lecture 4 Flashcards
The concept of the state
Determinants of politics
the key features – Sovereignty – Public institutions – Legitimation and domination – A territorial association
The term ‘state’ has been used to refer to a bewildering range of things: a collection
of institutions, a territorial unit, a philosophical idea, an instrument of coercion
or oppression, and so on. This confusion stems, in part, from the fact that
the state has been understood in four quite different ways; from an idealist
perspective, a functionalist perspective, an organizational perspective and an
international perspective. The idealist approach to the state is most clearly
reflected in the writings of G. W. F. Hegel (see p. 59). Hegel identified three
‘moments’ of social existence: the family, civil society and the state. Within the
family, he argued, a ‘particular altruism’ operates that encourages people to set
aside their own interests for the good of their children or elderly relatives. In
contrast, civil society was seen as a sphere of ‘universal egoism’ in which individuals
place their own interests before those of others. Hegel conceived of the state
as an ethical community underpinned by mutual sympathy – ‘universal altruism’.
The drawback of idealism, however, is that it fosters an uncritical reverence
for the state and, by defining the state in ethical terms, fails to distinguish clearly
between institutions that are part of the state and those that are outside the state.
Functionalist approaches to the state focus on the role or purpose of state
institutions. The central function of the state is invariably seen as the maintenance
of social order (see p. 400), the state being defined as that set of institutions
that uphold order and deliver social stability. Such an approach has, for
example, been adopted by neo-Marxists (see p. 64), who have been inclined to
see the state as a mechanism through which class conflict is ameliorated to
ensure the long-term survival of the capitalist system. The weakness of the functionalist
view of the state, however, is that it tends to associate any institution
that maintains order (such as the family, mass media, trade unions and the
church) with the state itself. This is why, unless there is a statement to the
contrary, an organizational approach to the definition of the state is adopted
throughout this book
The organizational view defines the state as the apparatus of government in
its broadest sense; that is, as that set of institutions that are recognizably ‘public’,
in that they are responsible for the collective organization of social existence and
are funded at the public’s expense. The virtue of this definition is that it distinguishes
clearly between the state and civil society (see p. 6). The state comprises
the various insti tutions of government: the bureaucracy (see p. 361), the military,
the police, the courts, the social security system and so on; it can be identified
with the entire ‘body politic’. The organizational approach allows us to talk
about ‘rolling forward’ or ‘rolling back’ the state, in the sense of expanding or
contracting the responsibilities of the state, and enlarging or diminishing its
institutional machinery.
In this light, it is possible to identify five key features of the state:
The state is sovereign. It exercises absolute and unrestricted power, in that it
stands above all other associations and groups in society. Thomas Hobbes
(see p. 61) conveyed the idea of sovereignty (see p. 58) by portraying the
state as a ‘leviathan’, a gigantic monster, usually represented as a sea creature.
State institutions are recognizably ‘public’, in contrast to the ‘private’
institutions of civil society. Public bodies are responsible for making and enforcing collective decisions, while private bodies, such as families, private
businesses and trade unions, exist to satisfy individual interests.
The state is an exercise in legitimation. The decisions of the state are usually
(although not necessarily) accepted as binding on the members of society
because, it is claimed, they are made in the public interest, or for common
good; the state supposedly reflects the permanent interests of society.
The state is an instrument of domination. State authority is backed up by
coercion; the state must have the capacity to ensure that its laws are obeyed
and that transgressors are punished. For Max Weber (see p. 82), the state
was defined by its monopoly of the means of ‘legitimate violence’.
The state is a territorial association. The jurisdiction of the state is
geographically defined, and it encompasses all those who live within the
state’s borders, whether they are citizens or non-citizens. On the international
stage, the state is therefore regarded (at least, in theory) as an
autonomous entity.
The international approach to the state views it primarily as an actor on the
world stage; indeed, as the basic ‘unit’ of international politics. This highlights
the dualistic structure of the state; the fact that it has two faces, one looking
outwards and the other looking inwards. Whereas the previous definitions are
concerned with the state’s inward-looking face, its relations with the individuals
and groups that live within its borders, and its ability to maintain domestic
order, the international view deals with the state’s outward-looking face, its relations
with other states and, therefore, its ability to provide protection against
external attack. The classic definition of the state in international law is found in
the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of the State (1933).
According to Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention, the state has four features:
a defined territory
a permanent population
an effective government
the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
This approach to the state brings it very close to the notion of a ‘country’. The
main difference between how the state is understood by political philosophers
and sociologists, and how it is understood by IR scholars is that while the former
treat civil society as separate from the state, the latter treat civil society as part of
the state, in that it encompasses not only an effective government, but also a
permanent population. For some, the international approach views the state
essentially as a legal person, in which case statehood depends on formal recognition
by other states or international bodies. In this view, the United Nations
(UN) is widely accepted as the body that, by granting full membership, determines
when a new state has come into existence. Nevertheless, while, from this
perspective, states may be legally equal, they are in political terms very different.
Although their rights and responsibilities as laid out in international law may be
identical, their political weight in world affairs varies dramatically. Some states
are classified as ‘great powers’, or even ‘superpowers’ (see p. 422), whereas others
are ‘middle’ or ‘small’ powers and, in cases such as the small highland countries
of the Caribbean and the Pacific, they may be regarded as ‘micro-states’. Regardless of the different ways in which the state has been understood, there
is general agreement about when and where it emerged. The state is a historical
institution: it emerged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe as a system
of centralized rule that succeeded in subordinating all other institutions and
groups, including (and especially) the Church, bringing an end to the competing
and overlapping authority systems that had characterized Medieval Europe. By
establishing the principle of territorial sovereignty, the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), concluded at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, is often taken to have
formalized the modern notion of statehood, by establishing the state as the principal
actor in domestic and international affairs. There is less agreement,
however, about why the state came into existence. According to Charles Tilly
(1990), for instance, the central factor that explains the development of the
modern state was its ability to fight wars. In this view, the transformation in the
scale and nature of military encounters that was brought about from the
sixteenth century onwards (through, for instance, the introduction of gun
powder, the use of organized infantry and artillery, and the advent of standing
armies) not only greatly increased the coercive power that rulers could wield, but
also forced states to extend their control over their populations by developing
more extensive systems of taxation and administration. As Tilly (1975) thus put
it, ‘War made the state, and the state made war’. Marxists, in contrast, have
explained the emergence of the state largely in economic terms, the state’s origins
being traced back to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, with the state
essentially being a tool used by the emerging bourgeois class (Engels, [1884]
1972). Michael Mann (1993), for his part, offered an account of the emergence
of the state that stresses the state’s capacity to combine ideological, economic,
military and political forms of power (sometimes called the ‘IEMP model’).
The state nevertheless continued to evolve in the light of changing circumstances.
Having developed into the nation-state during the nineteenth century,
and then going through a process of gradual democratization, the state acquired
wider economic and social responsibilities during the twentieth century, and
especially in the post-1945 period, only for these, in many cases, to be ‘rolled
back’ from the 1980s and 1990s. The European state model, furthermore, spread to other lands and other continents. This occurred as the process of decolonization
accelerated in the decades following World War II, independence implying
the achievement of sovereign statehood. One result of this process was a rapid
growth in UN membership. From its original 51 member states in 1945, the UN
grew to 127 members by 1970, and reached 193 members by 2011 (with the
recognition of South Sudan). The state has therefore become the universal form
of political organization around the world. However, in order to assess the significance
of the state, and explore its vital relationship to politics, two key issues
have to be addressed. These deal with the nature of state power and with the roles
and responsibilities the state has assumed and should assume.
What is the nature of state power, and whose interests does the state represent?
From this perspective, the state is an ‘essentially contested’ concept. There are
various rival theories of the state, each of which offers a different account of its
origins, development and impact on society. Indeed, con troversy about the
nature of state power has increasingly dominated modern polit ical analysis and
goes to the heart of ideological and theoretical disagreements in the discipline.
These relate to questions about whether, for example, the state is autonomous
and independent of society, or whether it is essentially a product of society, a
reflection of the broader distribution of power or resources. Moreover, does the
state serve the common or collective good, or is it biased in favour of privileged
groups or a dominant class? Similarly, is the state a positive or constructive force,
with responsibilities that should be enlarged, or is it a negative or destructive
entity that must be constrained or, perhaps, smashed altogether? Four contrasting
theories of the state can be identified as follows:
the pluralist state
the capitalist state
the leviathan state
the patriarchal state.
The pluralist state
The pluralist theory of the state has a very clear liberal lineage. It stems from the
belief that the state acts as an ‘umpire’ or ‘referee’ in society. This view has also
dominated mainstream political analysis, accounting for a tendency, at least within
Anglo-American thought, to discount the state and state organizations and focus
instead on ‘government’. Indeed, it is not uncommon in this tradition for ‘the state’
to be dismissed as an abstraction, with institutions such as the courts, the civil
service and the military being seen as independent actors in their own right, rather
than as elements of a broader state machine. Nevertheless, this approach is possible
only because it is based on underlying, and often unacknowledged, assumptions
about state neutrality. The state can be ignored only because it is seen as an impartial
arbiter or referee that can be bent to the will of the government of the day.
The concept of geopolitics
An approach to policy analysis emphasizing geographical factors such as ■ Location ■ Climate ■ Natural resources ■ Physical terrain ■ Population
Geopolitics is an approach to foreign policy analysis that understands the actions, relationships and significance of states in terms of geographical factors such as location, climate, natural resources, physical terrain and population. Key exponents of geopolitics include Alfred Mahan (1840–1914), who argued that the state that controls the seas would control world politics, and Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), who suggested that control of the land mass between Germany and central Siberia is the key to controlling world politics. The advance of globalization is sometimes seen to have made geopolitics obsolete.
Politics has always had a spatial, or territorial, dimension. As political rule
involves making and enforcing general rules over a particular population, this
must imply taking account of where those people live, even if their location is
imprecise or shifting (as in the case of a nomadic tribe). The association between
politics and territory became more formalized and explicit from the sixteenth
century onwards, as a result of the emergence of the modern state. For example,
as the Peace of Westphalia (1648) defined sovereignty (see p. 58) in territorial
terms, states were seen to be defined by their ability to exercise independent
control over all the institutions and groups that live within their territorial
borders. Two further developments consolidated the importance of territory.
The first of these was the emergence of nationalism from the late eighteenth
century onwards. As nationalist doctrines spread, so did the idea that national
communities are, in part, forged by their sense of having a ‘homeland’. As states
evolved into nation-states, territory therefore became a matter not just of legal
jurisdiction, but also one of identity and emotional attachment. The second
development was the strengthened association between national power with
territorial expansion that was brought about by imperialism (see p. 4270).
Political power is always linked to the control of territory because it allows rulers
both to extract resources and to control geographically-defined populations.
However, the European ‘struggle for colonies’ in Africa and Asia during the nineteenth
century was motivated by a heightened sense of this link, encouraging
some to argue that the destiny of states is essentially determined by geographical
factors. This gave rise to the discipline of ‘geopolitics’.
Nevertheless, the unity and coherence of established nation-states, as well as
their ability to maintain territorial sovereignty, have both been compromised in
recent decades. Although the expansion of the state’s economic and social responsibilities
during much of the twentieth century had helped to fuel political
centralization, during the 1960s and 1970s countervailing forces emerged,
particularly through the tendency to redefine identity on the basis of culture or
ethnicity (see p. 160), as discussed in Chapter 7. This was evident in the emergence
of secessionist groups and forms of ethnic nationalism that sprang up
places such as Quebec in Canada, Scotland and Wales in the UK, Catalonia and
the Basque area in Spain, Corsica in France, and Flanders in Belgium. As the pressure
for political decentralization grew, major constitutional upheavals were
precipitated in a number of states (as discussed later in the chapter). In Italy, the
process did not get under way until the 1990s with the rise of the Northern League
in Lombardy. There have been similar manifestations of ethnic assertiveness
amongst the Native Americans in Canada and the USA, the aboriginal peoples in
Australia and the Maoris in New Zealand. In the latter two cases, at least, this has
brought about a major reassessment of national identity, suggesting, perhaps, that
nationalism was being displaced by multiculturalism (see p. 167).
Why does it matter?
■ „A democratic form of participatory political system requires as
well a political culture consistent with it”
(Almond & Verba, 1972, p.5)
The meaning of political culture for the
sustainability of the political system
- The idea that authority is legitimate, that is : there are justified
reasons to accept that authority as legal/lawful - For political philosophers it constitutes a moral or principle, that
is, describing „the grounds on which governments may demand
obedience from citizens” [Heywood 2013: 81], focusing on the
claim to legitimacy more than on the fact of obedience - Political scientists or sociologists would focus instead on people’s
willingness „to comply with a system of rule” [81]
Culture, in its broadest sense, is the way of life of a people. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to distinguish between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, the former encompassing that which is passed on from one generation to the next by learning, rather than through biological inheritance. Political scientists, however, use the term in a narrower sense to refer to a people’s psychological orientation, political culture being the ‘pattern of orientations’ to political objects such as parties, government, the constitution, expressed in beliefs, symbols and values. Political culture differs from public opinion in that it is fashioned out of long-term values rather than simply people’s reactions to specific policies and problems.
Political thinkers through the ages have acknowledged the importance of attitudes,
values and beliefs. However, these past thinkers did not see them as part
of a ‘political culture’. Burke (see p. 36), for instance, wrote about custom and
tradition, Marx (see p. 41) about ideology, and Herder (see p. 110) about
national spirit. All of them, nevertheless, agreed about the vital role that values
and beliefs play in promoting the stability and survival of a regime. Interest
amongst political scientists in the idea of political culture emerged in the 1950s
and 1960s as new techniques of behavioural analysis displaced more traditional,
institutional approaches to the subject. The classic work in this respect was
Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963), which used opinion surveys to
analyse political attitudes and democracy in five countries: the USA, the UK,
West Germany, Italy and Mexico. This work was stimulated, in part, by a desire
to explain the collapse of representative government in interwar Italy, Germany
and elsewhere, and the failure of democracy in many newly-independent developing
states after 1945. Although interest in political culture faded in the 1970s
and 1980s, the debate has been revitalized since the 1990s as a result of efforts in
Eastern Europe to construct democracy out of the ashes of communism, and
growing anxiety in mature democracies, such as the USA, about the apparent
decline of social capital (see p. 175) and civic engagement. However, there is also
debate about whether or not political culture is shaped by the ideas and interests
of elite groups. This, in turn, is linked to rival views of the mass media (see p.
179) and the extent to which government can now manipulate political communication,
considered later in the chapter.
Civic culture or ideological hegemony?
Debate about the nature of political culture has often focused on the idea of civic
culture, usually associated with the writings of Almond and Verba (1963, 1980).
Almond and Verba set out to identify the political culture that most effect ively
upheld democratic politics. They identified three general types of political
culture:
A participant political culture. This is one in which citizens pay close attention
to politics, and regard popular participation as both desirable and
effective.
A subject political culture. This is characterized by more passivity amongst
citizens, and the recognition that they have only a very limited capacity to
influence government.
A parochial political culture. This is marked by the absence of a sense of
citizenship, with people identifying with their locality, rather than the
nation, and having neither the desire nor the ability to participate in politics.
Although Almond and Verba accepted that a participant culture came closest to
the democratic ideal, they argued that the ‘civic culture’ is a blend of all three, in
that it reconciles the participation of citizens in the political process with the
vital necessity for government to govern. Democratic stability, in their view, is underpinned by a political culture that is characterized by a blend of activity and
passivity on the part of citizens, and a balance between obligation and performance
on the part of government.
In their initial study (1963), Almond and Verba concluded that the UK came
closest to the civic culture, exhibiting both participant and subject features. In
other words, while the British thought that they could influence government,
they were also willing to obey authority. The USA also scored highly, its relative
weakness being that, as participant attitudes predominated over subject ones,
Americans were not particularly law-abiding. The difficulty of building or
rebuilding a civic culture was underlined by the examples of both West Germany
and Italy. By the early 1960s, neither country appeared to have a strong par -
ticipant culture; while the subject culture was dominant in Germany, parochial
attitudes remained firmly entrenched in Italy. Almond and Verba’s later study
(1980) highlighted a number of shifts, notably declining national pride and
confidence in the UK and the USA, which contrasted with a rise in civic propensities
in Germany.
The civic-culture approach to the study of political attitudes and values has,
however, been widely criticized. In the first place, its model of the psychological
dispositions that make for a stable democracy is highly questionable. In particular,
the emphasis on passivity and the recognition that deference to authority is
healthy has been criticized by those who argue that political participation (see p.
444) is the very stuff of democratic government. Almond and Verba suggested a
‘sleeping dogs’ theory of democratic culture that implies that low participation
indicates broad satisfaction with government, which politicians, in turn, will be
anxious to maintain. On the other hand, when less than half the adult population
bothers to vote, as regularly occurs in the USA, this could simply reflect
widespread alienation and ingrained disadvantage. (The link between declining
participation rates and the health of the political system is discussed in greater
detail in Chpater 20.)
Second, the civic-culture thesis rests on the unproven assumption that political
attitudes and values shape behaviour, and not the other way round. In short,
a civic culture may be more a consequence of democracy than its cause. If this is
the case, political culture may provide an index of the health of democracy, but
it cannot be seen as a means of promoting stable democratic rule. Finally,
Almond and Verba’s approach tends to treat political culture as homogeneous;
that is, as little more than a cipher for national culture or national character. In
so doing, it pays little attention to political subcultures and tends to disguise
fragmentation and social conflict. In contrast, radical approaches to political
culture tend to highlight the significance of social divisions, such as those based
on class, race and gender (see Chapter 7).
A very different view of the role and nature of political culture has been
developed within the Marxist tradition. Although Marx portrayed capitalism as
a system of class exploitation and oppression operating through the ownership
of the means of production, he also acknowledged the power of ideas, values and
beliefs. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology ([1846]1970), ‘the
ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is
the ruling material force of society, is at the same time the ruling intellectual
force’. In Marx’s view, ideas and culture are part of a ‘superstructure’ that is
conditioned or determined by the economic ‘base’, the mode of production
the civic culture a and v
Gabriel Almond and Sidney
Verba’s works on the civic culture
■ Trying to analyse „the conditions favouring the development of
stable democracy”
■ political culture defined as a set of orientations towards political
objects, distinguishing three components of these orientations
cognitive orientation = knowledge and belief
affective orientation = feelings
evaluational orientation = judgements and opinions
■ Lack of a behavioural component noted by many scholars
Types of Political Culture
In our comparison of the political cultures of five contemporary
democracies, we employ a number of concepts and classifications
which it will be useful to specify and define. We speak of the
“political culture” of a nation rather than the “national character”
or “modal personality,” and of “political socialization” rather than
of child development or child rearing in general terms. This is not
because we reject the psychological and anthropological theories
that relate political attitudes to other components of personality, or
because we reject those theories that stress the relationship between
child development in general terms and the induction of the child
into his adult political roles and attitudes. Indeed, this study could
not have been made without the prior work of those historians,
social philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and
psychiatrists who have been concerned with the relations between
the psychological and political characteristics of nations. In particu-
lar, this study has been greatly influenced by the “culture-person-
ality” or “psychocultural approach” to the study of political
phenomena. This approach has developed a substantial theoretical
and monographic literature in the past twenty-five years.9
We employ the term political culture for two reasons. First, if we
are to determine the relations between political and nonpolitical attitudes and developmental patterns, we have to separate the former
from the latter even though the boundary between them is not as
sharp as our terminology would suggest. The term political culture
thus refers to the specifically political orientations—attitudes toward
the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the
role of the self in the system. We speak of a political culture just as
we can speak of an economic culture or a religious culture. It is a
set of orientations toward a special set of social objects and
processes.
But we also choose political culture, rather than some other
special concept, because it enables us to utilize the conceptual
frameworks and approaches of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Our thinking is enriched when we employ, for example
such categories of anthropology and psychology as socialization,
culture conflict, and acculturation. Similarly, our capacity to under-
stand the emergence and transformation of political systems grows
when we draw upon the body of theory and speculation concerned
with the general phenomena of social structure and process.
We appreciate the fact that anthropologists use the term culture
in a variety of ways, and that by bringing it into the conceptual
vocabulary of political science we are in danger of importing its
ambiguities as well as its advantages. Here we can only stress that
we employ the concept of culture in only one of its many meanings:
that of psychological orientation toward social objects. When we
speak of the political culture of a society, we refer to the political
system as internalized in the cognitions, feelings, and evaluations of
its population. People are inducted into it just as they are socialized
into nonpolitical roles and social systems. Conflicts of political
cultures have much in common with other culture conflicts, and
political acculturative processes are more understandable if we
view them in terms of the resistances and the fusional and in-
corporative tendencies of cultural change in general.
Thus the concept of political culture helps us to escape from the
diffuseness of such general anthropological terms as cultural ethos
and from the assumption of homogeneity that the concept implies.
It enables us to formulate hypotheses about relationships among the
different components of culture and to test these hypotheses empiri-
cally. With the concept of political socialization we can go beyond
the rather simple assumptions of the psychocultural school regarding
relationships between general child development patterns and adult
political attitudes. We can relate specific adult political attitudes
and behavioral propensities to the manifest and latent political
socialization experiences of childhood.
The political culture of a nation is the particular distribution of
patterns of orientation toward political objects among the members
of the nation. Before we can arrive at such distributions, we need to
have some way of systematically tapping individual orientations
toward political objects. In other words, we need to define and
specify modes of political orientation and classes of political objects.
Our definition and classification of types of political orientation follow Parsons and Shils, as has been suggested elsewhere
figure 1 a and v draw
Figure I
tells us that the political orientation of an individual can be tapped
systematically if we explore the following:
1. What knowledge does he have of his nation and of his political
system in general terms, its history, size, location, power, “consti-
tutional” characteristics, and the like? What are his feelings toward
these systemic characteristics? What are his more or less considered
opinions and judgments of them?
2. What knowledge does he have of the structures and roles, the
various political elites, and the policy proposals that are involved
in the upward flow of policy making? What are his feelings and
opinions about these structures, leaders, and policy proposals?
3. What knowledge does he have of the downward flow of policy
enforcement, the structures, individuals, and decisions involved in
these processes? What are his feelings and opinions of them?
- How does he perceive of himself as a member of his political
system? What knowledge does he have of his rights, powers, obli-
gations, and of strategies of access to influence? How does he feel
about his capabilities? What norms of participation or of perform-
ance does he acknowledge and employ in formulating political
judgments, or in arriving at opinions?
Characterizing the political culture of a nation means, in effect,
filling in such a matrix for a valid sample of its population. The
political culture becomes the frequency of different kinds of
cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientations toward the political
system in general, its input and output aspects, and the self as
political actor.
Parochial Political Culture. When this frequency of orientations
to specialized political objects of the four kinds specified in Figure
1 approaches zero, we can speak of the political culture as a paro-
chial one. The political cultures of African tribal societies and
autonomous local communities referred to by Coleman11 would fall
into this category. In these societies there are no specialized political
roles: headmanship, chieftainship, “shamanship” are diffuse politi cal-economic-religious roles, and for members of these societies the
political orientations to these roles are not separated from their
religious and social orientations. A parochial orientation also im-
plies the comparative absence of expectations of change initiated by
the political system. The parochial expects nothing from the politi-
cal system. Similarly, in the centralized African chiefdoms and
kingdoms to which Coleman refers, the political cultures would be
predominantly parochial, although the development of somewhat
more specialized roles in these societies might mean the beginnings
of more differentiated political orientations. Even larger-scale and
more differentiated polities, however, may have predominantly
parochial cultures. Rustow’s characterization of the Ottoman Em-
pire gives us an example:
“The authority of government, based almost entirely on taxation,
the maintenance of an army, and an age-old tradition of dynastic
rule, was felt most immediately in the towns, less directly in the
villages, and hardly at all among the tribes. The provinces were
ruled by military governors or landed feudatories with only oc-
casional interference from the capital. The nomadic tribes lived in
what an apt Arabic idiom calls the ‘land of insolence,’ respecting no
outside authority. The city economies were largely regulated by the
autonomous guilds of the craftsmen. In the country at large, each
village was a self-contained unit economically as well as politically.
The principal emissary of authority to the village, the tax gatherer,
was less of a government official than a private contractor or sub-
contractor who recompensed himself as liberally as he could for the
advances he had paid to his employers. Often the village was re-
sponsible for tax payments collectively—a circumstance which
further reduced the control of authority over the individual peasant.
Law itself was largely beyond the scope of the ruler, whose decrees
in a few points supplanted or modified a universal structure of re-
ligious law and local custom.”12
In this kind of polity the specialized agencies of central govern-
ment might hardly touch the consciousness of townsmen, villagers,
and tribesmen. Their orientations would tend to be unspecialized
political-economic-religious ones, congruently related to the simi-
larly unspecialized structures and operations of their tribal, religious,
occupational, and local communities.
What we have been describing is extreme or pure parochialism
that occurs in simpler traditional systems where political speciali-
zation is minimal. Parochialism in more differentiated political
systems is likely to be affective and normative rather than cognitive.
That is to say, the remote tribesmen in Nigeria or Ghana may be
aware in a dim sort of way of the existence of a central political
regime. But his feelings toward it are uncertain or negative, and he
has not internalized any norms to regulate his relations to rt
figure 2 a and v draw
The second major type of political
culture listed in Figure 2 is the subject culture. Here there is a
high frequency of orientations toward a differentiated political
system and toward the output aspects of the system, but orientations
toward specifically input objects, and toward the self as an active
participant, approach zero. The subject is aware of specialized
governmental authority; he is affectively oriented to it, perhaps
taking pride in it, perhaps disliking it; and he evaluates it either as
legitimate or as not. But the relationship is toward the system on
the general level, and toward the output, administrative, or “down-
ward flow” side of the political system; it is essentially a passive re-
lationship, although there is, as we shall show below, a limited
form of competence that is appropriate in a subject culture.
Again we are speaking of the pure subject orientation that is
likely to exist in a society where there is no differentiated input
structure. The subject orientation in political systems that have de-
veloped democratic institutions is likely to be affective and norma-
tive rather than cognitive. Thus a French royalist is aware of
democratic institutions; he simply does not accord legitimacy to
them.
The Participant Political Culture. The third major type of politi-
cal culture, the participant culture, is one in which the members of
the society tend to be explicitly oriented to the system as a whole
and to both the political and administrative structures and proc-
esses: in other words, to both the input and output aspects of the
political system. Individual members of the participant polity may
be favorably or unfavorably oriented to the various classes of politi-
cal objects. They tend to be oriented toward an “activist” role of
the self in the polity, though their feelings and evaluations of such
a role may vary from acceptance to rejection, as we shall show
below.
This threefold classification of political cultures does not assume
that one orientation replaces the others. The subject culture does
not eliminate diffuse orientations to the primary and intimate
structures of community. To the diffuse orientations to lineage
groups, religious community, and village it adds a specialized sub-
ject orientation to the governmental institutions. Similarly, the
participant culture does not supplant the subject and parochial
patterns of orientation. The participant culture is an additional
stratum that may be added to and combined with the subject and
parochial cultures. Thus the citizen of a participant polity is not
only oriented toward active participation in politics, but is subject
to law and authority and is a member of more diffuse primary
groups.
To be sure, adding participant orientations to subject and paro-
chial orientations does not leave these “earlier” orientations un-
changed. The parochial orientations must adapt when new and
more specialized orientations enter into the picture, just as both
parochial and subject orientations change when participant orien-
tations are acquired. Actually, some of the most significant dif-
ferences in the political cultures of the five democracies included
in our study turn on the extent and the way that parochial, subject,
and participant orientations have combined, fused, or meshed to-
gether within the individuals of the polity.13
Another caution is necessary. Our classification does not imply
homogeneity or uniformity of political cultures. Thus political
systems with predominantly participant cultures will, even in the
limiting case, include both subjects and parochials. The imper-
fections of the processes of political socialization, personal prefer-
ences, and limitations in intelligence or in opportunities to learn
will continue to produce subjects and parochials, even in well-
established and stable democracies. Similarly, parochials will con-
tinue to exist even in “high” subject cultures.
Thus there are two aspects of cultural heterogeneity or cultural
“mix.” The “citizen” is a particular mix of participant, subject, and
parochial orientations, and the civic culture is a particular mix of
citizens, subjects, and parochials. For the citizen we need concepts
of proportions, thresholds, and congruence to handle the ways in
which his constellation of participant, subject, and parochial at-
titudes is related to effective performance. For the civic culture,
which we shall treat in detail below, we need the same concepts of
proportions, thresholds, and congruence to handle the problem of
what “mix” of citizens, subjects, and parochials is related to the ef-
fective performance of democratic systems. When we compare the
political cultures of our five countries we shall have the occasion to
discuss these questions again.
Our threefold classification of participant, subject, and parochial
is only the beginning of a classification of political cultures. Each
one of these major classes has its subclasses, and our classification
has left out entirely the dimension of political development and
cultural change. Let us look into this latter question first, since it
will enable us to handle the problem of subclassification with a
better set of conceptual tools.
Political cultures may or may not be congruent with the struc-
tures of the political system. A congruent political structure would
be one appropriate for the culture: in other words, where political
cognition in the population would tend to be accurate and where
affect and evaluation would tend to be favorable. In general, a
parochial, subject, or participant culture would be most congruent
with, respectively, a traditional political structure, a centralized
authoritarian structure, and a democratic political structure. A
parochial political culture that was congruent with its structure
would have a high rate of cognitive orientations and high rates of
positive affective and evaluative orientations to the diffuse struc-
tures of the tribal or village community. A subject political culture
congruent with its system would have a high rate of cognition and
high positive rates of the other two types of orientation to the
specialized political system as a whole, and to its administrative or
output aspects; while the congruent participant culture would be
characterized by high and positive rates of orientation to all four
classes of political objects.
Political systems change, and we are justified in assuming that
culture and structure are often incongruent with each other. Partic-
ularly in these decades of rapid cultural change, the most numerous
political systems may be those that have failed to attain congruence,
or are moving from one form of polity to another.
figure 3 a and v draw
To represent schematically these relations of congruence/incon-
gruence between political structure and culture, we present Figure 3.
Any one of the three major types of political cultures may be
located on the matrix in Figure 3. Thus we may speak of “al-
legiant”14 parochial, subject, and participant cultures when cog-
nitive, affective, and evaluative orientations to the appropriate
objects of the polity approach unity, or perfect congruence between
culture and structure. But congruence between culture and struc-
ture may be best represented in the form of a scale. The limits of
congruence between culture and structure are established in columns
1 and 2 of the figure. The congruence is strong when the frequencies
of positive orientations approach unity (+); the congruence is
weak when the political structure is cognized but the frequency of
positive feeling and evaluation approaches indifference or zero.
Incongruence between political culture and structure begins when
the indifference point is passed and negative affect and evaluation
grow in frequency (—). We may also think of this scale as one of
stability/instability. As we move toward the first column in the
figure, we are moving toward an allegiant situation: one in which
attitudes and institutions match; as we move toward the third
column, we are moving toward alienation: where attitudes tend to
reject political institutions or structures.
orientations
Orien-
tation refers to the internalized aspects of objects and relationships. It includes (1) “cognitive orientation,” that is, knowledge of and
belief about the political system, its roles and the incumbents of
these roles, its inputs, and its outputs; (2) “affective orientation,”
or feelings about the political system, its roles, personnel, and per-
formance, and (3) “evaluational orientation,” the judgments and
opinions about political objects that typically involve the com-
bination of value standards and criteria with information and
feelings.
In classifying objects of political orientation, we start with the
“general” political system. We deal here with the system as a whole
and include such feelings as patriotism or alienation, such cog-
nitions and evaluations of the nation as “large” or “small,” “strong”
or “weak,” and of the polity as “democratic,” “constitutional,” or
“socialistic.” At the other extreme we distinguish orientations
toward the “self” as political actor; the content and quality of norms
of personal political obligation, and the content and quality of the
sense of personal competence vis-a-vis the political system. In
treating the component parts of the political system we distinguish,
first, three broad classes of objects: (1) specific roles or structures,
such as legislative bodies, executives, or bureaucracies; (2) incum-
bents of roles, such as particular monarchs, legislators, and ad-
ministrators, and (3) particular public policies, decisions, or
enforcements of decisions. These structures, incumbents, and de-
cisions may in turn be classified broadly by whether they are in-
volved either in the political or “input” process or in the
adminstrative or “output” process. By political or input process we
refer to the flow of demands from the society into the polity and
the conversion of these demands into authoritative policies. Some
structures that are predominantly involved in the input process are
political parties, interest groups, and the media of communication.
By the administrative or output process we refer to that process by
which authoritative policies are applied or enforced. Structures
predominantly involved in this process would include bureaucracies
and courts.
We realize that any such distinction does violence to the actual
continuity of the political process and to the multifunctionality of
political structures. Much broad policy is made in bureaucracies
and by courts; and structures that we label as input, such as interest
groups and political parties, are often concerned with the details of
administration and enforcement. What we are referring to is a dif-
ference in emphasis, and one that is of great importance in the
classification of political cultures. The distinction we draw between
participant and subject political cultures turns in part on the pres-
ence or absence of orientation toward specialized input structures.
For our classification of political cultures it is not of great impor-
tance that these specialized input structures are also involved in the
performance of enforcement functions and that the specialized ad-
ministrative ones are involved in the performance of input functions.
The important thing for our classification is what political objects
individuals are oriented to, how they are oriented to them, and
whether these objects are predominantly involved in the “upward”
flow of policy making or in the “downward” flow of policy enforce-
ment. We shall treat this problem in greater detail when we define
the major classes of political culture.
We can consolidate what we have thus far said about individual
orientations toward the polity in a simple 3x4 matrix.
Classes of political objects
1) the system as a whole
2) the „self” as political actor
3) the „input”/political processes, structures and decisions
– the flow of demands from the society into the polity
– Eg. political parties, interest groups, mass media
4) The „output”/administrative processes, structures and decisions
– The process of applying or enforcing authoritative policies
– Eg. bureaucracies, courts
Parochial political culture
■ Examples given by A&V: African tribal societies
(1960s)
■ With no political specialization
■ Generic „rulers” (chieftains) with politicaleconomic-religious
roles combined
■ No expectations on behalf of the individual
Subject political culture
■ Awareness of specialized governmental authority ■ Hardly any orientations towards „input” objects or the self seen as an active participant ■ The passive relationship
Participant political culture
■ Members oriented toward an „activist”
role of the self in the polity
■ Orientations towards all the classes of
political objects present
The civic culture
■ „A participant political culture in which the political
culture and political structure are congruent”
■ [yet] participant political orientations combine with
subject and parochial ones;
■ „the nonparticipant, more traditional political
orientations tend to limit the individual’s
commitment to politics and to make that
commitment milder”
Critique of Almond and Verba’s
work
[A.Heywood, Politics]
■ The dilemma of passive-active participation
■ The question of causal relationship implied
– what is first? Democracy, behaviour or
culture?
■ Social and political conflicts neglected
