The Civic Culture

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The Civic Culture
The Civic Culture 1963 cover Almond Verba.jpg
Cover of the 1963 edition
Author Gabriel Almond,
Sidney Verba
Publisher Sage Publications, Inc
Published in English
December 1963
Media typePrint
Pages574 ppg (1963 release)
ISBN 0691075034 (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]

Contents

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]

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

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]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Political sociology</span> Branch of sociology

Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human behavior</span> Array of every physical action and observable emotion associated with humans

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Modernization theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset, drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, and saw a resurgence after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seymour Martin Lipset</span> American sociologist (1922–2006)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Civic engagement</span> Individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern

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Civic journalism is the idea of integrating journalism into the democratic process. The media not only informs the public, but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public debate. The civic journalism movement is an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants.

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<i>Union Democracy</i> 1956 book

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cleavage (politics)</span> Sociological concept

In political science and sociology, a cleavage is a historically determined social or cultural line which divides citizens within a society into groups with differing political interests, resulting in political conflict among these groups. Social or cultural cleavages thus become political cleavages once they get politicized as such. Cleavage theory accordingly argues that political cleavages predominantly determine a country's party system as well as the individual voting behavior of citizens, dividing them into voting blocs. These blocs are distinguished by similar socio-economic characteristics, who vote and view the world in a similar way. It is distinct from other common political theories on voting behavior in the sense that it focuses on aggregate and structural patterns instead of individual voting behaviors.

Classical pluralism is the view that politics and decision-making are located mostly in the framework of government but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence. The central question for classical pluralism is how power and influence are distributed in a political process. Groups of individuals try to maximize their interests. Lines of conflict are multiple and shifting as power is a continuous bargaining process between competing groups. There may be inequalities but they tend to be distributed and evened out by the various forms and distributions of resources throughout a population. Any change under this view will be slow and incremental, as groups have different interests and may act as "veto groups" to destroy legislation. The existence of diverse and competing interests is the basis for a democratic equilibrium, and is crucial for the obtaining of goals by individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Political culture of the United Kingdom</span> Overview of the political culture of the United Kingdom

The political culture of the United Kingdom was described by the political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) as a deferential civic culture. In the United Kingdom, factors such as class and regionalism and the nation's history such as the legacy of the British Empire impact on political culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabriel Almond</span> American political scientist (1911–2002)

Gabriel Abraham Almond was an American political scientist best known for his pioneering work on comparative politics, political development, and political culture.

A civic culture or civic political culture is a political culture characterized by "acceptance of the authority of the state" and "a belief in participation in civic duties". The term was first used in Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's book, The Civic Culture. Civic political culture is a mixture of other political cultures namely parochial, subject and participant political cultures. Almond and Verba characterised Britain as having a civic political culture. In "Is Britain Still a Civic Culture?" Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley discuss the extent to which Britain can still be regarded as having a civic political culture. The term civic culture is used to identify the political culture characteristics that explain the stability of a democratic society's political structure.

Kay Lehman Schlozman is an American political scientist, currently the J. Joseph Moakley Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Schlozman has made fundamental advancements to the study of participation in American politics, and was a pioneer in the field of gender and politics. Her contributions include the theory of civic voluntarism, several landmark studies on the relationship between access to resources and different types of political participation, and related investigations into the nature of civic culture. Schlozman has one of the highest citation counts of any political scientist, including being among the top 50 most cited active political scientists and top 10 most cited women in the discipline. She worked closely with Sidney Verba for nearly 50 years, first as his student and then as his collaborator.

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.