Political culture1

Political culture consists of a relatively coherent repertoire of cognitive and evaluative models that

enable members of a political community to give a sense to their role as political actors, to other

political actors, to the community they belong to and to the institutional structure in which they live.

Thanks to this framework, they can decide which objectives to pursue, and shape their actions and

behaviours accordingly.

Political culture has the following features: a) it is a shared legacy accumulated over time; b)

it consists of a collection of solutions which have proved, with experience, to be effective in solving

problems concerning human survival, adaptation to the external environment and internal

integration; c) it is transmitted to new members of the political community through socialization.

Political culture has two fundamental contituents: a) cognitive models, i.e. a population of

concepts enabling the imposition of an order on the world through a rational process of critical

objectivization; b) and evaluative models, which make it possible to attribute meaning to the world

through identification with particular values that separate out what is good, right and desirable from

what is bad, wrong and to be avoided.

Like broader cultural orientations, political culture is largely experienced quite unconsciously by

individuals, who are first and foremost carriers and users. To put in another way: the set of

cognitive and evaluative models that make up political culture are, according to Edgard Schein’s

definition, “assumptions taken for granted”. Individuals that share a specific political culture

consider such cognitive and evaluative models to be common sense, the obvious and natural way to

1
Cartocci, R. Political Culture in B. Badie, D. Berg-Schlosser e L. Morlino
(eds), “International Encyclopedia of Political Science”, London, Sage, 2011,
vol.VI , pp. 1949-1962.

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give meaning to the political sphere, to its actors and institutions as well as to its boundaries —

what is politics and what is not politics?

As anthropologists have observed in relation to cultural models in general, there is nothing

objective or natural in the way in which the content of political culture is defined. It has a pragmatic

basis and depends on the clallenges and problems that human beings have to handle. So political

culture is not just a mental construction of assumptions that are taken for granted. These

assumptions form the background and the basis for the political behaviour of actors, i.e., the

framework within which individuals act in what is considered a politically appropriate way. This

involves excluding actions considered to be inappropriate or deplorable, and deciding whether or

not to take part in elections, to cooperate with institutions or act in an underhand fashion, to

organize peaceful demonstrations or take part in violent protests.

Political culture is therefore moulded by the accumulated experience of a political community

and is a restriction that is hard to eliminate. There is debate amongst scholars as to how far one must

go back to find the roots of today’s political culture. This problem will be discussed in more detail

below. However, there is a general consensus that change in political culture, as in all forms of

cultural change, is a slower and more difficult process than institutional, economic and social

change. This is the reason why political culture is characterized by a certain amount of ambiguity.

On the one hand, it is a valuable collective resource in that it makes perceptions, beliefs and

individual attitudes towards political institutions and actors relatively homogeneous. On the other

hand, it represents an obstacle in the face of social and economic changes. In such cases political

culture may offer solutions which prove ineffective when coping with problems of adaptation to

new challenges from outside or from within a given society.

The first section of this entry deals with the scientific context in which the concept of political

culture was introduced into political science, the questions it seeks to answer and the operational

definitions used in the empirical studies. In the second section there is a description of the main

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theoretical and empirical developments in comparative studies on political culture, conducted by

means of representative sample surveys in an increasing number of countries. This is followed by a

section devoted to a discussion of such research design and the methodological and epistemological

presuppositions that are involved.

The fourth and fifth sections cover different research designs regarding political culture and

related concepts. First, consideration is given to the analytic, methodological and empirical

contribution made by studies of social capital, a concept that in the last two decades has prompted

extensive research into the relationship of norms, beliefs and social organization with the

effectiveness of democracy and economic development. In the sixth section the concept of political

culture is compared with that of nation-building, as used in comparative studies of European

political development, according to a research design that is complementary in many respects to the

one based on representative sample surveys.

A critical discussion of the analogies and differences between various research designs is

presented in the final section, where emphasis is placed on the need to consider the depth of the

historic roots of every cultural pattern, and thus of every political culture. It is then argued that in a

political culture that is adequate for an effective democracy there needs to be a balance between two

different components – on the one hand an emphasis on individual well-being and self-realization,

on the other commitment and fairness towards institutions and a moral obligation towards one’s

local community and nation.

A new scientific concept and its operational definitions

Unlike conceptual innovations in everyday life, in the field of scientific research every conceptual

innovation is carefully recorded due to the complete institutionalization of science. The concept of

political culture was introduced by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba at the beginning of the 1960s

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in their book The Civic Culture. This work was part of an extensive programme of theoretical

discussion and empirical research into the major processes of political development that had started

in the 50s. The tragedy of two world wars and of the totalitarianisms in Europe, the birth of new

democracies in the three nations defeated in World War Two (Germany, Italy and Japan), the

establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the founding of new states in Africa and

Asia following the end of the French and British colonial empires – all these gave rise to a series of

important research issues regarding the stability of the new political regimes, in particular the new

democracies.

According to the new functionalist and behaviourist approach, it was imperative for political

science to study the cultural orientations of individuals, especially attitudes to democracy, in that

these are crucial to the stability of a democratic regime.

The Civic Culture stressed the importance of political culture as a variable capable of

influencing, if not determining, the stability and performance of democratic regimes. The new

concept fell within an illustrious tradition. In the history of political thought many authors have

emphasized the importance of the cultural and moral orientations of citizens for the prosperity and

power of states. The terms may vary but the meanings are similar: civic virtues (Aristotle), values

and feelings of identity and commitment (Machiavelli), morality and customs (Rousseau), and

above all the “habits of the heart”, which, according to Tocqueville, animated the citizens of the

United States in the first few decades after independence and were the foundation of American

democracy.

In order to shed light on the subjective components of politics, the new concept of political

culture drew on these classic contributions, producing a new paradigm for empirical research in

political science that still underpins the majority of studies in political culture. This new paradigm is

based on four of the most significant theoretical and analytic sources for the social sciences in the

first half of the 20th century:

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 1 – The contributions of Max Weber’s sociology in the theory of action and in defining a

typology of criteria according to which individuals consider political authority legitimate and

consent to comply with its rules. On one hand, the importance of values in orienting individual

behaviour is stressed by Weber’s distinction between goal rationality, i.e., decisions based on a

calculation of possible individual benefits, and value rationality, namely decisions based on value

orientations, irrespective of, or contrary to, one’s own interests. On the other hand, Weber defines

three ideal types of political authority: traditional, legal-rational and charismatic. Each is supported

by different beliefs: the belief in its conformity to the past; the belief in its conformity to established

rules; and the belief in the particular personal qualities of a leader. In other words, legitimation

depends on one of three different values: tradition, the institutional structure in use or a single,

extraordinary person. The first two values support political continuity while the latter fuels political

change.

2 – The four conceptual pairs (the so-called pattern variables) defined by Talcott Parsons in

relation to the theoretical foundations of his functionalist approach: universalism vs. particularism,

achievement motivation vs. ascriptiveness, specificity vs. diffuseness, affective neutrality vs.

affectivity. The first term in each pair is considered a typical trait of modernity while the second is a

feature of traditional orientations. This set of opposing categories is the basis for all subsequent

studies of modernization processes in both the political and the economic realm.

3 – The empirical analysis of attitudes developed by social psychologists such as Louis

Guttman, Rensis Likert and Charles Osgood in the context of the new behavioural approach.

Different attitude scales were designed in order to collect systematic and comparable data on mass

opinions, beliefs and value orientations through face-to-face interviews.

4 – The influx of Freudian theories on American psychoanthropology, with the notion of the

“basic personality structure” and the importance attributed to socialization processes not only in

childhood but throughout the life cycle.

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 These four analytic contributions were then combined with the new methodology of public

opinion polls, which make it possible to collect data on opinions and attitudes in samples of

citizens. Indeed, the research design of The Civic Culture applies the operational definition of

political culture in sample surveys in five democracies: the United States, Mexico, Britain,

Germany and Italy.

According to the new paradigm established in The Civic Culture, political culture has four

characteristics: 1) it consists of the set of subjective orientations towards politics of the individual

citizens of a nation; 2) it consists of knowledge and beliefs about politics, and a commitment to

certain political values; 3) it is the result both of a socialization process that begins in childhood and

continues through one’s education and exposure to the mass media, and also of direct experience

acquired during adulthood with regard to the performance of political institutions and actors; 4) it

has an influence on, even if it does not determine, the performance of political institutions, due to a

two-way causal link between culture and institutional performance. In general, political culture has

an impact on the quality of democracy, but the latter also contributes to orienting the political

culture of a nation’s citizens.

The study revealed the existence of three different types of political culture: parochial, subject,

participant. Parochial culture is characterized by a prevalence of attitudes based on particularism,

localism, short-range trust and a subjective divorce from the state and politics. The main features of

the second ideal type are compliance and confidence in the legal authority of the state, its

administrative order and its decisions – the output, according to a systemic view. Participant

political culture is based on the active political engagement of citizens who fuel the input side

through the creation of free associations, in keeping with Tocqueville’s classic reflections.

Civic culture, which consists of a balance between these ideal types, is considered to be the

most suitable cultural foundation for a stable democracy. Of the five political systems taken into

consideration, the United States and Great Britain had a civic culture, while Germany and Italy

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were considered democracies with a high risk of instability at the time when The Civic Culture was

published. Germany was deemed to have a prevalently subject-based political culture, while Italy

was prevalently parochial.

Changes in political culture: the rise of postmaterialist values

Some of the most important findings of The Civic Culture were reviewed and criticized twenty

years later by Almond and Verba themselves. They pointed to the growth of a participatory culture

in Germany, the reduction of subject attitudes and an increase in the levels of dissatisfaction and

distrust in Britain and the United States. In the meantime, a host of other investigations had been

conducted, revealing a drop in the degree of confidence in democratic institutions and increasing

disaffection and political protest in Western democracies and Japan.

The observed changes in value orientations are of particular interest. On the basis of a

comparative study of six European nations carried out in 1970, Ronald Inglehart noted that the

youth protest movements were primarily concerned with issues neglected by the traditional political

parties, for instance environmental conservation, disarmament and needs associated with individual

self-fulfilment rather than economic improvement. Inglehart considered these value orientations to

be effects of the situation of economic well-being in which the socialization of young people had

taken place in the Western European countries, which had reached an unprecedented level of wealth

since the Second World War.

With the modification of political priorities, cultural change is fueled by the demographic

replacement of the population due to the arrival of generations with more postmaterialist

orientations than older ones, which gradually disappeared from the scene.

Inglehart bases his thesis on the theory of motivation developed by the psychologist Abraham

Maslow, who considers the gratification of needs to be as decisive on human action as the classic

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principle of privation. According to this theory, the fundamental needs of human beings are

organized into a hierarchy consisting of four ascending levels: basic physiological needs; the need

for safety and stability; the need for affection, self-esteem and and a sense of belonging. At the

higher level there is the need for self-realization. Satisfaction of a need pertaining to a lower level

brings to the fore the one relating to the next level up.

According to Maslow, this framework is an organizational model of the individual personality.

Inglehart turned it into an explanatory model of the mutation of political culture: the older

generations, who grew up amidst the poverty and insecurity generated by the war, are oriented

towards materialist values induced by survival and safety needs. By contrast, young Europeans born

after the Second World War are oriented towards postmaterialist values, i.e. belonging, self-esteem

and self-realization. Having grown up in a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, they tend

to take a certain level of material comfort for granted and therefore develop the value priorities

typical of higher levels. As a result, they are more oriented towards themes such as personal

fulfilment, individual freedom and the conservation of nature.

This difference between young people’s values and those of their parents fuels cultural change

since, according to the Freudian concept of the “basic personality structure” developed by Ralph

Linton and Abraham Kardiner, individuals tend to maintain in the course of their adult life the value

priorities introjected at a profound level in the formative phase of their childhood and youth.

The operational definition used by Inglehart to collect data on materialist-postmaterialist value

priorities is an inventory of twelve possible political goals. Representative samples from Western

countries were asked to choose the most important political goals from the following items.

Material goals: maintain order in the nation; fight rising prices; maintain a high rate of economic

growth; make sure the country has strong defence forces; maintain a stable economy; fight against

crime. Postmaterial goals: give people more say in the decisions of government; protect freedom of

speech; give people more say in how things are decided at work and in their community; try to

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make our cities and countryside more beautiful; move toward a friendlier, less impersonal society;

move toward a society where ideas count more than money. Respondents were then classified as

materialists or postmaterialists depending on whether they favour one of the two kinds of goals

consistently.

A worldwide research program

The operational definition used by Inglehart to measure value change has become a standard

tool in the proliferating studies of political culture, along with questions aimed at surveying

interpersonal and institutional trust, democracy-autocracy preference, life satisfaction and other

similar issues. This series of studies followed the research design adopted in the groundbreaking

volume The Civic Culture. The design has three main characteristics: a) a sample survey: data

collection on political opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and values conducted by means of structured

interviews with representative samples of citizens; b) a comparative design: the same questionnaire

is applied in different political systems in the same period. In other words, the same operational

definitions are used in different countries, favouring comparability of data and permitting the testing

of hypotheses at an individual as well as a national level; c) a longitudinal design: if possible, the

same questionnaires – or the same subsets of closed questions – are applied in the same countries in

different years, creating a rising number of time series for many political culture variables, such as

levels of institutional trust, satisfaction with democratic performance, support for leaders, national

pride and so on.

A number of agencies have been established in recent decades to monitor public opinion

orientations and political attitudes. The Eurobarometer program of the European Union was set up

in 1973 and since 1974 has supplied twice-yearly data on opinions and attitudes for each member or

candidate-member of the Union. Similar survey programmes have recently been set up. The New

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Democracies Barometer, established in 1991, covers twelve East European countries; the

Latinobarometer covers 19 countries from 1996 while Afrobarometer covers over twelve states

from 1999.

Cooperation between different research centres around the world has led to an increase in the

number of nations for which data on political culture indicators are available. Increasingly extensive

networks have been built up, making it possible to conduct the same research project at the same

time in an ever greater number of nations. In particular, the World Values Survey and the European

Value Survey have conducted five waves in a steadily rising number of countries. After the first

wave in 1981, successive waves of data collection were carried out in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005,

covering countries distributed in all the continents (over one hundred in the most recent wave).

A further advantage has been the setting up of efficient data archives. Coupled with new data

transmission tools, these archives facilitate secondary analyses, that is research and empirical

testing of hypotheses by researchers who have not taken part in gathering and analysing the original

data.

All these developments have resulted in a sharp growth in the degree of institutionalization and

standardization of research into mass orientations. One of the most recent, and ambitious, findings

of this research programme is illustrated in Figure 1. It was produced by Ronald Inglehart and

Christian Welzel on the basis of data collected in the first four waves of the World Values Survey.

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Figure 1 The impact of self-expression values on effective democracy, controlling for each
country’s percentage of solid democrats.
Source: R.Inglehart and C. Welxel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy, p.266

The Figure shows the position of 80 states with respect to two variables. The vertical axis is

an index of the quality of democracy in the different countries, and takes into account not only

the existence or otherwise of free elections but also the moral integrity of the political elites as

measured by the ‘control of corruption’ scores provided by the World Bank and other

organizations. Corruption amongst elites is in fact the main factor preventing respect of the

equality of rights and the law, and therefore of an effective democracy. The lower values on

the scale relate to non-democratic countries with corrupt elites, while the higher scores are

obtained by democraticies with political elites that guarantee the rule of law and equal rights.

The horizontal axis shows the average values for each country on an index that measures the

spread of a cultural orientation based on the predominance of values associated with individual self-

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 realization and self well-being. It is a direct evolution of Inglehart’s first postmaterialism scale. This

new cultural syndrome is surveyed by five indicators:

- postmaterialist liberty aspirations (give people more say in the decisions of government; protect

freedom of speech; give people more say in how things are decided at work and in their

community)

- forms of political protest, such as signing petitions;

- tolerance of homosexuality and of sexual liberty;

- interpersonal trust;

- life satisfaction.

The relation between the two variables in the figure is measured controlling for the percentage

of respondents who prefer democracy over autocracy, in order to exclude spurious effects due to

merely instrumental prodemocratic motives. Countries where self-expression values are relatively

less widespread than mere support for democracy would suggest are the same where the political

regime violates the rule of law and equal rights more than levels of mere support for democracy

would suggest (see bottom left-hand corner).

At the opposite corner, countries where self-expression values are relatively more widespread

than mere support for democracy would suggest are the same where democracy is more effective

than mere support for democracy would suggest.

In short, the figure shows the strong linkage between a peculiar syndrome of political culture

– self-expression values – and the level of effective democracy: near the top right-hand corner are

the small democracies of protestant Northern Europe, with the United Kingdom and the English-

speaking. democracies (United States, Canada and Australia). Near the opposite corner are some

African and Asian states, with Yugoslavia (at the time formed by Serbia and Montenegro) ranking

as the lowest European country on both variables.

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 The limits of the comparative survey approach

The application and extension of the research design of The Civic Culture in the 40-year period

since it was first published has enabled the international political science community to build up a

large number of comparable data sets on a growing number of nations. The availability of statistical

packages and powerful, low-cost computers, combined with the internet infrastructure, has

facilitated the empirical testing of many hypotheses by means of complex multivariate models.

Important changes in political attitudes and beliefs have been monitored over time and compared in

different countries.

Like any scientific method, technique or decision, this research design also has certain

limitations As with all research tools, the capacity of sample surveys to achieve objectives depends

on the degree to which they offer a simplification of the world, the complexity of which cannot be

grasped by any one tool. A scientific tool is useful if, and only if, it has a limited applicability.

The sample survey research design in the comparative study of political culture is no exception

to this rule. In particular, it tends to emphasize the orientations of mass political culture rather than

those of the elites. Similarly, the wide-range comparative design makes it easier to concentrate on

mass attitudes relating to the polity and politics levels instead of the policy level, which is more

context-dependent. Scholars have stressed these limits, together with others that stem largely from

the basic assumptions of the two main approaches that gave rise to this paradigm: functionalism and

behaviourism.

The functionalist approach has two limits. On the one hand there is a tendency to regard

politics as a clearly defined sphere with respect to society and the economy, and easily recognizable

even in very disparate social systems. On the other, functionalism tends to favour a synchronic

perspective, with a consequent reduction in the attention devoted to the diachronic dimension and in

piecing together the historic origins of the observed processes. As seen above, in the paradigm of

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the comparative research survey, the temporal dimension is only taken into account through the

collection of successive ‘snapshots’, that is, the various waves of sample surveys.

The behaviourist approach, whose roots lie in experimental psychology, has greatly stimulated

the operational definition of citizens’ opinions, attitudes and value orientations. However, it is based

on the individualist and atomist assumption that the whole equals the sum of its individual parts.

The critical point is therefore the link between the micro level (a sample of individuals interviewed)

and the macro level. The political culture of a country is viewed as a statistical aggregation of the

opinions and attitudes of individual citizens.

In addition to these limitations, which derive from the epistemological features of

functionalism and behaviourism, representative sample surveys also have three methodological

limitations:

- actual behaviours, which are the overt output of cultural orientations, are not observed but

only inferred by verbal answers to questions;

- it is assumed that the meanings of questions and answers are the same in different countries

and languages: a necessary assumption if one is to consider the answers of interviewees to be

comparable;

- the number of interviews in national samples is usually too small to guarantee the statistical

representativeness of sub-national samples. This makes it impossible to explore regional differences

in political culture within a given country.

The following sections deal with two different contributions to the study of political culture

that can be regarded as complementary to the paradigm established by The Civic Culture, in that

they pursue different research designs or strategies of inquiry, each of which overcomes some of the

limits described above, though in different ways.

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 Social capital and democracy

One of the principal conceptual innovations in political science and sociology over the last

twenty years is the notion of social capital, introduced in the 1960s by the economists Gary Becker

and James Loury. The concept of social capital became popular in political science as a result of the

analytic work of James Coleman, who related it to social networks, and the research of Robert

Putnam into the institutional performance of Italian regional governments in Making Democracy

Work. According to Putnam’s definition, social capital “refers to features of social organization,

such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating

coordinated actions”.

In other words, social capital is a collective resource and has some of the features of a public

good: it offers advantages to all the members of a group, but no one can appropriate it in an

exclusive way. If one person profits from social capital that does not reduce its availability for

others. On the contrary, social capital has a radically anti-economic feature: the more it is used the

more becomes available for the whole community. Social capital therefore offers a solution to the

dilemmas of collective action posed by scholars such as Mancur Olson and Elinor Ostrom. As a

form of social organization, social capital also has positive effects on economic development in that

it contributes to creating a favourable environment for market exchanges thanks to cooperation,

trustworthiness, honesty and compliance with formal and informal rules.

The notion of social capital is closely related to that of civic culture. They have a common

forebear, Tocqueville, who attributed great importance to the trustworthiness of citizens and the

significance of free associations. The two concepts also share the scientific issue of the relation

between culture and effective democracy.

Putnam’s research on Italian regions exploited the opportunity to apply an experimental

design. In the 1970s the new regional institutions began to operate within the same nation-state. The

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research question was: what variables explain the differences in the output of the new regional

governments? According to Putnam’s findings, the marked differences in the economic

development of the Northern and Southern regions tend to coincide with big differences in

institutional efficiency. However, this is ultimately a spurious correlation.

The independent variable that explains the differences in both economic development and

institutional performance is the amount of social capital present in the various Italian regions at the

end of the 19th century. The Northern regions had the same level of poverty as the Southern

regions, but appreciably higher levels of social capital. Seventy years later, in post-war Italy, social

capital or the “civic community” explains both the difference in economic development and the

difference in institutional performance. The well-known economic cleavage between North and

South (i.e the Mezzogiorno) is only one aspect of a multifaceted divide that sets regions with a high

social capital and high institutional performance apart from regions with limited social capital and

inefficient local institutions.

Figure 2 The Civic Community and Institutional Performance.Source: R. Putnam, Making

democracy work, p.98]

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 As Figure 2 suggests, Putnam’s point of departure is similar to Inglehart and Welxel’s one, but

the research design differs on many significant points:

1) There is no comparison between different nations, but an analysis of a single nation, Italy,

with various research techniques. The comparative design regards the Italian regions, thereby

emphasizing within-state differences and reducing the risk of comparing cases that are too

heterogeneous.

2) The nature of the civic community is measured not only by means of elite and mass surveys

but also by gathering data on observable and documentable behaviours (involvement in voluntary or

other associations, newspaper circulation figures, election turnout).

3) Data gathered from official documents and historical archives also make it possible to make

intertemporal comparisons at the distance of almost a century.

4) Differences within the same country are highlighted and their historic origins reconstructed

using data and findings relating to the Italian tradition of electoral studies.

5) By conducting a comparative analysis within a single nation it is possible to make reliable

predictions on the basis of dynamic models. The differences between the Northern and Southern

regions are not only significant but above all are hard to eliminate, in that they tend to create two

opposing conditions of equilibrium. Regions with civic communities display virtuous circles of

trust, participation, effective institutions and economic development. By contrast, regions with un-

civic communities are entrapped in a vicious circle of distrust, defection, inefficient institutions and

economic stagnation.

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 Political culture, nation-building and state-formation

Putnam’s conclusions confirm on the one hand the importance of political culture for the

quality of democracy and on the other specify the particularity of Italy, as had been observed in the

1950s and 60s not only in The Civic Culture but also in the contemporary ethnographic fieldwork of

Edward Banfield, who shed light on the syndrome of “amoral familism”.

Italy is a case of a divided political culture, in which the divisions are to a large extent

geographical. In Northern Italy the civic community, which corresponds to a participant political

culture, tends to prevail. In the Southern regions there tends to be a prevalence of parochialism

characterized by localist and familistic loyalties, i.e. the vicious circle of the un-civic community.

This latter set of concepts emphasizes a further aspect of political culture, namely that political

culture also consists of beliefs and attitudes that do not have an explicit political content. The

political meaning and consequences of familism and parochialism are implicit and embedded.

Nonetheless, they are just as important as the explicit political content of participant and subject

cultures. More specifically, it can be said that parochial culture is the consequence of historic

processes marked by limited social and political mobilization on the part of the elites.

As Karl Deutch argues, mobilization is a process of change that involves, entirely or partially,

the population of countries that are undergoing modernization. In the early stages this tends to lead

to changes in the employment and residence of individuals, while subsequently it also radically

modifies their perceptions, expectations, beliefs, memories and sense of identity. In other words, the

process of mobilization changes the assumptions that people take for granted, in that it changes

behaviour and the problems that need to be coped with. Sectors of the population that are less

affected by this process maintain to a greater degree the traditional set of assumptions and beliefs

that political scientists label as parochialism or familism.

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 Social and political mobilization lies at the heart of Stein Rokkan’s study of state-formation

and nation-building processes in Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire onwards. In

general the political development of Western Europe has taken place in four phases, which can be

summed up as follows: a) state-formation, which involves the establishment of politically

centralized control over a given territory, which is defended from external or internal attack and

administered in a uniform way by civil and military bureaucracies; b) nation-building, promoted

through a process of cultural standardization with the imposition of a common language, a single

religion, and rituals and myths that lend legitimacy to the power of the monarch or elites; c)

democratization, through the granting of suffrage to increasingly large portions of the population; d)

the creation of the welfare state, that is, a state that looks after its citizens, guaranteeing them health

care, education and protection against the risks of poverty.

The ways in which and the time it has taken for different states to meet these four challenges

has had a precise effect on the quality and stability of democratic regimes. The older states, which

managed to crush the resistance of the free cities and of feudal ties prior to the Peace of Westphalia

(1648), have proved to be the most stable democracies in the 20th century. Typical cases are the

United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark.

At the opposite extreme there is the case of Italy and, to a lesser extent, Germany, which only

became unified states in 1870, after the beginning of a process of social, political and economic

mobilization fuelled throughout the continent by the French Revolution and the Industrial

Revolution. These new states have had to overcome the four challenges in less than a century. In

both cases the liberal and democratic state collapsed in the period between the two wars, with the

rise of the Fascist and Nazi regimes.

According to this line of research, in Europe the culture of a country derives from the

interaction between three fundamental components: ethnic-linguistic identity, religious faith and the

outcome of processes of cultural standardization activated by nation-builders through the education

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system, compulsory military service, etc. Political culture is therefore profoundly influenced by the

timing and the modalities of state-formation and nation-building processes. Moreover, the outcomes

of these two processes create the patterns which define a feature of political culture that Max Weber

had already considered decisive for the stability of a regime: the degree of legitimacy enjoyed by

political institutions. These may in fact be regarded as positive values, symbols with which to

identify as members of a nation, or negative values, that is symbols of a political regime that has

little legitimacy and arouses distrust and suspicion.

This top-down schema of the relationship between political culture and institutional

architecture assigns a fundamental role to the elites of nation-builders and places the origins of

modern-day political cultures much further in the past.

Rokkan’s schema of political development also highlights cases of countries with non-uniform

political cultures. This lack of uniformity may be due to resistance on the part of some peripheral

areas to the process of cultural standardization promoted by the centre, or to shortcomings or delay

in the state-formation process. Spain, the Netherlands and Italy are three examples of countries that

have experienced nation-building difficulties as a result of cultural differences within their state

frontiers.

Spain is a case of early state-formation, but it has been unable to overcome the resistance of

peripheral areas with considerable economic resources, which have managed to maintain linguistic

autonomy. After the transition to democracy in the 1970s, the new Constitution, introduced in 1978,

recognizes the existence of a plurality of nations within the Kingdom of Spain.

The Netherlands is an example of a country with different subcultures resulting from linguistic

or religious cleavages. These cultural cleavages have been successfully solved by the solution of

consociational democracy founded on “pillarization”. This institutional accommodation is effective

to the extent that it recognizes, confirms and reassures each of the different cultural identities.

Incidentally, the dramatic developments following the collapse of the Republic of Yugoslavia in the

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1990s testify that this accommodation is very difficult to export, even within 21st-century Europe, if

the countries involved do not have a democratic political culture.

Italy is an example of late state-formation, carried out by a secularized elite of nation-builders

that was weak and isolated with respect to the two-fold opposition of the catholic and socialist

movements. These movements created strong anti-state subcultures, thus contributing to the

democratic breakdown in 1922. Here too there is a general lesson to be learnt: the historic legacy of

an element of weakness – strong anti-state subcultures – can become a resource once the political

and institutional framework and the international context have changed. In post-war Italy, it was the

networks of these two subcultures – the unions, cooperatives, voluntary associations, religious

groups and local savings banks – that provided the organizational basis of the civic community of

Northern Italy as described by Putnam.

Two necessary components of political culture

The scientific question about the relationship between political culture and democracy has

been answered in many ways over the last few decades, and has opened up various research

perspectives. Three different research strategies, amongst the most influential and well-known, have

been presented in detail. Of the three, the paradigm of comparative survey research into political

culture orientations adopts methods and techniques that differ greatly from those used by Rokkan in

his theory about the conditions and processes that led to the birth of democracy in Western Europe.

There are four main differences.

With each new wave, the World Values Survey has tended to enlarge the number of countries

covered by the representative sample surveys, without, however, taking account of growing

variance in the level of economic development, the literacy of the population and the duration of the

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democratic regime. By contrast, Rokkan focuses on a more limited area that is relatively

homogeneous in terms of historical, cultural, political and economic development.

The first paradigm seeks to explain the differences in opinions, beliefs and values by resorting

to multivariate models capable of producing high correlation coefficients. The second pieces

together the complex, centuries-old web of social, political, economic and cultural processes with

typologies that can explain the individual national versions of European democracy.

The first paradigm alternates between individual- and state-level analyses. The second is

interested in detecting the existence of specific territorial cultures within states, interpreting them as

aspects of a peculiar path of state-formation and national-building.

The first paradigm recognizes the two-way relation between political culture and the

effectiveness of democracy. However, the rising number of countries considered under a synchronic

perspective tends to privilege the spread of civic and self-expression values as the causal factor that

makes democracy work, according to a bottom-up schema. The second paradigm tends instead to

emphasize a top-down schema, analysing the different nation-building capacities of state

institutions, i.e. their ability to define political culture. On all four points the work of Putnam and

his colleagues lies in an intermediate position, resorting as it does to a comparative approach limited

to an homogeneous area, stressing the historical roots of the differences between the cases

considered and recognizing virtuous or vicious circles between effective institutions and civic

community.

Almost paradoxically, the two most distant paradigms yield analogous results. The countries

which the series of World Value Surveys have shown to be characterized by the greatest democratic

effectiveness and a more self-expression oriented political culture include the European countries

which, on the basis of Rokkan’s analysis, were the first to achieve a stable democracy, having

concluded the state-formation and nation-building phases prior to the French Revolution. These are

the two oldest and most powerful Protestant monarchies of Northern Europe (the United Kingdom

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and Sweden), and the consocialtional democracies situated respectively at the source and the

estuary of the Rhine – Switzerland and the Netherlands. More generally, the Western European

nations reveal a greater presence of postmaterialist values and more democratic effectiveness than

the Eastern European countries. Rokkan’s schema, which in the 1970s aimed to explain the

historical process of democratization in Europe, is therefore a good predictor of the results obtained

by Inglehart and Welzel in sample surveys conducted over the last two decades to measure the

current content of political culture and recent changes.

This convergence of results suggests that the two research strategies, though they differ

greatly, are not alternatives and have to be integrated so as to pinpoint the characteristics required of

a political culture for it to be considered adequate in terms of democratic effectiveness. There is a

continuity between early and successful state-formation and nation-building and the rise of

postmaterialist and self-expression values.

Such a convergence is by no means obvious, in that the process of nation-building involves the

spread of altruistic values and the subordination of individual interests to those of the community –

which runs counter to the emphasis placed by postmaterialist values on the primacy of individual

liberty and self-expression.

Analytically, the opposition between the cultural outcomes of a successful nation-building and

the syndrome of self-expression values becomes evident if one bears in mind the process that led to

the expansion of citizenship rights, as charted by Thomas Marshall. According to a cumulative

schema, citizens’ rights first saw the light of day in the 18th century with the establishment of the

rule of law, whereby the civil rights of all citizens were recognized and guaranteed by impartial

courts. The following century saw the development of political rights, quintessentially symbolized

by Parliament. The 20th century was marked by the introduction of a new family of rights: social

rights, with the establishment of compulsory education, public health, etc.

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 This three-fold typology corresponds, significantly but partially, to the four stages of political

development defined by Rokkan, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 European political development and citizenship rights

Stages of European political Citizenship rights

development (Thomas Marshall)
(Stein Rokkan)

State-formation (rule of law) Civil rights (courts)

Nation-building ————

Democratization Political rights (Parliament)

Welfare state Social rights (schools)

Figure 3 European political stages and citizenship rights

Source: R. Cartocci, Mappe del tesoro [Treasury Maps], p.121

The succession of the three types of rights corresponds to three of Rokkan’s four phases, with

the lower row corresponding to the institutional structure of Western European democracies after

the Second World War: a generous welfare state that guarantees social rights and satisfies the

material and security needs of its citizens.

There is an empty box alongside the nation-building phase, for which there is no

corresponding family of rights. In fact, nation-building does not presuppose the recognition of

citizenship rights. On the contrary, individuals have duties and obligations towards the nation.

There is, then, a shift from the pre-eminence of individuals to that of the community as a whole.

The establishment of individual rights is a fundamental feature of European political identity.

The concept of the nation relates not so much to an individualistic as to a holistic perspective,

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according to which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as is well expressed by the value

of Fraternité in the motto of the French Revolution.

The United States does not lend itself to comparison with Western Europe. But even in the

case of American political culture, scholars have found a similar equilibrium between opposing

values: individual freedom on the one hand and communitarian bonds, loyalty and commitment to

institutions on the other. As Robert Bellah has observed, the Americans consider individualism to

be the pre-eminent and distinguishing value of their culture. However, this individualism is

counterbalanced by two opposing moral orientations: civic republicanism and the biblical tradition.

Both value sets relate to the holistic nature of the community – respect for the dignity of all human

beings and an invocation of the moral goals that guided the Founding Fathers, which place upon

each citizen the responsibility for the common good.

In both Western Europe and the United States, freedom and individual rights are accompanied

by solidarity values and subordination to the common good. A political culture in which just one of

these components prevails becomes a risk for democratic stability. An effective democracy needs a

political culture with a balance between postmaterialist values, which stress the participation,

tolerance and self-expression of individuals, and the values of a successful nation-building: loyalty

towards institutions, considered an effective means of guaranteeing the safety and well-being of

citizens.

Participant postmaterialist citizens stimulate the renewal of democracies and prompt them to

find effective institutional solutions to deal with new forms of inequality relating to gender, ethnic

origin, sexual orientation and so on. However, these value orientations are associated with

privileged sectors of society, especially educated young people. Seymour Lipset and Jason Lakin

have recently observed that an excessive number of participant citizens creates the risk of provoking

a dangerous overload of political demands, thereby generating zero-sum-conflicts. On the other

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hand, scholars such as Robert Putnam, Theda Skocpol and Russel Dalton have stressed the decline

of civic engagement in Western democracies, even in younger cohorts.

Democracies have to find the way to adapt to the new attitudes and behaviours of Western

citizens, more critical and less confident than before. Democracies owe their legitimacy to their

ability to simultaneously guarantee both the self-fulfilment needs of the more educated, secularized

and postmaterialist sectors of society and the safety and physical needs of the majority of citizens,

who share more traditional and materialistic values and are rather unwilling to engage in militant

forms of political committment.

Roberto Cartocci

See also: collective action, comparative studies, democracy, nation-building, path-dependence,

pillarization, public opinion, social capital, state-formation, scaling, survey research, values.

Further Readings

Almond, G. & Powell, G. 1966 . Comparative Politics. Boston: Little,

Brown & Company.
Almond, G., & Verba, S. 1963 . The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and
Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Almond, G., & Verba, S. Eds. 1980 . The Civic Culture Revisited. Boston:
Little, Brown & Company.
Banfield, E. 1958 . The Moral Bases of a Backward Society. Glencoe: The
Free Press.
Barnes, S. & Kaase, M. 1979 . Political Action: Mass Participation in Five
Western Democracies. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Bellah, R. & collegues 1985 . Habits of the Heart: Individualism and
Commitment in Americal Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cartocci, R. 2007 . Mappe del tesoro. Geografia del capitale sociale in Italia
[Treasury Map. Geography of Social Capital in Italy]. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Coleman, J. 1990 . Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Dalton, R. 1988 . Citizen Politics in Western Democracy: Public Opinion
and Political Parties in theUnited States, Britain, West Germany and France.
Chatam: Chatam House.
Dalton, R. 2004 Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, The Erosion
of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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 Deutsch, Karl. 1961 . “Social Mobilization and Political Development”, in
American Political Science Review, LV, n.3, pp. 493-514.
Inglehart, R. 1990 . Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Inglehart, R. & Welzel, C. 2005 . Modernization, Cultural Change, and
Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaase, M. & Newton, K. 1995 . Beliefs in Government. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Lipset, S. & Lakin, J. 2004 . The Democratic Century. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press.
Marshall, T. 1951 . Citizenship and Social Class. London, Pluto Press.
Norris, P. ed. . 1999 . Critical Citizens. Global Support for Democratic
Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Putnam, R. with Leonardi, R. and Nanetti, R. 1993 . Making Democracy
Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Putnam, R. 2000 . BowlingAlone. The Collapse and Revival of American
Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rokkan, S. 1999 . State Formation, Nation-building, and Mass Politics in
Europe. The Theory of Stein Rokkan. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Schein, E. 1988 Organizational Culture, Cambridge Mas : Mit, Sloan
School of Management, Working Paper n. 2088.
Skocpol, T. & Fiorina, M. P. eds. 2000 . Civic Engagement in American
Democracy. Washington: Brooking Institution Press.
Wildawski, A. 1987 . “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A
Cultural Theory of Preference Formation”, in American Political Science Review,
LXXXI, n.1, pp. 3-21.

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