Civic 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 nonphysiological 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.
•
O’Donnell is a product of the modernization