Civic Culture

Political Culture of Democracy

• What are the social structures and processes that support political culture?

• What is the Political Character of a world or national culture?

Participation

• Democracy - citizens have the right to have influence  

• Totalitarian - citizens act as parochial subjects

• Political Culture is more than institutions of government (executive, legislative, judicial)

Civic Culture

• a shared culture of political accommodation• pluralistic culture based on communication and

persuasion  • a culture of consensus and diversity • a culture that permits change but moderates

change– combines elements of traditional and modern– emerged first in Great Britain– Other nations with a civic culture: USA, Switzerland,

Sweden,Norway, Finland

Political Culture

• thus refers to specific political orientations - attitudes toward the political system and its component parts.  This includes attitudes (at the individual level) of the role of self in the system.    -political efficacy    -political trust

"culture" in political culture

• Alternatively, political culture can be viewed as a set of orientations toward a special set of social objects and processes.

• The "culture" in political culture allows us to examine or include (for consideration) psychological orientations toward social objects.

• What, then, is the political culture of a state?– It is that particular distribution of patterns of orientation

toward political objects among members (citizens) of the state.

What is orientation?

• 1) cognitive orientation - knowledge and belief about the political system (roles, inputs, outputs).

• 2) affective orientation - feeling about the political system its roles, personnel and performance. (efficacy)

• 3) evaluational orientation - the judgements and opinions about political objects that typically involve standards and criteria with information and feelings (trust)

How do you evaluate the orientation of a society toward its political system?

• 1) What general knowledge do individuals possess about their country & political system?

• 2) What knowledge do individuals possess of structures & roles, political elites, policy making?  The individual's feelings about these?

• 3) What knowledge does the individual have of the downward flow of policy enforcement?  (examples: structures/processes, individuals involved?)

• 4) How do individuals perceive themselves as members of their political systems?  What are individuals' knowledge of their rights, powers, obligations?

Out of the evaluation can you score societies and

assign a classification?  Yes. • Parochial Political Culture

– scores zero or near zero on 1-4– South American tribal societies, societies in

remote areas– expectations of change or action initiated by the

political system is absent

Subject Political Culture

• high frequency of orientations toward a differentiated political system

• orientations toward self as an active participant approach zero– understands outputs of political system– essentially passive– apt to be affective and normative (knows

• institutions exist, accords them limited or no legitimacy - emotional and value judgments dominate - not a cognitive approach).

Participant Political Culture

• oriented explicitly to the system as a whole and

• to both the political and administrative structures and processes of the system

• (inputs and outputs).

Composition of Orientations

• All three can exist simultaneously in a state!!!

– Individually: a citizen can be a mix of participant, subject and parochial orientation

– Collectively: a given political culture, but especially civic cultures, are a mix of citizens who are subjects, parochials, and participants.

What is the effect of economics on culture?

• Material-Post Material shift• Material values: emphasis on economic security and

on physical security.  Those who feel insecure about these needs have a fundamentally different outlooks and political behavior from those who feel secure about them.– war produces both economic and physical insecurity

– poor individuals tend to be exposed to both economic and physical insecurity (poverty and high crime rates).

Post-material values• emergence of the satisfaction of the physiological

needs allows a growing emphasis on non-physiological needs (higher order needs)– social equality, environmental protection, cultural

pluralism, and self-expression

• A number of movements have emerged in the modern era that can be classified as satifying higher order needs:– environmental movement– women's movement– expansion of social and political freedoms     – demands for equal treatment (ethnicity)

Other Theoretical Approaches

• Modernization

• Dependency and Marxism

• Corporatism

• Bureaucratic Authoritarianism

Modernization• Based on two ideas about social change:

– Traditional versus Modern• Folk-urban dichotomy (anthropology)

– Theory of Evolution• Social evolution theory: modern (industrial) emerges in stages from

traditional (theological/military)

• Theory of Stages of Growth– All societies alike at “traditional” stage – eventually they

pass through same sets of changes that lead to modernization – Rostow.

– Theory modeled on 1st world extended to 3rd world– The application of technology to control nature as engine of

growth

Dependency and Marxism• Challenge to Modernization Theory• Originated in the debate about Latin American

underdevelopment.• Two primary factors:

– Underdevelopment– Neo-Marxism

• Underdevelopment explanation externalized– System of international free trade at fault– International economy portrayed as divided into a center

and periphery– ISI policies recommended as solution

Import-Substitution Industrialization

• Goal: to move Latin America from an inward to an outward pattern of development

• Measures:– Protection for domestic industry (tariff/subsidy)– Structural reforms (land reform/income redistribution)

• To expand the power of the internal market for local industry by increasing the purchasing power of peasants and workers

• ISI failures– Domestic markets reached limits– MNCs to avoid tariffs established subsidiaries in LA

countries (role of foreign capital underestimated)

Marxism (Neo)• Leninist view of capitalism was that it would reach its

zenith during the imperial era and decline from there• Researchers examining failures of ISI changed the

Marxist focus on center countries to periphery nations and how they were impacted by imperialist MNCs (negative)

• New Left thinkers with the Cuban revolution noticed peasants, not workers more inclined to revolt.

• Perhaps Communism’s two stage approach was limited (bourgeoisie to full cap=alliance with workers to revolution to establish socialism).

Neo-Marxism

• The duty of revolutionaries was to make revolutions (Che Guevara)

• Human will can overcome objective limitations (necessity for full capitalism)

• Western imperialism had drained capital and stunted its growth in the periphery nations

• Latin America was doomed to stagnate without political revolution.

Dependency• Rejected the modernizationists’ contention that

certain that certain cultural and institutional features caused underdevelopment

• Global approach linking internal and external factors• Insertion into global econ during imperial era shaped

the region’s economic growth (international division of labor imposed by west)

• No comparative advantage• Center gained at expense of periphery which

constrained economic potential of Third World

Dependency

• A situation in which the economy of a certain country is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the first nation is subjected.

• Interndependent relationship is constrained into dependency when only one of the two nations is able to grow its economy and the other nation is able only to grow as a reflection of the others expansion.

Corporatism• A theory of community and the state.

– organic state tradition – stresses the political community, functional associations, and the role of the state in promoting the common good.

• Assumes that the preferred form of political life is an association of individuals as members of a community.– Liberalism emphasizes individual self-interest– Marxism emphasizes mode of production/class struggle

• Political institutions are a natural organic element of society.

• Institutions must be infused with authority to fulfill proper roles

Corporatism• The state the most perfect form of political community

– The component parts of the state: family, private associations, churches, clubs, interest groups

– All have a role/proper function to which they are intimately connected.

• The role of the state and its morality (to govern with a view to the common interest) are central.

• In opposition to:– Marxism (in violation of the harmonious community idea)– Liberalism/Capitalism (antagonism between classes and the

idea of the weak state)

• Finally, the public common interest dominates the private individual interest

New Corporatism

• A system of interest representation in which the constituents are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed by the state (but not created) and granted a deliberate monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supporters. (Schmitter)

Critiques

• An apology for fascism• Overly dramatic/rigid definition of class conflict• Implicitly accepting the traditional/modern

dichotomy of Modernization Theory (why is this bad?)

• Theory stresses cultural values as key therefore is it really a significant departure from Modernization?

Bureaucratic Authoritarianism• Emerged as an attempt to understand militarization of

government in South America during the 1960s and 1970s.

• Militaries emerged in this time as governing institutions with a plan for accelerating industrial growth (foreign investments, control over suffrage, wage controls)

• Draws on Modernization, Dependency and Corporatism

• Primary hypothesis: That in late-developing countries more advanced levels of industrialization might actually coincide with the collapse of democracy and an increase in inequality.

Steps to Authoritarianism

• Economic stagnation (possibly collapse)– Usually during developmental process

• Increasing demands on government from citizens– resolve the economic situation

• Political inability• Coalition of private, government, citizens

look to military for solution

O’Donnell’s B.A.

• Bureaucratic Authoritarianism for O’Donnell is a product of the modernization process instead of producing a tendency toward democratization and increased social equity.

• Problems?