Political Cultures

Political System and Processes in India – Review 2

30.11.2021
 INTRODUCTION

Political culture, is a set of shared views and normative judgments held by a population regarding its political
system. The notion of political culture does not refer to attitudes toward specific actors, such as a president or
prime minister, but rather denotes how people view the political system as a whole and their belief in its legitimacy.

American political scientist Lucian Pye defined political culture as the composite of basic values, feelings, and
knowledge that underlie the political process. Hence, the building blocks of political culture are the beliefs,
opinions, and emotions of the citizens toward their form of government.

The classic study of political culture is The Civic Culture (1963) by American political scientists Gabriel Almond and
Sydney Verba. Based on surveys conducted in the United States, Britain, West Germany, Italy, and Mexico, this
landmark investigation sought to identify the political culture within which a liberal democracy is most likely to
develop and consolidate.

Almond and Verba’s argument is based on a distinction between three pure types of political culture: parochial,
subject, and participant.

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 Three types of Political cultures

In a parochial political culture, citizens are only indistinctly aware of the existence of central government.

In parochial cultures, exemplified by African tribal societies, citizens have low cognitive, affective, and
evaluative orientation towards the four types of political objects. (1) the “general” political system, (2) the
specific roles or structures in the system (such as legislatures and bureaucracies), (3) the incumbents of roles
(such as monarchs and legislators), and (4) public policies (decisions or enforcements of decisions) In these
simpler traditional societies, there are no specialized political roles and little expectation for political change.
Here, “the individual thinks of his family’s advantage as the only goal to pursue, or conceives of his role in the
political system in familistic terms”.

In a subject political culture, citizens see themselves not as participants in the political process but as subjects
of the government. In subject cultures, there is high cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientation towards
the political system and policy outputs, but orientations towards input objects (like political parties) and the
self as an active participants are minimal. Thus orientation towards the system and its outputs is channeled via
a relatively detached, passive relationship on the part of the citizen. Subject cultures are most compatible with
centralized, authoritarian political structures. Indeed, for the subject “the law is something he obeys, not
something he helps shape”.
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 Three types of Political cultures

In a participant political culture, citizens believe both that they can contribute to the system and that they are
affected by it. In participant cultures, members of society have high cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientation
to the political system, the input objects, the policy outputs, and recognize the self as an active participant in the
polity. Social actors tend to be activist and mobilized.

In general, participant cultures are most compatible with democratic political structures. Here, the citizen is
expected to have “the virtues of the subject – to obey the law, to be loyal – but he is also expected to take some part
in the formation of decisions”.

Almond and Verba note that political cultures rarely conform to the foregoing ideal-types; rather, they tend to be
mixed cultures. Further, political culture does not always map onto functional political structures: political systems
may be characterized by high congruence between culture and structure (which engenders allegiance), weak
congruence (which engenders apathy), and incongruence (which engenders alienation).

Their core idea was that democracy will prove most stable in societies where subject and parochial attitudes provide
ballast to an essentially participant culture. This mix is known as civic culture.

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 CIVIC CULTURE

In this ideal combination, the citizens are sufficiently active in politics to express their preferences to rulers but not
so involved as to refuse to accept decisions with which they disagree. Thus, the civic culture resolves the tension
within democracy between popular control and effective governance.

American political scientist Robert Putnam argued that civic community, based on high levels of political interest,
social equality, interpersonal trust, and voluntary association, leads to higher probabilities of effective governance
and democracy.

Political culture is the property of a collectivity—for example, a country, region, class, or party. While most studies
of political culture concentrated on national cultures, some studies focused on territorially defined units at the
subnational level too.

It is this mixed quality of the civic culture that mediates the contradictions inherent in democratic systems, namely
the tension between government power/effectiveness and government accountability/responsiveness. First, the
parochial/subject foundations of the civic culture incentivize moderation: “The parochial and subject orientations
modify the intensity of the individual’s political involvement and activity. Political activity is but one part of the
citizen’s concerns, and usually not a very important part at that”.

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 CIVIC CULTURE

Thus the citizen in the civic culture is “not the active citizen: he is the potentially active citizen”. This facilitates elite
decision-making and effective governance. Yet elites must nonetheless be “kept in check. The citizen’s opposite role,
as active and influential enforcer of the responsiveness of elites, is maintained by his strong commitment to the
norm of active citizenship and his perception that he can be an influential citizen […] This may be in part myth […]
yet the very fact that citizens hold to this myth […] creates a potentiality of citizen influence and activity”.

In this way, the civic culture accommodates the need for consensus (which prevents social fragmentation) and for
cleavage (which organizes politics and renders political activity meaningful). This tension is negotiated and diffused
via the inconsistency between participatory norms and participatory behavior.

More concretely, democratic consolidation emerges from a stabilizing cycle, where brief spurts of intense political
mobilization (which serve to validate the participatory myth’s existence by boosting “the citizen’s perception of his
own influence”) are followed by prolonged periods of normal politics with minimal citizen participation (which
serve to promote the government’s “effective performance”). In Almond and Verba’s own words, this “equilibrium
mechanism” results when “an issue becomes salient, activity rises, and balance is restored by a governmental
response that reduces the salience of the issue”.