The Concept of Political Culture

216 Pages·1993·22.56 MB·English

by  Stephen Welch (auth.)

THE CONCEPT OF POLffiCAL CULTURE
The Concept of Political
Culture
Stephen Welch
© Stephen Welch 1993
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993
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Frrst published in Great Britain 1993 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LID
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and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
This book is published in the Macmillan!St Antony's Series
General Editor: Rosemary Thorp
A catalogue record for this book is available
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ISBN 978-1-349-22795-2 ISBN 978-1-349-22793-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22793-8
Frrst published in the United States of America 1993 by
Scholarly and Reference Division,
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ISBN 978-0-312-09144-6
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Welch, Stephen.
The concept of political culture I Stephen Welch.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-09144-6
1. Political culture. I. Title.
JA75.7.W43 1993
306.2--dc20 92-38066
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
To my father and in memory of my mother
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Political Culture and Democracy 14
The Civic Culture: Two Projects 14
The Comparative Project 22
Sociological Criticisms 27
2 Political Culture and Modernity 30
Cultural Lag 31
Stages of Modernity 34
Postmaterialism 39
3 Political Culture and Communism 45
The Consonance/Dissonance Theory
and Resocialization 46
The Soviet and Czechoslovak Cases 50
The Collapse of Communism and the
Multivalence of History 57
4 Political Culture and Comparative Explanation 64
Cause and Effect 64
Culture and Context 72
Problems of Comparability 74
5 Political Culture and Stalinism 80
The 'Prefiguration' of Stalinist Political Culture 81
The 'Realization' of Stalinist Political Culture 84
Against Idealism 91
Political Culture and Ideology after Stalin 94
vii
viii Contents
6 Political Culture and Interpretation 99
Culture as a Resource 99
Geertz on Culture and Ideology 104
Phenomenology and Social Construction 108
Phenomenology and Political Culture 113
7 Political Culture and National Identity 118
Outline of a Phenomenological Approach to
National Identity 119
The Theory of Nationalism 122
Poland: the Nation as Response 125
Germany: the Nation as Invention 131
Implications for Political Culture 134
8 New Trends in Political Culture Research 136
Structuralism 136
The Grid and the Group 141
The Historians 147
Conclusion 159
Notes 166
Bibliography 193
Index 204
Acknowledgements
The first three years of the research on which this book is based were
funded by an ESRC Studentship. I wish to thank the following people
for useful comments or conversations: Ralf Dahrendorf, John Goldberg,
Joel Hellman, John Higley, Mary McAuley, David Priestland, Karl Robe
(and other participants in the Fifth Essen Conference on Political Culture,
Essen, February 1989) and Joe Schull. Erica Benner and Martha Merritt
read earlier versions of the manuscript in their entirety and made many
good suggestions. Lakshmi Daniel helped me with some logistical matters.
My D. Phil. examiners, Michael Lessnoff and Zbigniew Pelczynski, pro
vided useful guidance and a singularly effective stimulus to many of the
improvements contained herein. Mr Lessnoff went beyond the call of duty
in making additional suggestions for the final revision, and could no doubt
have made many more if time had allowed. I especially want to thank my
supervisor, Archie Brown, for his support over the long haul. I used to
think that the practice of sharing the credit while taking the blame was a
paradoxical conceit; now I realize it is merely right.
ix
Introduction
'Political culture is one of the most popular and seductive concepts in
political science; it is also one of the most controversial and confused.' 1
Since this view was expressed in 1979, it has if anything become truer.
Recent years have seen a recrudescence of theoretical debate about the
concept and new applications in a variety of academic disciplines. In
addition, its use has become quite widespread among journalists and tele
vision commentators; its appeal has even extended, in the most worrying
development, to advertising copy-writers.2 This state of affairs makes
embarking on a general critique of 'political culture' and a survey of its
uses daunting. It at first seems as though political culture research has
ramified and expanded beyond the point at which it is useful even to refer
to it under one heading. This first impression is to a degree accurate, in
that whatever the conclusions of the present study, it is clear that there
is something in the idea of political culture that will continue to attract
political scientists, historians and pundits: like the early anthropological
idea of culture itself, it threatens to absorb everything in its vicinity.
A second look reveals an opposite but equally off-putting problem.
The categorization of different types of political culture research, if we
notice the numerous attempts at this that have been made, turns out to
be quite possible - indeed all too possible. The disposition to construct
typologies that is endemic to political culture research turns out to afflict
its summarizers also.3 The existence of several typologies of political
culture research already provides good grounds for not following that
approach here. Further grounds are provided when we consider to what
extent such typologies advance knowledge-raising thereby the important
general question of the purpose of categorization.
When dealing with a large and complex domain of data, it is of course
natural to attempt to give the domain some order by imposing categories
upon it. It is something else, however, to make a priori assumptions
about what these categories should be like, and to suppose, as many
of these accounts do, that the act of categorization exhausts analysis.
One of the studies we will consider makes the strong claim that a
typology must 'produce a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set
of classes for the domain under consideration' .4 But why? Moreover,
whether or not such a result is feasible in the analysis of political
cultures themselves (the aim of the study just referred to), there are
2 Introduction
good reasons for doubting its feasibility in the analysis of political culture
research.
These reasons follow from the fact that no useful criterion of distinction
facilitates the creation of 'mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive'
categories. This claim rests on the meaning given to 'useful'. It is true
that 'Any criterion will organize data - will order items in classes - but
only some classifications will be scientifically useful' ,s yet there is no need
to assimilate usefulness to typological purity. Our goal in the following
chapters is to assess political culture research, not simply to order it.
Several criteria of ordering suggest themselves, but our argument will
often take the form of showing how the distinctions they would establish
are not hermetic and that the overlap or interference between 'categories'
helps us to understand problems in political culture research. Thus it is one
theme of the argument that noticing the lack of 'mutually exclusive and
jointly exhaustive' categories helps us to understand the domain we are
studying. The latter is to be considered the purpose of a 'useful' criterion
of distinction. Indeed, the very term 'criterion of distinction' is somewhat
rigid. Since we will be concerned with various forms of overlap, it would
be better to regard the criteria as a range of polarities.
With this qualification in mind, we may go on to consider the 'dis
tinctions' that will be employed below. One that prominently suggests
itself is that between behaviouralism and interpretivism. The candidacy
of this distinction for the subdivision of the political culture field is quite
plausible. For one thing, the distinction has come to be at least one of
the more important and common ways of analyzing political science as
a whole, and polemics between the two camps have been going on for at
least thirty years. More to the point, though, is the fact that political culture
has itself provided an arena for that contest: in its ball of fame it contains
major representatives from each side, and thus has served as a microcosm
of the behavioural-interpretive debate in political science.
Behaviouralism, described by Robert Dahl as a 'mood' rather than a
'field', approximates in his view to a 'scientific outlook'. It had as its
ultimate goal 'the development of a science of the political process', 6 'a
major step forward in the nature of political science as science . . . toward
a probabilistic theory of politics' .7 The optimism of these aspirations was
of a piece with the optimistic attitude towards science and technology as
a whole that was prevalent in America in the 1950s and early 1960s. But
aside from this consonance with the mood of the times, behaviouralism
drew strength from various sources. Dahl mentions specific factors such
as the support for behavioural research given by various foundations
and the hands-on experience of government by political scientists that