Understanding Political Culture: Types and Criticisms
Understanding Political Culture
Parochial culture is characterized by members who barely recognize the presence of a specialized political authority and lack expectations for the overall system or any change it might generate. In this type of culture, affective feelings of rejection of any social or political organization that goes beyond the immediate family or closest relatives are prevalent. However, none of these cultures are displayed in real life in a pure form, but rather in a hybrid based on two dimensions: identification with the political system and participatory engagement.
Among the types of hybrid political culture that Almond and Verba stressed in The Civic Culture is a mixture of elements of subjective and participant culture and the system. This mixture provides a perfect harmony between the two dimensions that promotes the functioning and stability of a liberal democratic system. According to those authors, this culture is present in the UK and USA, two countries with a long democratic tradition included in the study, but only partially shown in Mexico.
Liberal democracies work better and are more stable if their citizens participate and obey. It is no wonder that this work is interpreted as the formulation of a type of political culture, civic culture, which was a crucial variable for the stability and effectiveness of democracy. Supported by the modernization paradigm and the dominant political culture during the fifties and sixties, this model of civic culture was a precondition for the existence of political modernization and democracy. Almond and Verba conclude their work by advising on the means to supplant the process leading to the Western democracies to form this type of political culture.
Finally, according to these authors, all of these orientations and attitudes are developed and solidified during adolescence and youth in the family, and personal interactions with the system remain stable for the rest of one’s life. They claim that their model provides a double causality, that institutions, the scheme, and its operation can also influence the attitudes of citizens. The defense of political attitudes as a result of preferential pre-adult socialization means recognizing that the change of political regime does not alter the political attitudes of adult individuals.
Critical Reactions to Political Culture Theory
There have been many criticisms since 1963, made from different ideological and theoretical assumptions. They have focused on three issues: the concept of political culture, the alleged relationship between the latter and the behavior of citizens and the political system, and the types of political culture or civic culture.
The first criticism is due to authors such as Barry and Pateman, who stressed the ethnocentrism and ideological bias of the concept of civic culture. According to Almond and Verba’s research, it is conducted around a logic made from a particular normative definition of democracy that considers the existence of an optimal balance between public participation and autonomy of the elites as required. Their work never defines the dependent variable; it is simply assumed that the best and most stable democracies are in the UK and USA. Civic culture favors the maintenance of the liberal democracy that exists there.