8 - Political attitudes and behaviour

Summary

Everyone has their own view of politics, and their own interests and ideas and ways of behaving. But individuals do not exist in isolation and nor are they unique. If this were the case it would make no sense to talk about ‘the working class’ or ‘youth cultures’, or to make generalisations about ‘left-wing intellectuals’ or ‘right-wing business interests’. At a still more general level, citizens of the same country usually share similar assumptions and views about politics, which makes the Swedes different from the Chileans, the Spanish different from the South Africans and the South Koreans different from the Irish. Political scientists find it useful to label these shared patterns of beliefs and attitudes ‘the political culture’. The first part of the chapter discusses the political values and attitudes of individuals and groups, and examines how modern research has tried to understand and explain political cultures.

Values and attitudes are important in their own right, but they are also significant because they tell us something about how people are likely to behave, and behaviour has a big and direct impact on political life. In order to understand what people do, and why they do it, it is necessary to understand what they think. For example, it is not enough to know that someone did not vote in an election: we need to know whether their inaction was caused by apathy, alienation, or contentment.