5 The Civic Culture Concept

Gabriel A. Almond EARLY NATIONS

Something like a notion of political culture has been around as long as men have spoken and written about politics. The prophets in their oracles, exhortations, and anathemas impute different qualities and propensities to the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians. The Greek and Roman historians, poets, and dramatists comment on the culture and character of the Ionians and Dorians, Spartans, Athenians, and Corinthians; the Rhaetians, Pannonians, Dacians, Parthians, and Caledonians. The concepts and categories we use in the analysis of political culture-subculture, elite political culture, political socialization, and culture change-are also implied in ancient writings.... Nowhere do we find a stronger affirmation of the importance of political culture than in Plato's Republic when he argues "that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of the one as there are of the other. For we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock' and not out of the human natures which are in them:' He speaks of aristocratic, timocratic, oligarchic, and democratic polities and men, deriving the structural and performance characteristics of the first from the values, attitudes, and socialization experiences of the second. In ways that surely would intrigue, if not embarrass, our contemporary psychohistorians he explains the qualities of the aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic polity by the prevailing personal character types, which are in turn explained by typical family constellations with cultivated, gloryseeking, or money-grubbing fathers, dominant, compliant, or complaining mothers, and the like. And just as he stresses the importance of political culture, so does Plato in both The Republic and The Laws lay enormous weight on political socialization. ". . . [O]f all animals the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated; he is the most insidious, sharp witted, and insubordinate of animals. Wherefore he must be bound with many bridles. . . :'1 Mothers and nurses, fathers, tutors, and political officials all have the obligation to guide and coerce the incorrigible animal into the path of civic virtue. The last book of Aristotle's Politics, a fragment to be sure, was devoted to education. Plutarch reports how Lycurgus engineered the Spartan character from the moment of birth, so to speak, counseling the women to bathe their newborn sons in wine, rather than in water, in order to temper their bodies. The nurses used "no swaddling bands; the children grew up free and unconstrained in limb and form, and not dainty or fanciful about their food; not afraid in the dark, or of being left alone; and without peevishness, or illhumour or crying.... Aristotle is a more modern and scientific political culturalist than Plato, since he not only imputes importance to political culture variables, but explicitly treats their relationship to social stratification variables on the one hand and to political structural and performance variables on the other. He argues that the best attainable form of government is the mixed form in a society in which the middle classes predominate. Mixed government is one organized on both oligarchic and democratic principles, hence giving some representation in governing to both the rich and the well born as well as to the poor and the base. Such a government is likely to arise and work best when wealth is widely distributed and when there is a large middle class which imparts its character to the state. He points out that the middle amount of all the good things of fortune is the best amount to possess. For this degree of wealth is the readiest to obey reason. . . . And the middle class are the least inclined to shun office and to covet office, and both of these tendencies are injurious to states. And in addition to these points, those who have an excess of fortunes goods, strength, wealth, friends and the like, are not willing to be governed and do not know how to be (and they have acquired this quality even in their boyhood from their homelife, which was so luxurious that they have not got used to submitting to authority even in schools) while those who are excessively in need of these things are too humble. . . . A society in which the middle class is small produces a state "consisting of slaves and masters,

not of free men, and of one class envious and another contemptuous of their fellows. This condition of affairs is very far removed from friendliness, and from political partnership. . .,' which Aristotle believed to be the cultural basis of the best and most lasting form of government.3 Aristotle's conception of mixed government with a predominant middle class is related to what some of us in recent years have characterized as the civic culture in which there is a substantial consensus on the legitimacy of political institutions and the direction and content of public policy, a widespread tolerance of a plurality of interests and belief in their reconcilability, and a widely distributed sense of political competence and mutual trust in the citizenry. . . .

THE INFLUENCE OF EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGY

As the discipline of sociology developed in the course of the nineteenth century, the importance of subjective variables in the explanation of social and political phenomena was generally recognized. Henri de Saint-Simon attributed more importance to ideological-religious attitudes than economic ones in the maintenance of social stability and the attainment of social progress. Auguste Comte viewed society essentially as a system of common moral ideas. Marx viewed ideology as a significant weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie in retarding revolutionary processes, and political consciousness in the working class as a necessary condition of proletarian revolution. Emile Durkheim based his conception of social solidarity on the "conscience collective;' or the system of values, beliefs, and sentiments shared by the members of societies. And Paretos concepts of logical and nonlogical action, of "residues" and "derivations,' were parts of a substantially psychological theory of sociopolitical structure and social change. But of all the European sociologists the most influential in the shaping of research on political culture was Max Weber. For Weber sociology had to be an "empathic" science, a Verstehende

Soziologie in which attitudes, feelings, and values were important explanatory variables. Perhaps Weber was the first truly modern social scientist. His concepts were empirically grounded; he was methodologically quite inventive and sophisticated. He himself had used questionnaires, developed a form of content analysis, and employed systematic field observation. Weber's work on the sociology of religion was a response to Marxian sociological theory, which stressed economic structure-the relations of production -as the basic formative influence on social institutions and ideas. Weber's comparative study of the economic ethos of the great world religions was intended to demonstrate that values and ideas can be the catalytic agents in changes in economic structure and in political institutions. Weber's types of political authority - traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic - are subjective categories. They were the three ideal-typical reasons why leaders are obeyed by followers, the three idealtypical bases of political legitimacy. Structural differences among political systems are treated as subordinate categories to these essentially subjective categories. Traditional orders are those in which the rulers are obeyed because they have been selected according to immemorial rules, and act in accordance with such rules. The main form of rational-legal order that Weber treats is bureaucracy, in which officialdom is obeyed because it is selected and acts according to written, rational, and enforceable rules. Charismatic authority is the extraordinary and transitional type of political order characterized by a belief in the superhuman or extra-human qualities of a leader. Weber's typology of political parties again is based on the subjective reasons for membership and support. Class parties are those which recruit supporters on the basis of their appeal to class interest. Patronage parties are those which appeal to supporters on the basis of the promise of power, office, and other material advantages, while Weltanschauung (World-View) parties are based on an appeal to the ideals of

political supporters. Finally, Weber's basic categories of types of social action-traditionality, affectuality, instrumental and value rationality- profoundly influenced theories of development and modernization which entered into political culture research. Weber's principal interpreter in the United States was Talcott Parsons. His early theoretical work elaborated and specified some of the main Weberian categories. Thus, for example, Parsons's categories of orientation to action and his pattern variables4 are quite clearly elaborations of the Weberian categories of types of social action. Parsons in his concept of orientation to social action speaks of cognitive, affective, and evaluative modes of orientation. Parsons's pattern variables-his pairs of contrasting modes of orientation to action-reflect the influence of both Weber and Durkheim; from the perspective of Weber, specificity, universalism, achievement motivation, and affective neutrality are properties of rational culture and structure, while diffuseness, particularism, ascriptiveness, and affectivity are aspects of traditionality. These Parsonian categories played an important role in studies of political modernization and in the research design of the Civic Culture study.

individuals and social groupings. The units of analysis which social psychology has employed as building blocks of explanation are instinct, habit, sentiment, and attitude. Graham Wallas and Walter Lippmann were instinctivists, as were William McDougall, E. L. Thomdike, and John Dewey. Other early social psychologists stressed habit and sentiment as the basic units of analysis, but the mainstream of social psychology adopted attitude as its unit of analysis. The concept of attitude avoided the heredity or environment bias implied in such concepts as instinct and habit, and also avoided the stress on feeling implied in the concept of sentiment. As defined in social psychology, an attitude is a propensity in an individual to perceive, interpret, and act toward a particular object in particular ways. As the discipline became increasingly empirical, experimental, and rigorous in the 194Os and 1950s, it began to explore how particular social and political attitudes were formed and transformed, the effect of group structure and communication upon attitudes, the structure and interrelations of attitudes, and the like. . . .

THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOANTHROPOLOGY

A fourth intellectual stream entering into political culture conceptualization and research was that of psycho-anthropology, stemming from the work of Freud and his disciples and joining with anthropology in the 1930s in what later became known as the psycho-cultural approach. Freud himself commented on man's political fate but from a psychobiological point of view. Neither he nor his students dealt with the special characteristics of nations and groups. It was the general fate of man limited by his instinctive endowments and psychological mechanisms that provided the themes for Freud and the early psychoanalytic theorists. The merger of psychoanalysis with the social sciences began in the 1920s and 1930s with the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Harold Lasswell.6

THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

A third intellectual stream entered into political culture conceptualization and research-that of social psychology. This discipline emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century largely out of efforts among sociologists and psychologists to understand and explain the social and political catastrophes of those years: the bloodshed and destruction of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, racial antagonisms, and the like. Social psychology represents an effort to understand and explain how and why the attitudes and behavior of individuals are conditioned and influenced by the presence and impact of other

Produced primarily by anthropologists and psychiatrists, this psycho-cultural literature sought to explain political culture propensities by childhood socialization patterns, unconscious motivation, and psychological mechanisms. During and immediately after World War II, efforts were made to characterize and explain the psychological propensities of the major nations at war-Germany, Russia, America, France, and Japan. But this effort to explain the politics and public policy of large and complex nations in the simple terms of libido theory and family authority and with the assumed homogeneity of the small village or tribal society aroused skepticism and gave way to the more sophisticated formulations of Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Alex Inkeles, and Daniel Levinson? Kardiner and Linton extended the scope of socialization beyond the earlier libidinal stages to the full life cycle, including adult experiences as factors influencing cultural propensities. They also introduced quasi-statistical notions such as "basic" or "modal" personality to correct the earlier assumption of culture-personality homogeneity. Linton was the first to deal directly with the heterogeneity of culture in large societies by introducing the concepts of subculture, role, and status culture. Inkeles and Levinson brought the psycho-cultural approach to a full statistical formulation, arguing that only rigorous sampling techniques with carefully formulated and tested questions could establish differences in the political culture of nations and the subgroups within them.

methods, making it feasible to gather representative data on large populations; (2) the increasing sophistication of interviewing methods to assure greater reliability in the data derived by these methods; (3) the development of scoring and scaling techniques, making it possible to sort out and organize responses in homogeneous dimensions and relate them to theoretical variables; and (4) the increasing sophistication of methods of statistical analysis and inference, moving from simple descriptive statistics to bivariate, multivariate, regression, and causal path analysis of the relations among contextual, attitudinal, and behavioral variables. The development of survey research brought to bear on politics a set of precision tools enabling us to move from relatively loose and speculative inferences regarding psychological propensities from the content of communications, from clinical materials, or from behavioral tendencies. To be sure, the data yielded by survey research were created by the instruments and procedures of the researcher, by the questions asked of respondents, by his sampling decisions, and by his techniques of analysis and inference. As experience in voting studies, attitude studies, and market research accumulated, these sources of error came under greater control, although, to be sure, they can never be fully eliminated.

THE CIVIC CULTURE MODEL

The Civic Culture study drew on all these intellectual currents. From enlightenment and liberal political theory it drew the "rationality activist model" of democratic citizenship, the model of a successful democracy that required that all citizens be involved and active in politics, and that their participation be informed, analytic, and rational. The Civic Culture argued that this rationality-activist model of democratic citizenship was one component of the civic culture, but not the sole one. Indeed, by itself this participant-rationalist model of citizenship could not logically sustain a stable democratic

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SURVEY RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

But as so often has happened in the history of scientific work, the invention of a new research technology was the catalytic agent in the political culture conceptualization and research that took place in the 1960s. . . . This revolution in social science research technology had some four components: (1) the development of increasingly precise sampling

government. Only when combined in some sense with its opposites of passivity, trust, and deference to authority and competence was a viable, stable democracy possible. . . .

POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL THEORY

Political culture is not a theory; it refers to a set of variables which may be used in the construction of theories. But insofar as it designates a set of variables and encourages their investigation, it imputes some explanatory power to the psychological or subjective dimension of politics, just as it implies that there are contextual and internal variables which may explain it. The explanatory power of political culture variables is an empirical question, open to hypothesis and testing. As political culture research has developed in the last two decades, there has been a polemic of sorts organized around three questions: (1) differences of opinion as to definition and specification of the content of political culture; (2) controversy over the analytic separation of political culture from political structure and behavior; and (3) debate over its causal properties. The various definitions of political culture are in most cases pre-theoretic categorizations intended to affirm the importance of these cultural variables in the explanation of political phenomena, or preceding empirical investigations of some specific aspect or aspects of political culture. In an early formulation drawing on the work of Talcott Parsons, I defined political culture as consisting of cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientations to political phenomena, distributed in national populations or in subgroups, and then I proceeded to suggest some cultural hypotheses which might explain the differences in performance among Anglo American, continental European, totalitarian, and pre-industrial political systems.8 In a formulation published around the same time, Samuel Beer, also drawing on Talcott Parsons, argued that a political culture orients a people toward a polity and its processes, providing it with a

system of beliefs (a cognitive map), a way of evaluating its operations, and a set of expressive symbols.9 In The Civic Culture the definition of the concept was adapted to the analysis of the cultural properties assumed to be associated with democratic stability. Consequently the elaboration of the concept stressed political knowledge and skill, and feelings and value orientations toward political objects and processes-toward the political system as a whole, toward the self as participant, toward political parties and elections, bureaucracy, and the like. Little or no stress was placed on attitudes toward public policy. In a major collaborative investigation of varieties of political culture, Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba offered more comprehensive elaborations of the concept. Pye, focusing on political development themes, discussed the variety of ways the concept of political culture can help explain developmental problems and processes:'-o Verba defined the important dimensions of political culture as including the sense of national identity, attitudes toward oneself as participant, attitudes toward one's fellow citizens, attitudes and expectations regarding governmental output and performance, and knowledge about and attitudes toward the political processes of decision making. Dahl, in his study of political oppositions, discusses in detail several types of political orientation that have a bearing on patterns of political partisanship. The first of these is orientation toward the political system as a whole, which affects the extent and distribution of loyalty in a national society; attitudes toward cooperation and individuality and toward other people in general, which affect the formation of political groups and their interaction; and orientation toward problem solving (e.g., whether it is pragmatic or ideological), which affects the interactions of political parties. He then proceeds to show how these attitudes may affect the policies and tactics of political movements, drawing for illustrative purposes from case histories of the United States and a number of Western European democracies.12

In a recent formulation, Almond and Powell elaborate the concept of political culture in three directions: (1) substantive content, (2) varieties of orientation, and (3) the systemic relations among these components. An analysis of a nation's political culture would have to concern itself with all three. From the point of view of substantive content we may speak of "system" culture, "process" culture, and "policy" culture. The system culture of a nation would consist of the distributions of attitudes toward the national community, the regime, and the authorities, to use David Easton's formulation. These would include the sense of national identity, attitudes toward the legitimacy of the regime and its various institutions, and attitudes toward the legitimacy and effectiveness of the incumbents of the various political roles. The process culture of a nation would include attitudes toward the self in politics (e.g., parochialsubject-participant), and attitudes toward other political actors (e.g., trust, cooperative competence, hostility). The policy culture would consist of the distribution of preferences regarding the outputs and outcomes of politics, the ordering among different groupings in the population of such political values as welfare, security, and liberty. Orientations toward these system, process and policy objects may be cognitive, consisting of beliefs, information, and analysis; affective, consisting of feelings of attachment, aversion, or indifference; or evaluative, consisting of moral judgments of one kind or another. A third aspect of a political culture would be the relatedness or systemic character of its components. Philip Converse14 suggested the concept of "constraint" to characterize situations in which attitudes toward political institutions and policies go together. Thus, in a given population, attitudes toward foreign policy, domestic economic policy, and racial segregation may be parts of a consistent ideology; for most individuals in this group, if one knew how they stood on foreign policy one could predict their views on taxation, on busing, and the like. In other groups these attitudes might be independent. Similarly, information, beliefs,

feelings, and moral judgments are interrelated. Generally speaking the political cultures of nations and groups may be distinguished and compared according to their internal constraint or consistency15. . . . The criticism of The Civic Culture that it argues that political culture causes political structure is incorrect. Throughout the study the development of specific cultural patterns in particular countries is explained by reference to particular historical experiences, such as the sequence of Reform Acts in Britain, the American heritage of British institutions, the Mexican Revolution, and Nazism and defeat in World War IT for Germany. It is quite clear that political culture is treated as both an independent and a dependent variable, as causing structure and as being caused by it. The position taken in The Civic Culture that beliefs, feelings, and values significantly influence political behavior, and that these beliefs, feelings, and values are the product of socialization experiences is one that is sustained by much evidence. But The Civic Culture was one of the earliest studies to stress the importance of adult political socialization and experiences and to demonstrate the relative weakness of childhood socialization. These points are made unambiguously and are substantiated by evidence. This relatively open conception of political culture, viewed as causing behavior and structure, as well as being caused by them, and including adult political learning and a rational cognitive component, is the special target of Ronald Rogowski, who rejects political culture theory as being too loosely and diffusely formulated to be acceptable as explanatory theory. He argues that there are clear-cut rational relationships between socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious interests and political structure, and that a rational individualist explanation of political structure is a more powerful and parsimonious theory than political culture theory.16 This polemic about the explanatory significance of political culture as defined in The Civic Culture can only be resolved by empirical research, and such research as has been done suggests that Rogowski's position is not sustainable

by evidence. Much of human history stands in disproof of the argument that the structure of political institutions and their legitimacy can be explained by simple reference to rational self':' interest. Surely the rational self-interest of social class and of ethnic and religious groups is a powerful dynamic illuminating political movements and conflicts, and contributing significantly to historical outcomes. But patriotism, community loyalty, religious values, and simple habit and tradition obviously enter into the explanation of political structure and legitimacy. . . .

Notes 1. Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett 1 vol. ed. (New York: Dial Press, n.d.), p.445. 2. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Ronuzns, trans. John Dryden, rev. by Arthur Hugh Gough (New York: Random House, Modem Library, n.d.), p. 62. 3. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1932), pp. 285. 4. Talcott Parsons and E. A. Shils, Taward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). 5. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, Civilimtion and Its Discontents (1930) in Complete Works, voL 22 (New York: Macmillan, 1962). 6. B. Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1927); Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (NeW York: William Morro\v, 1928); Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934); Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930). 7. Abram Kardiner, The Psychological Frontiers of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945); Ralph Linton, The Cultuml Background of Personality (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1945); Alex Inkeles and Daniel Levinson, "National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Socio-Cultural Systems;' in Lindzey and Aronson, Handbook, vol. 4; Alex Inkeles, "National Character and Modern Political Systems" in Franklin L. K. Hsu, ed., Psychological Anthroplogy (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1961).

8. G. A. Almond, Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 35. 9. Samuel Beer's most recent formulation, which elaborates his views first formulated in Patterns of Government (1958), is to be found in S. .Beer and Adam Ulam, eels., Patterns of Government, 3rd ed., part 1 (New York: Random House, 1974). 10. Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), chap. 1. 11. Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1963). 12. Robert A. Dahl, Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 352. 13. David Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965). 14. Philip Converse, "The Nature of Mass Belief Systems;' in David Apte_ ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964). 15. See also Donald Devine, The Political Culture of the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). 1 16. Ronald Rogowski, A Rational Theory of j Legitinuzcy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).