according to factors such as class and education, even within the countries that most nearly approached the ideal of liberal democracy.
More to the point, Gabriel Almond (b. 1911) and Sidney Verba (b. 1932), the authors of The Civic Culture, found that it varied greatly according to the efficacy and stability of the democratic regimes surveyed. It was high in the USA and the United Kingdom, relatively low in Italy, and marginal in Mexico (which was not, at the time, a democracy, but rather a fairly liberal one-party state). However, as actual political participation rates are everywhere extremely low, it is unclear that citizens’ perceptions of their political competence mean very much.
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