1 - Political Culture and Value Change

Summary

Approximately fifty years ago, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) published The Civic Culture, followed soon after by Sidney Verba and Lucian Pye’s (1965) Political Culture and Political Development. The importance of these two classic studies cannot be overemphasized. They widened the political culture approach into a global framework for the comparative analysis of political change and regime legitimacy in developed as well as developing countries. The guiding question of the Almond-Verba-Pye approach concerned what citizen beliefs make democratic regimes survive and flourish. With the expansion of democracy into new regions of the globe, this civicness question is even more relevant today.

Political Culture and Political Development laid out the analytical tool kit and categories to examine the civicness question empirically. The volume was particularly important on conceptual grounds, yet it lacked systematic cross-national data to support its conclusions because such research was not feasible. Today, this situation has changed dramatically. The World Values Survey (WVS) and other cross-national projects have opened large parts of the developing world to public opinion research. Now there is an abundance of evidence on a wide range of social and political attitudes. This situation creates an excellent opportunity to evaluate contemporary political cultures in terms of the civicness question.