The term political culture has entered everyday language; as a concept, it has enjoyed a new lease of life in the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s. The author of one of the most systematic explorations of the notion of political culture has suggested that ‘the enduring nature of its appeal in the face of a large body of criticism’ derives partly from ‘a dissatisfaction both with an account of politics that ignores the issues of meanings and culture, and with an account of culture that ignores issues of politics and power’ (Welch 1993).
Although some of the themes evoked by the concept of political culture were not unknown to classical political thought, the term political culture appears to have been first used by Herder (Barnard 1969), and its elaboration and development as a concept of modern political science dates from the 1950s (especially Almond 1956). Substantive empirical research organized around the concept began to appear in the 1960s (see e.g. Almond and Verba 1963; Pye and Verba 1965). These early applications of the concept were linked to questionable theories of political development, but the value of an understanding of political culture in no way depends upon its incorporation in a particular type of developmental, structure-functionalist or systems analysis.
While the concept of political culture had a generally lower salience in the 1970s than in the 1960s, it began to attract in that decade greater attention than hitherto from students of Communist systems. A number of them identified as a vital issue, of both theoretical and practical importance, the degree of consonance or dissonance between, on the one hand, the values and political doctrine being promulgated through the official agencies of political socialization by the Communist power-holders and, on the other, the values and fundamental political beliefs to be found among the mass of the people (Brown 1984; Brown and Gray 1977; White 1979). It had been argued that Communist states represented particularly successful cases of political socialization from above. Thus, for example, Huntington and Dominguez (1975) suggested that ‘the most dramatically successful case of planned political cultural change is probably the Soviet Union’ and that Communist systems had been an exception to a more general rule that conscious, mobilizational efforts to change political cultures had fared poorly (Greenstein and Polsby 1975). Studies of political culture in the European Communist countries called into question, however, the success there of official political socialization. A variety of sources of evidence were drawn upon by researchers, for in most Communist countries, relevant survey data were either unavailable or unreliable and overt political behaviour could also be misleading. Conformist political actions did not necessarily imply the internalization of Marxist Leninist norms in highly authoritarian regimes where the penalties for political non-conformity were severe.
The collapse of most Communist systems by the beginning of the 1990s, while not providing conclusive evidence regarding popular values and beliefs in the late 1970s, tended to lend support to those who emphasized the relative failure of Communist political socialization efforts. Writing in 1983—some years before the Communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe came to an end following a process of peaceful change—Gabriel Almond went so far as to see Communism as ‘a test of political culture theory’ and concluded:
What the scholarship of comparative communism has been telling us is that political cultures are not easily transformed. A sophisticated political movement ready to manipulate, penetrate, organize, indoctrinate and coerce and given an opportunity to do so for a generation or longer ends up as much or more transformed than transforming.
Political culture has been defined in a variety of different ways and several distinctive approaches to the study of it may be identified. So far as definitions are concerned, they can be classified into two broad categories: those which confine the scope of political culture to the subjective orientation of nations, social groups or individuals to politics; and those which broaden the concept to include patterns of political behaviour. Most political scientists have favoured the more restrictive category. Representative definitions in this first group include those which see political culture as ‘the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place’ (Verba 1965), or as ‘the subjective perception of history and politics, the fundamental beliefs and values, the foci of identification and loyalty, and the political knowledge and expectations which are the product of the specific historical experience of nations and groups’ (Brown 1977).
An example of a broader definition is that which views political culture as ‘the attitudinal and behavioural matrix within which the political system is located’ (White 1979). Scholars who prefer this second, broader type of definition of the concept have suggested that in characterizing political culture in subjective or psychological terms, ‘political scientists have parted company with the great majority of anthropologists’ (Tucker 1973). That view appears, however, not only to downplay the great diversity of definitions of culture among anthropologists but also to overlook a growing body of work within social and cultural anthropology. As Ladislav Holy (1979) has put it:
New insights into the working of social systems have been achieved in anthropology through following the implications of an analytical distinction between the conceptual and cognitive world of the actors and the realm of events and transactions in which they engage.
Definitions matter less than the use to which the concept of political culture is put and the extent to which its employment helps to illuminate important aspects of political life. As recently as 1990, an entire series of books entitled ‘Political Cultures’ was launched under the general editorship of the late Aaron Wildavsky. Its starting-point was that ‘political cultures broadly describe people who share values, beliefs, and preferences legitimating different ways of life’, but it stressed an ‘openness to a variety of approaches to the study of political cultures’. The volume which launched the series (Thompson et al. 1990) draws extensively on the pioneering work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas. In contrast to the studies conducted in the 1960s, the authors emphasize the variety of political cultures to be found within each country and move the focus of attention from differences between nations to differences within nations. Having set out the case for ‘the social construction of nature’, Thompson et al. argue that if ‘the boundaries between the political and the nonpolitical are socially constructed, then the study of political culture must assume a central place’ in the discipline of political science.
This approach is consonant with the work of Welch (1993), who draws upon phenomenological social theory in claiming that ‘the social environment through which people move is constituted and made meaningful by them’. Denying the ‘givenness’ of any part of that environment, he criticizes much of the existing body of work on political culture. ‘Culture’, Welch (1993) suggests, ‘is not a set of givens of which political culture is a subset; it is a process, and “political culture” refers to that process in its political aspects.’
Among the many debates which surround the concept of political culture is an emerging one on the value of survey research as a way of eliciting and understanding political cultures. Some of the newer writing, which draws heavily on the insights of anthropology (see, e.g. Welch 1993) sees survey research as at best of marginal value as an aid to interpreting political cultures, while other scholars—in a more sociological tradition—emphasize the dangers of the subjective views of the social scientist being projected on to the social actors studied in the absence of well-grounded surveys. Increasingly, a valuable body of interpretative work on political culture is being built up, albeit from a variety of definitional and methodological starting-points.
Archie Brown
University of Oxford
References
Almond, G.A. (1956) ‘Comparative political systems’, Journal of Politics 18.
——(1983) ‘Communism and political culture theory’, Comparative Politics 13.
Almond, G.A. and Verba, S. (eds) (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Princeton, NJ.
Barnard, F.M. (1969) ‘Culture and political development: Herder’s suggestive insights’, American Political Science Review 62.
Brown, A. (1984) Political Culture and Communist Studies, London.
Brown, A. ‘Introduction’ to: Brown, A. and Gray, J. (1977) Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, London.
Douglas, M. (1975) Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, London.
——(1982) In the Active Voice, London.
Holy, L. (1979) ‘Changing norms in matrilineal societies: the case of Toka inheritance’, in D.Riches (ed.) The Conceptual-Nation and Explanation of Processes of Social Change, Belfast.
Huntington, S. and Dominguez, J.I. (1975) ‘Political development’, in F.I.Greenstein and N.W.Polsby (eds) Macropolitical Theory, vol. 3 of Handbook of Political Science, Reading, MA.
Thompson, M., Ellis, R. and Wildavsky, A. (1990) Cultural Theory, Boulder, CO.
Tucker, R.C. (1973) ‘Culture, political culture and Communist society’, Political Science Quarterly 88.
Verba, S. ‘Conclusion: Comparative Political Culture’ in Pye, L.W. and Verba, S. (eds) (1965) Political Culture and Political Development, Princeton, NJ.
Welch, S. (1993) The Concept of Political Culture, London.
White, S. (1979) Political Culture and Soviet Politics, London.
