14.1 Concept of political culture
The concept of political culture was first presented in a detailed form in the book of American political scientists G. Almond and S. Verba “Civic Culture” (1963). This work was based on a large array of empirical data obtained during the comparative studies in 1959–1960 in the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Mexico. G. Almond formulated the concept of political culture as follows: “Each political system is included in a special pattern of orientations for political action. I considered it useful to call it a political culture... When we talk about the political culture of society, we mean a political system internalized in the knowledge, feelings and assessments of its members”.
Therefore, in fact, the study of political culture is an analysis of the political system at the orientation level.
According to G. Almond’s co-author – S. Verba, political culture “does not deal with what is happening in politics, but with what people think about it”. Thus, political culture is the beliefs and representations that influence the behaviour of people within existing political institutions. These beliefs mainly grow out of the personal experience of citizens and only partially – from the political memory of some historical events.
The most important question for the creators of the concept was: how is the political order achieved and maintained? Based on the definitions of the phenomenon that they had singled out, the authors set the following goal: to identify the type of political culture that best corresponds to the survival and development of liberal democracy. As a result, G. Almond and S. Verba identified three perfectly pure types of political culture.
In their opinion, parochial political culture (or patriarchal) exists in those societies where there is no specialisation of political roles. The knowledge of members of society as regards to the state, emotions and judgments about the inherent values is close to zero. Indifference, lack of expectations, apolitical attitude, along with the dominance of local or ethnic solidarity and identification are the main features of parochial political culture. It can dominate in the young states, but it persists in industrial countries, when the outlook of a significant part of citizens is limited by interest and commitment to their roots, their town, and region, with almost complete lack of attention to national and international problems.
A subordinate political culture (or culture of obedience) exists in the presence of a specialization of political roles; citizens view themselves as an object of influence on the part of the state rather than as participants in the political process. The state power is represented here mainly in terms of lowering the norms that must be observed from above, and regulations that must be obeyed. People are either afraid of punishment, or expect various benefits from the paternalistic state.
Within the framework of participatory political culture (or culture of participation), the population is fully conscious of the policy and strives to participate actively in it, although the evaluation of the results of participation can be negative. The central authority is considered simultaneously in terms of top-down instructions to be submitted to, and in terms of the possibility of the interested citizens’ participation from below in the processes of making political decisions.
In their pure form, these types of political culture are extremely rare. In practice, rather stable combinations of these ideally pure types of political culture are possible. According to G. Almond and S. Verba, such combinations were characteristic for some periods of the political history of European states, both in the distant and in the recent past. Thus, the combination of patriarchal and subordinate orientation was characteristic of the Ottoman Empire, as well as for Prussia and England of the times of absolutism. The combination of allegiance and political culture of participation became characteristic of the Great Britain of the XIX century, when the patriarchal orientation at the level of local self-government was destroyed. The combination of patriarchal political culture with an orientation toward political participation, according to American political scientists, characterizes the political culture of countries that have freed themselves from colonial dependence.
The main conclusion of the researchers was that the best chances for achieving a stable democracy are societies in which the predominantly participatory political culture includes significant elements of parochial and subordinate orientations. This particular hybrid was named by G. Almond and S. Verba as the political culture of citizenship. The predominant feature of it is the rationally active behaviour of citizens, which is the main link between the levels of micro- and macro-policies. Within the framework of such a culture, citizens are sufficiently involved in politics and actively express their interests and preferences, but still not so much as to block political decisions taken by the elite.
Of the five countries studied, the United Kingdom was closest to the culture of citizenship, according to G. Almond and S. Verba, followed by the United States, which ceded to the former metropolis by the relative weight of loyalty in political culture. Germany, Italy and Mexico, located in such a sequence in the list, somehow deviated from the culture of citizenship.
As a result, every national political culture, according to the concept of Almond and Verba, is a mixture of three ideal types. Moreover, the more complex and multifaceted political culture, the greater is the adaptive capacity of the political system.
14.2 Development of the theory of political culture: problems of application for comparative analysis
Political culture is a dynamic phenomenon; its content and form are in constant development. Formation of political culture is carried out in the process of interaction of various value orientations and forms of political participation of citizens, national traditions, customs, reflecting the characteristic features of the civilizational development of society and the state.
Recognized nowadays, the classic work of G. Almond and S. Verba, at the same time, has been actively criticized for more than four decades since its publication. The approach offered by Almond and Verba has an important advantage: an empirical observation of the political behaviour of citizens allows one to compare different societies according to common criteria. There were a huge number of new definitions. This diversity in the interpretation of political culture is primarily associated with the uncertainty of the general concept of “culture”. American researchers A. Kreber and M. Clarkhon in the early 1950s counted more than 200 definitions of this concept. After all, opinions about the scope of the concept of “political culture” were divided “…between those who want to limit it to subjective orientations toward the political system and those who would like to include distinctly expressed political behaviour in political culture as a part of it”. Thus, the concept of political culture can be revealed not only through such categories as tradition, ideology, etc., but also through patterns of political behaviour. The last of these concepts can be defined through the political style of leadership, through sustainable forms of political participation and political orientations of citizens, manifested in their attitude to their own role in political life, as well as to its basic structural elements – the constitution and the system of law, to official ideology, to the government and its course, existing procedures and principles for political decision-making, to participation in local self-government, etc.
Consequently, political culture as a whole appears in most interpretations as a kind of a universe. That is why, according to researchers, this concept has a significant degree of uncertainty: after all, in fact, it contains all the spiritual and cultural layers of the relationship of society (human) to politics. This means that, along with those elements that are conditioned by the actual political system, the universe cannot but include those layers that are determined by the previous political history, as well as those ideological versions that exist with respect to the future.
Finally, in addition to these purely theoretical arguments, arguments from the practice of comparative studies were often cited. In particular, the authors were accused of tendentiousness and west-centrism, pointed at the obsession of the concept of political culture on the stability of systems, describing it as deeply conservative in its prerequisites.
The most serious difficulties were encountered by researchers who tried to apply the approach of G. Almond and S. Verba to the study of political cultures of the USSR and other countries of the eastern bloc. The extreme internal contradictions of these political cultures were revealed, which did not allow giving them any definite and unambiguous description. Nevertheless, the analysis of Soviet political culture led Western political scientists to two important conclusions.
In principle, Almond and Verba themselves acknowledged that the conclusions drawn in the 1960s need serious correction, moreover, they made these corrections in their subsequent work. However, the typology and tools developed by them have by no means lost their significance and continue to serve as a basis for studying political culture within the framework of comparative analysis.
In the early 1990s, an American scholar R. Inglehart, analyzed the role of civic culture in the formation and development of democracy in three dimensions: interpersonal trust, satisfaction with life and the percentage of people supporting radical revolutionary changes. As a result, he came to the following conclusions.
First, there are stable cultural values and attitudes similar to most democratic countries.
Secondly, states with a high standard of living, interpersonal trust and tolerance are more inclined to accept and support democratic institutions than countries with a low level of these indicators.
Thirdly, the researcher did not reveal a direct relationship between the level of economic development and democracy, but between these variables, in his opinion, there are the following links – the social structure and political culture.
Different societies follow their trajectories, even when they are subject to the same economic forces, partly because of specific factors, such as cultural heritage, that also influence the development of countries.
However, the application of the conceptual scheme of R. Inglehart in relation to the so-called transitional societies has its limitations. In addition, according to many analysts, the notion of political culture is very difficult to explain political changes in society, in particular, the process of democratic transit.
According to one of the most common interpretations of political culture associated with the name of G. Ekstein, it is a kind of psychological filter, i.e. these are the ideas and attitudes rooted from childhood in the mind of a man, which have a constant influence on his political behaviour. Through this filter, the information coming from outside is skipped and filtered out or received. It is clear that only what is accepted corresponds to the basic attitudes and values of a person.
Such an interpretation of political culture inevitably forces us to seek a source of changes in society outside of it, forcing us to turn to other models of interpreting empirical data. On these grounds, the critics see the weakness and irrelevance of the theory of political culture, especially since its adepts failed to foresee the stabilisation and consolidation of democratic regimes in postwar Germany and Japan, nor the beginning of democratic transformations in the communist world. Calling such a position “cultural pessimism”, as its followers see an insurmountable obstacle to democracy in the border Eastern European regions in the heritage of socialism and the pre-socialist cultural tradition, the German political scientist D. Zegert calls it a typically unreasonable prejudice.
For the sake of justice, it should be said that in a significant part of the socio-political transformations studies through the use of the concept, political culture, as a rule, states not integrity but heterogeneity of any cultural tradition, which allows its different components to determine the specific political system of a country and the political behaviour of its citizens during social changes. Therefore, the core of political culture should not be perceived as a monolithic entity, it is rather a mobile combination of different attitudes and orientations, and their relationship and specific gravity in the overall composition can change over time. Political culture is not confined to value-based, ideologically articulated positions; a number of other components play a part in it: the psychological attitudes of the population towards the political system, its institutions and political actors, their often subconscious orientations, prejudices, etc.
However, researchers have long seen another stable correlation, indicating a serious impact of the socio-cultural sphere, the historical and civilizational context on the nature, pace and results of political transformations. Thus, in the 1980s, S. Huntington pointed out the relationship of a political culture with a wider system of cultural values, primarily traditional ones, which in turn are related to the doctrinal and structural characteristics of a particular world religion. As a result, he singled out two types of political cultures.
The first is a consummate political culture, distinguished by its religious-philosophical position, according to which the current and final goals in human life are closely interrelated. Such cultures are less susceptible to democratic values. These are political cultures based on the values of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Confucianism, etc.
The second type is instrumental political cultures, characterized by the presence of a significant set of normative religious traditions in the value system, according to which the current goals in a person’s life are separate and independent of the ultimate goals, so that they do not have a serious impact on each of its concrete actions. Instrumental values are viewed by Huntington as more open to democratic values (cultures associated with Protestantism, Hinduism, Shinto, etc.). Instrumental cultures are defined as systems characterised by closer functional links between traditional and democratic values and norms and therefore contain more potential opportunities for adaptation and assimilation of new democratic norms and institutions.
14.3 Comparative study of political subcultures
When political culture corresponds to a political structure, namely, when cognitive, effective and value orientations strengthen political institutions, such a culture is called loyal. This characteristic implies a certain degree of correspondence between elitist and mass political cultures. In the event of strong breaks between them, there is a threat of preserving the national identity. Formation of a political nation includes, therefore, the process of relative unification of political culture, i.e. integration (both vertical and horizontal) of the masses and elites, aligning their political values and orientations.
In underdeveloped societies, as well as societies at the stage of transformation, mass political culture, as a rule, is fragmented, rather than homogeneous. Racial, religious, tribal, ethnic, class, geographical and other differences also fuel the growth of diverse political subcultures. In democratic, pluralistic societies, on the contrary, gaps pass within relatively homogeneous groups (middle class, etc.), forming the appropriate type of political and national identity.
As already noted, G. Almond and S. Verba saw their task in studying the main types of national political cultures, i.e. attitudes and orientations shared by the overwhelming majority of the population of the countries surveyed. At the same time, they could not fail to note the obvious fact that in every society there are groups – carriers of political orientations, clearly different from the orientations of the majority. To reflect this phenomenon, the concept of “political subculture” was introduced. This concept denotes the system of political orientations and behaviour patterns, characteristic of social groups and communities, which differ in this capacity from other social actors and the nation as a whole. Political subcultures are generated by socio-economic, socio-ethnic, institutional, socio-territorial and cultural status stratification of society.
Political subcultures can be vertical and horizontal. Vertical subcultures differ in social and democratic characteristics; this is the difference between mass and elitist subcultures. Horizontal subcultures are subcultures common to the elite and the masses, based on religious, ethnic, regional characteristics and differences.
Fragmented political culture is a culture in which the population does not have a firm agreement on the ways of development of society. What, in the opinion of the researchers, is the difference between cultures, split into subcultures, from fragmented culture? Subcultures are mini-cultures, independent, autonomous entities. Culture, consisting of subcultures, is a culture formed by a set of data of autonomous entities; a fragmented culture is the sum of fragments (segments). These two phenomena are not the same but are related, close to each other, and sometimes coincide. Therefore, some researchers do not make this distinction.
This concept played a secondary role in the very concept of a culture of citizenship, then became increasingly important for research. From this point of view, the experience of the American political scientist D. Elazar and his school is indicative. In contrast to G. Almond and S. Verba, D. Elazar set a goal – to develop a typology of American political culture, i.e. identify the components of its subculture. American political culture, in his opinion, grows out of the interaction between the “market” and the “commonwealth” and from this point of view represents the synthesis of the three main subcultures.
This, first, is an individualistic political subculture. It is rooted in the notion that the government is established from purely utilitarian considerations, namely, in order to serve the functions demanded of it by the people. In other words, the state’s activities should be limited to those spheres, especially in the field of economy, which encourage private initiative and wide access to the market. Politics in terms of this culture is a business that, like any other business, leads the competition for talent and success and rewards those who connect their careers with politics.
From the point of view of a moralistic political subculture, politics is one of the main forms of human activity in the search for a good society, and a state is a positive tool whose duties include serving the common good. Politics is seen as a business and even a duty of every citizen. Political parties are seen as a useful political mechanism, but they have no intrinsic value.
The third type is the traditional political subculture that is rooted in an ambivalent attitude toward the market, combined with the paternalistic and elitist concepts of the commonwealth. The ideal of this culture is a hierarchical society, where power is in the hands of a narrow elite group, bound by close ties for many generations. Most citizens do not participate in politics, and nobody directs them to such participation. Political parties do not play a significant role, since all major decisions are made by the ruling elite, demonstrating an anti-bureaucratic, anti-statist attitude.
In conclusion, we note that the problem of political culture is comparative by its nature. This quality is inherent in this concept. After all, political and cultural studies seek to find in each political culture certain immutable strata, constants, which make up its core. All this assumes a comparative analysis, resulting in a comparative context of the study.
14.4 Features of the development of political culture at the present stage of development
The political culture of our time is a complex multi-structural phenomenon that is influenced by the latest technologies. The globalisation of information and communication technologies leads to the formation of a virtual world. Today, the Internet affects the formation of people’s consciousness more than traditional media, and therefore, the political culture.
If we compare the XXI century with past ages, one can see that information and communication technologies have produced not only radical changes in the fundamentals of the economy but also changes in the socio-political and cultural sphere. In the XXI century not only the social structure of society becomes more complicated, but new social groups also appear, which leads to property inequality. Strengthening of vertical and horizontal mobility causes a reassessment of values and modifications of ideological orientations of people, i.e. all components of political culture.
Political culture in the XXI century is a stage when culture appears not only as an integral part of the society, in which associations and organisations are located. This is the stage when citizens create intellectual capital, where culture guarantees, together with other social values, public order and mutual understanding in society and acts as a value, where a person is the centre of everything.
The political culture of a particular country is usually formed in the process of interweaving different values of orientation and ways of political participation of citizens, national traditions, customs, ways of public recognition of man, the dominant forms of communication between the elite and the electorate, and other circumstances expressing stable features of the civilizational development of society and the state.
For example, the post-Soviet political culture, as part of the common cultural heritage of peoples that existed for a long historical period in unified political socio-economic conditions, is characterised by value orientations that have deep roots that go back to the traditional way of common life. Political culture is not a static phenomenon but is subject to change under the influence of both internal and external factors. Among the external factors of the formation of political culture, one can note the geopolitical situation.
The main directions of the formation of political culture are globalisation and the modernization of political life. Globalisation is an extremely complex and multifaceted process. The very nature of globality is changing with the growth of the integrity of the world society. It is equally important to build a civil society as a tool for the formation of a new political culture.
Control questions
Self-control questions