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Political Culture, Political Structure and Political Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Carole Pateman
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Extract

In The Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’. I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with which The Civic Culture itself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , July 1971 , pp. 291 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), p. 33.Google Scholar

2 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, p. 207.Google Scholar

3 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, p. 32.Google Scholar

4 Pye, Lucian W., ‘Introduction’, in Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) p. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See, for example, the first study of political efficacy Campbell, Angus, Gurin, Gerald and Miller, Warren, The Voter Decides (Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1954) p. 192Google Scholar and Table A3. A summary of findings on political efficacy can be found in Milbrath, Lester W., Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1965) pp. 56 ff.Google Scholar

6 This is the major argument of those recent theorists of democracy, the majority, who claim that the ‘classical’ theory of democracy is unrealistic and needs drastic revision. The final chapter of The Civic Culture provides one example of this argument; other examples are briefly discussed in Pateman, Carole, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 3–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 For example, this characterization: political culture ‘includes political traditions and folk heroes, the spirit of public institutions, political passions of the citizenry, goals articulated by the political ideology, and both formal and informal rules of the political game … political stereotypes, political style, political moods, the tone of political exchanges … some sense of what is appropriately political and what is not.’ Dawson, Richard E. and Prewitt, Kenneth, Political Socialisation (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1969), p. 26.Google Scholar

8 Dawson, and Prewitt, , Political Socialisation, p. 27.Google Scholar

9 Easton, David and Dennis, Jack, Children in the Political System: Origins of Political Legitimacy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969) p. 5.Google Scholar

10 Almond, Gabriel A., ‘Comparative Political Systems’, Journal of Politics, xviii (1956), 391–409, p. 396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, pp. 13–14.Google Scholar Compare these two definitions from other writers who follow Parsons. Orientations are ‘stable, internalized, dispositional traits, underlying and guiding individual behaviour’, Nordlinger, Eric A.The Working-Class Tories (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967), p. 46.Google Scholar Political culture is ‘the “internalized” expectations in terms of which the political roles of individuals are defined and through which political institutions (in the sense of regularized behaviour patterns) come into being’, Eckstein, Harry, ‘Introduction’ in Eckstein, and Apter, David E. (eds), Comparative Politics (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 26.Google Scholar

12 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, pp. 16 ff.Google Scholar

13 There is a brief discussion in Kim, Y. C., ‘The Concept of Political Culture in Comparative Polities’, Journal of Politics, XXVI (1964) 313–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMitchell, W. C. in Sociological Analysis and Politics: the Theories of Talcott Parsons (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967)Google Scholar, devotes a short section to political culture suggesting that Parsons provides a fruitful approach in this area as in others.

14 Parsons, Talcott, ‘The Point of View of the Author’ in Black, Max (ed), The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961) p. 337.Google Scholar

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18 Parsons, Talcott, Shills, Edward A., Naegele, Kaspar D. and Pitts, Jesse R. (eds), Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1961), p. 34.Google Scholar

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20 Parsons, and Shills, , Towards a General Theory of Action, p. 8.Google Scholar

21 Black, , The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons, p. 272.Google Scholar

22 Parsons, , Theories of Society, p. 990.Google Scholar

23 Parsons, , Theories of Society, p. 36Google Scholar (Parsons’ emphasis).

24 Parsons, Talcott, ‘On the Concept of Political Power’, in Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1967).Google Scholar

25 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, pp. 32–3.Google Scholar

26 Parsons, , The Social System, p. 203 and p. 208.Google Scholar

27 Parsons, , Theories of Society, pp. 74–5.Google Scholar

28 Parsons, , On the Concept of Political Power, p. 318.Google Scholar

29 Giddens, Anthony, ‘“Power” in the Recent Writings of Talcott Parsons’, Sociology, II (1968), 257–72, p. 266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Dawson, and Prewitt, , Political Socialisation, p. 56.Google Scholar

31 Easton, David and Dennis, Jack, ‘The Child's Acquisition of Regime Norms: Political Efficacy’, The American Political Science Review, LXI (1967), 25–38, p. 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Apathy may be an example of the ‘containment’ of frustration but, even so, the point is that it is far from clear that this results from the ‘internalization’ of a norm in childhood.

33 Campbell, et al. , The Voter Decides, p. 187.Google Scholar

34 , Almond and Verba, , The Civic Culture, pp. 136–7.Google Scholar

35 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Phillip, Miller, Warren and Stokes, Donald, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp. 516–18.Google Scholar

36 Lane, Robert E., Political Life: Why and How People Get Involved in Politics, (New York: Free Press, 1959), P. 149.Google Scholar

37 Campbell, et al. , The Voter Decides, pp. 187–8.Google Scholar Agreement with statements 1, 3, 4, 5 indicates inefficaciousness, and disagreement with 2.

38 The typical working-class view of a gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’, in contrast to the middleclass view of society as an ordered hierarchy, has often been remarked upon. One investigator found that manual workers interviewed had a general picture of government as ‘a group of men who arrange to keep themselves in power and don't care about the interests of the common people’. Lipsitz, Lewis, ‘Work Life and Political Attitudes’, The American Political Science Review, LVIII (1964), 951–62, p. 958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Evidence of the divergent views of the political structure of different income groups in the U.S.A. can be found in Form, William H. and Rytina, Joan, ‘Ideological Beliefs on the Distribution of Power in the United States’ American Sociological Review, XXXIV (1969), 19–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In a very interesting article Mann has collected together evidence of different perspectives of middle- and working-class individuals over a variety of areas, Mann, Michael, ‘The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy’, American Sociological Review, XXXV (1970), 423–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Prewitt, Kenneth, ‘Political Ambitions, Volunteerism, and Electoral Accountability’, American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 5–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also evidence on the belief in the efficacy of elections in Dennis, Jack, ‘Support for the Institution of Election by the Mass Public’, American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 819–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Langton, Kenneth P., Political Socialisation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 143.Google Scholar

41 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, pp. 271–3 and pp. 294–9, Tables XI. 6–8.Google Scholar ‘The structure of authority at the workplace is probably the most significant — and salient — … with which the average man finds himself in daily contact’, p. 294.

42 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, p. 340.Google Scholar They also argue that because, like any other government, a democratic government must govern, i.e. ‘have power and leadership and make decisions’, citizens cannot be very active politically; that would upset the ‘balance’ between ‘power and responsiveness’ of leaders necessary for democratic government (pp. 340–4). This argument that a stable democratic system requires apathy is common to many recent writers on democratic theory, who stress the dangers to stability of a significant increase in popular activity. One of the more emphatic statements on these lines can be found in Sartori, Giovanni, Democratic Theory (New York: Praeger, 1965).Google Scholar Sartori also argues that apathy ‘is nobody's fault in particular, and it is time we stopped seeking scapegoats’ (p. 88).

43 See figures VI.I and 2 showing that the higher the educational attainment of the respondents the higher their level of competence.

44 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, p. 337 and p. 360.Google Scholar

45 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, p. 2.Google Scholar

46 See Greenstein, Fred I., Children and Politics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) pp. 91–2Google Scholar; Kohn, Melvin L., ‘Social Class and Parent-Child Relationships: an Interpretation’, American Journal of Sociology, LXVIII (1968) 471–80.Google Scholar For descriptions of English family structures see, e.g. Klein, Josephine, Samples from English Cultures (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Kohn, Melvin L. and Schooler, Carmi, ‘Class, Occupation and Orientation’, American Sociological Review, XXXIV (1969), 659–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipsitz, ‘Work Life and Political Attitudes’; also the discussion of other studies supporting the argument that the authority structure of the workplace is a major influence on the sense of effectiveness in Pateman, Participation. See also the comments on the factory, in Inkeles, Alex, ‘Making Men Modern’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXV (1969), 208–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 See the discussion in Mann, ‘The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy’.