The Civic Culture

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The Civic Culture
Cover of the 1963 edition
AuthorGabriel Almond,
Sidney Verba
PublisherSage Publications, Inc
Published in English
December 1963
Media typePrint
Pages574 ppg (1963 release)
ISBN0691075034 (1963 release)
ISBN 0803935587 (1989 release)

The Civic Culture or The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations is a 1963 political science book by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba.[1] The book is credited with popularizing the political culture sub-field and is considered to be the first systematic study in this field.[2][3]

Synopsis

In the text Almond and Verba examine the democratic systems in five countries, the United States, Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United Kingdom. They interviewed about a thousand individuals in each country on their views of government and political life. As they define it, the "civic culture" (singular) is "based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that [permits] change but [moderates] it" (Almond and Verba 1963, 8). They consider political culture to be the element that connects individual attitudes with the overall political system structure.[4]

They identify three political structures: participant, subject, and parochial.[5]

  • Parochial cultures exemplified by tribal societies have little or no specialized political roles and low expectations for political change. Members conceive of their political role in familistic terms, thinking of their family's advantage as the main goal to pursue. Members have low affective and evaluative orientation within the political system.
  • Subject cultures have citizens with high cognitive, affective and evaluative orientation towards the political system and policy outputs, but have a relatively detached passive relationship towards them, with minimal to no relationship to political groups or being an active participant. Subject cultures are most compatible with authoritarian political structures.
  • Participant cultures have citizens who regard law not as simply something to passively obey, but something they help shape. Members have high cognitive, affective and evaluative orientation to all four types of objects within the political system.[6]

Strong civic cultures are distinguished by robust support for achieving political homeostasis: the optimal mediated balance between multiple contradictory forces such as in the tension between respect for individual rights and concern for the public good, or that between governmental effectiveness and responsiveness to the interests of citizens.[7][8]

Almond and Verba considered the Italian emphasis on the family as the driving main force for society as "amoral" (in the words of Edward Banfield (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958), or "exclusive", and believed that such a culture would impede the culture's potential for developing a "sense of community and civic culture," which they saw as a necessary background for "effective democracy".[9]

Reception and criticisms

Seymour Lipset wrote in The Democratic Century that Almond and Verba, "did argue persuasively that the extent of civic culture could be predicted by structural and historical factors" but that there was also "strong evidence that some aspects of the civic culture were powerfully associated with education levels, across national borders".[10]

The Civic Culture was criticized for having an "Anglo-American bias", with the authors stating that only the United Kingdom and the United States possessed the capability for long term democratic stabilization.[11] Critics also expressed skepticism over the accuracy of depicting a culture based upon individual interviews and that the approach was "ethnocentric and more prescriptive than objective and empirical".[12] Verba agrees that there is much to the criticism of putting cultures into the same mould, paying too little attention to context and institutional structures in other countries.[13]

In a retrospective in 2015, Verba offered some additional criticisms of his work, the most important of which was its mistaken optimism about education’s impact on civic culture. His assumption, which has been disproved in the last 50 years, was that a more highly-educated population would create a more secular and rational world. This change would significantly reduce clashes based on religious, racial and ethnic differences. Numerous other studies had replicated his other findings, but Verba pointed out that his data collection and analysis were primitive compared to what is typical in similar studies today. This criticism applied not just to technology but also to methodology such as care in crafting comparable questions in various languages.[14]

References

  1. ^ Baker, Kendall (1981). Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics. Harvard University Press. p. 320. ISBN 0674353153.
  2. ^ Wilson, Catherine (2008). The Politics of Latino Faith. NYU Press. pp. 17–18. ISBN 978-0814794135.
  3. ^ Caramani, Daniele (2008). Comparative Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 420. ISBN 978-0199298419.
  4. ^ Franklin, Daniel (2006). Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 4. ISBN 0742538095.
  5. ^ Crothers, Lane (2000). Culture and Politics: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 51. ISBN 0312233000.
  6. ^ Pavone, Tammaso (2014). "Political Culture and Democratic Homeostasis: A Critical Review of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture" (PDF). Princeton University. p. 2. Retrieved 2022-06-30.
  7. ^ Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky (2020). "Rethinking the Origins of Civic Culture and Why it Matters for the Study of the Arab World". Government and Opposition. 55 (1). doi:10.1017/gov.2019.12.
  8. ^ Pavone 2014.
  9. ^ Kawata, Junichi (2006). Comparing Political Corruption And Clientelism. Ashgate Pub Co. p. 145. ISBN 0754643565.
  10. ^ Lipset, Seymour (2004). The Democratic Culture. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 201. ISBN 0806136189.
  11. ^ Axleford, Barry (1997). Politics: An Introduction. Routledge. pp. 58–63. ISBN 0415110750.
  12. ^ Barrington, Lowell (2009). Comparative Politics: Structures and Choices. Wadsworth Publishing. p. 108. ISBN 978-0618493197.
  13. ^ Verba, Sidney (2015). "The 50th Anniversary of The Civic Culture". German Politics. 24 (3): 238. doi:10.1080/09644008.2015.1021794.
  14. ^ Verba 2015, p. 237.
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