NEVIS REVIEW No 5
Section I
Ref# 5.1.(B)
Dec 3, 2012
Political culture
(Part B) Political culture: General theoretical
framework
POLITICAL CULTURE
Although insights into political culture have been part
of political reflection since classical antiquity, two developments in the
context of the French Revolution laid the groundwork for modern understandings.
First, when members of the Third Estate declared “We are the people,” they were overturning centuries of thought
about political power, captured most succinctly by Louis XIV’s infamous
definition of absolutism: “L’etat, c’est moi ” (“I am the State”). Henceforth,
sovereignty was seen to reside in society rather than in the monarch and his
divine rights. A century later, Max Weber turned this political claim into a
scientific one when he defined legitimacy as that which is considered to be
legitimate—not only by elites but by the population in general; to understand
the political power of the state, social science must therefore attend to its
reception and sources in society. Second, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau
retheorized the social contract as one in which individual interests were taken
up in an overarching “General Will” of the collectivity, he raised the question
of how social solidarity could be maintained in the absence of recourse to
divine right. His answer was “civil religion,” symbols and rituals that
establish and dramatize the sense of collective belonging and purpose. A
century later, Émile Durkheim took up these themes when he questioned whether
modern, complex societies could generate sufficient solidarity to function in a
stable manner. Durkheim’s interest in what he called collective effervescence
(generated in and through communal rituals) and collective representations
(embodied in symbols as well as more abstractly in “collective conscience”)
extended Rousseau’s concerns and has underwritten con-temporary analyses of
political culture as the sets of symbols and meanings involved in securing and
exercising political power.
Contemporary work on political culture, however,
dates more directly to the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the United
States. In the wake of World War II (1939–1945), social scientists were
motivated to explain why some nations had turned to authoritarianism while
others supported democratic institutions. Before and during the war,
anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were proponents of a
“culture and personality” approach, which asserted that members of different
societies develop different modal personalities, which in turn can explain
support for different kinds of political programs and institutions. In a
somewhat different vein, the German exile philosopher Theodor Adorno and
colleagues undertook a massive study during the war into what they called, in
the title of their 1950 work, The Authoritarian Personality, continuing earlier
research by critical theorists into the structure of authority in families,
which they believed had led Germans to support authoritarian politics and
social prejudice. In a similar vein, Harold Laswell described a set of
personality traits shared by “democrats,” including an “open ego,” a
combination of value-orientations, and generalized trust.
Perhaps the most important work on political
culture in this period was Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s 1963 The Civic
Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, which combined
Laswell’s description of the democratic personality with at least two strands
of social science theory at the time. First, the predominant sociological
theory in the United States was that of Talcott Parsons, who explained social
order in terms of institutions that inculcated individuals with coherent sets
of norms, values, and attitudes—what Parsons called culture— which in turn
sustained those institutions through time. In contrast, the so-called
behavioral revolution in political science argued that such accounts neglected
extra-institutional variables as sources of social order (a concern that could
be traced back to Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century, who sought
external factors—in his case climate—to explain the different forms of law in
history); in Parsons, moreover, critics charged that norms, values, and
attitudes were more often simply assumed as necessary integrative features of
social systems rather than measured empirically (hence the appeal to
behaviorism, which in psychology held observability to be the only relevant
criterion for science).
The major point of Almond and Verba’s comparative
study was to address the role of subjective values and attitudes of national
populations in the stability of democratic regimes. This fit clearly within the
behavioral revolution because it turned to extra-institutional variables (norms
values, and attitudes) to explain political outcomes. Nonetheless, the work was
presented as a study of political culture, defined as the aggregate pattern of
subjective political dispositions in the populace, thus incorporating and,
indeed, operationalizing, the Parsonsian concept of culture. On the basis of
extensive survey research, The Civic Culture theorized three basic orientations
toward political institutions and outcomes: parochial, where politics is not
differentiated as a distinct sphere of life and is of relatively little
interest; subject, in which individuals are aware of the political system and
its outcomes but are relatively passive; and participant, where citizens have a
strong sense of their role in politics and responsibility for it. The Civic
Culture rated five countries on these qualities, finding Italy and Mexico to be
relatively parochial, Germany to be subject, and the United States and the
United Kingdom to be participant political cultures.
Subsequent work in this tradition by Ronald
Ingelhart and others has shown that the effect of basic satisfaction with
political life and high levels of interpersonal trust (what would later be
called “social capital”) are analytically distinct from economic affluence,
thus arguing forcefully that democracy depends on cultural as well as economic
factors. Contemporary authors such as Samuel Huntington have extended this kind
of argument about norms, values, and attitudes to the world stage, where they
describe a “clash of civilizations” in terms of basic “cultural” differences
understood in this way.
Nevertheless, there have been many criticisms of
the approach developed by Almond and Verba and their colleagues. These ranged
from methodological concerns about the survey instruments to the claim that the
approach normatively privileged American-style democracy as the model against
which all others must be judged. Still others argued that political culture was
being used as a residual category for all that cannot be explained by other
theories, and thus has no theoretically defensible conceptual ground of its own.
Most trenchant, however, were charges that the way Almond and Verba defined
political culture—in terms of subjectivity—eviscerates the importance of
culture as symbols and meanings: Without a richer understanding of symbols,
meanings, rituals, and the like, critics charged, political culture could not
be distinguished conceptually from political psychology: “What ‘theory’ may be
found in anyone’s head is not, ” one set of critics charged, “culture. Culture
is interpersonal, covering a range of such theory.… Political culture is the
property of a collectivity” (Elkins and Simeon 1979, pp. 128–129).
Indeed, since the 1970s, political culture theory
has been radically transformed by a more general cultural turn in social
science, brought about by such influences as the symbolic anthropology of
Clifford Geertz and the rise of semiotics, structuralism, and poststructuralism
in European anthropology and literary theory. In contrast to older
subjectivism, as well as to those who ignore culture altogether, newer work on
political culture in the 1980s and 1990s argued that, in Geertz’s words,
“culture is public because meaning is” (Geertz 1973, p. 12). This work
reformulated political culture as a system of meanings sui generis, as “a form
of structure in its own right, constituted autonomously through series of
relationships among cultural elements” (Somers 1995, p. 131), or as “codes,”
which could be either manifest or “deep.” In this view, political culture can
be measured only crudely by survey analysis; instead, it must be excavated,
observed, and interpreted in its own terms as an objective structure, on the
analogy of language.
However, the rise of various structuralisms in
political culture analysis—emphasizing the Rousseau- Durkheim more than the
Montesquieu-Weber axis—has required some modifications since the 1990s, when
structuralist approaches in general have fallen somewhat out of favor. More
recently, many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have embraced a
“practice” approach that emphasizes meaning making rather than meaning systems.
While in no way a return to the earlier subjectivism in political culture
theory, the practice approach recognizes the limitations of structuralism, in
which agents seem to drop out of the picture, or serve only as enactors or
carriers of structure. Instead, recent work has emphasized “the activity
through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate,
implement, and enforce competing claims they make upon one another and upon the
whole. Political culture is, in this sense, the set of discourses or symbolic
practices by which these claims are made” (Baker 1990, p. 4).
In sum, political culture theory makes empirical
sense out of the French Revolution’s claim that sovereignty derives from society
rather than the state. One temptation with this recognition, however, is to
assume that while states are about power, societies are about meaning and the
reception of power. One solution, inspired by Michel Foucault, among others,
has been to declare society the true locus of power. The problem is that this
misses the ways in which states do indeed set agendas for societies. Recent
analyses have thus returned to the political culture of the state (e.g.,
Bonnell 1997). But they do so without supposing that societies are mere
recipients of such productions.
In contrast to much work in political sociology,
which has drawn a facile distinction between “merely” symbolic politics and
“real” politics, recent political culture theory has thus demonstrated that social
life is an ongoing reproductive process. New political culture analysts in
particular have focused not only on how political acts succeed or fail to
obtain some material advantage but also on how in doing so they produce,
reproduce, or change identities. The struggle for position that constitutes
politics, we now understand, is always simultaneously strategic and
constitutive: As Lynn Hunt has written, “Political symbols and rituals were not
metaphors of power; they were the means and ends of power itself” (Hunt 1984,
p. 54). Interpreting them and understanding how they are generated and how they
work is thus of paramount importance.
( Source- INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL
SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION)
