PART I THE THEORY AND METHOD OF Til E STUDY CHAPTER 1 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE This is a study of the political culture of democracy and of the social structures and processes that sustain it. The faith of the Enlightenment in the inevitable triumph of human reason and liberty has been twice shaken in recent decades. The development of Fascism and Communism after World War I raised serious doubts about the inevitability of democracy in the West; and we still cannot be certain that the continental European nations will discover a stable form of democratic process suitable to their particular cultures and social institutions; nor can we more than hope that together they will discover a European democracy. Without having first resolved these doubts, the events since World War II have raised questions of the future of democracy on a world scale. The "national explosions" in Asia and Africa and the almost universal pressure by previously subjected and isolated peoples for admission into the modem world put this more special political question into the broader context of the future character of the world's culture. Culture change has acquired a new significance in world history. The groping toward enlightenment and control over nature that acquired momentum three or four centuries ago in the West has become a world-wide process, and its tempo has shifted from centuries to decades. The central question of public policy in the next decades is what content this emerging world culture will have. We already have a partial answer to this question and could have predicted it from our knowledge of the processes of cultural diffusion,1 Physical goods and their mode of production seem to present the least difficulties in diffusion. It is apparent that these aspects of Western culture are diffusing rapidly, along with the technology upon which they depend. Since economic modernization and national unification 1 Ralph Linton, The Study of Man: An Introduction, New York, 1936, pp. 324-46. 3 the theory and method of the study require a large social overhead investment in transportation, communication, and education, and since this in turn calls for taxation, regulation, and administration, the model of a rational bureaucracy also diffuses relatively easily. The idea of an efficient bureaucracy has much in common with the idea of a rational technology. Lucian Pye refers to modern social organization as being based on an organizational technology.2 What it has in common with engineering and technology is its mixture of rationality and authority. Engineering is the application of rationality and authority to material things; modern social organization is its application to human beings and social groups. While the non-Western world is far from having successfully developed an industrial technology and an efficient bureaucracy, there can be little question that it wants these institutions and has some understanding of them. What is problematical about the content of the emerging world culture is its political character. While the movement toward technology and rationality of organization appears with great uniformity throughout the world, the direction of political change is less clear. But one aspect of this new world political culture is discernable: it will be a political culture of participation. If there is a political revolution going on throughout the world, it is what might be called the participation explosion. In all the new nations of the world the belief that the ordinary man is politically relevant—that he ought to be an involved participant in the political system—is widespread. Large groups of people who have been outside of politics are demanding entrance into the political system. And the political elites are rare who do not profess commitment to this goal. Though this coming world political culture appears to be dominated by the participation explosion, what the mode of participation will be is uncertain. The emerging nations are presented with two different models of the modern participatory state, the democratic and the totalitarian. The democratic state offers the ordinary man the opportunity to take part in the political decision-making process as an influential citizen; the totalitarian offers him the role of the "participant subject."3 Both modes have appeal to the new nations, 8 Committee on Comparative Politics, Social Science Research Council, Memorandum on the Concept of Modernization, November 1961. 3 See Frederick C. Barghoom, "Soviet Political Culture," a paper prepared for the Summer Institute on Political Culture, sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics, Social Science Research Council, Summer 1962. 4 an approach to political culture and which will win out—if indeed some amalgam of the two does not emerge—cannot be foretold. If the democratic model of the participatory state is to develop in these new nations, it will require more than the formal institutions of democracy—universal suffrage, the political party, the elective legislature. These in fact are also part of the totalitarian participation pattern, in a formal if not functional sense. A democratic form of participatory political system requires as well a political culture consistent with it. But the transfer of the political culture of the Western democratic states to the emerging nations encounters serious difficulties. There are two principal reasons. The first of these concerns the nature of the democratic culture itself. The great ideas of democracy—the freedoms and dignities of the individual, the principle of government by consent of the governed —are elevating and inspiring concepts. They capture the imaginations of many of the leaders of the new states and of the modernizing older ones. But the working principles of the democratic polity and its civic culture—the ways in which political elites make decisions, their norms and attitudes, as well as the norms and attitudes of the ordinary citizen, his relation to government and to his fellow citizens—are subtler cultural components. They have the more diffuse properties of belief systems or of codes of personal relations, which the anthropologists tell us spread only with great difficulty, undergoing substantial change in the process. Actually, Western social science has only begun to codify the operating characteristics of the democratic polity itself. The doctrine and practice of a rational bureaucracy as an instrument of the democratic political powers are less than a century old. Doubts about the possibility of a neutral bureaucracy were expressed in England as recently as the 1930's, and on the European continent such doubt is widespread today. The complex infrastructure of the democratic polity—political parties, interest groups, and the media of communications—and the understanding of their inner workings, operating norms, and social-psychological preconditions are only now being realized in the West. Thus the image of the democratic polity that is conveyed to the elites of the new nations is obscure and incomplete and heavily stresses ideology and legal norms. What must be learned about democracy is a matter of attitude and feeling, and this is harder to learn. The second principal reason why the diffusion of democracy en- 5 the theory and method of the study counters difficulties among the new nations concerns the objective problems confronting these nations. They are entering history with archaic technologies and social systems, drawn toward the gleam and power of the technological and scientific revolutions. It is not difficult to see why they should be drawn toward a technocratic image of the polity: a polity in which authoritarian bureaucracy predominates and political organization becomes a device for human and social engineering. But in many cases, perhaps in all though in differing measure, the leaders of the modernizing nations appreciate the distortions and the risks in adopting an authoritarian form of polity. Though they cannot fully understand the subtle balances of the democratic polity and the nuances of the civic culture, they tend to acknowledge their legitimacy as the expression of an impulse toward the humane polity. In characterizing their situation, we have left out a significant element. For while it is true that they are fascinated by science and technology and are drawn to an impatient technocratic polity as a means of attaining the new things of this world, they are also the creatures of their own traditional cultures and would prefer to deal gently with these cultures if this choice were available. The Civic Culture It is as an answer to this ambivalence that the civic culture recommends itself. For the civic culture is not a modern culture, but a mixed moderaizing-traditionil one. C. P. Snow, with his gift for surgical prose, has confronted us with an exaggerated dichotomy between the humanistic and the scientific^technological cultures. Shils takes issue with Snow, arguing that he has missed a third culture— the civic culture—which, because it contains both the scientific and humanistic-traditional cultures, enables them to interact and interchange without destroying or polarizing each other.* Herring, responding similarly to Snow's dichotomy, argues that 1C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, New York. 1961, and Edward A. Shiis, Demagogues and Cadres In the Political Development of the New States, a memorandum prepared for the Committee on Comparative Politics, Social Science Research Council, September 1961, pp. 20-21. The title of our book has been taken from this passage of the Shils paper, as well as from earlier uses of this concept of "civility" in other writings of his. For an excellent discussion of the relations between the scientific and humanistic cultures, see Shils, "The Calling of Sociology," in T. Parsons, E. Shils, K. Naegele, and J. Pitts, Theories of Society, New York, ig6i, Vol. n, pp. 1,414 if. 6 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE the culture of the West is pluralistic, and that Snow's representation of the sharp conflict between science and the more traditional humanism overlooks the cultural diversity of Western society, especially the quality that the cultures of science and democracy share in common: the experimental attitude. Herring suggests that science and democracy have a common origin in the humanistic culture of the West. But because they have different functions they diverge in important respects. Science is rational, straightforward, ". . . it abhors half-way measures." The democratic or civic culture emerged as a mode of "economic" and humane culture change. It takes the slow course and "seeks the common denominator."5 The development of the civic culture in Britain may be understood as the product of a series of encounters between modernization and traditionalism—encounters sharp enough to effect significant change but not so sharp or so concentrated in time as to create disintegration or polarization. Partly because of her insular security, Britain came into the era of national unification and of absolutism able to tolerate a greater measure of aristocratic, local, and corporate autonomy than could continental Europe. A first step toward secularization was the separation from the Church of Rome arid the beginnings of toleration of religious diversity. A second step was the emergence of a thriving and self-confident merchant class, and the involvement of court and aristocracy in the risks and calculations of trade and commerce. Independent aristocrats with secure local power in the countryside, courageous nonconformists, rich and self-confident merchants —these were the forces that transformed the tradition of the feudal estates into the parliamentary tradition and enabled Britain to pass through the era of absolutism without destroying her pluralism. Britain thus entered the industrial revolution with a political culture among its elites which made it possible to assimilate the gross and rapid changes in social structure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without sharp discontinuities. The aristocratic Whigs found it possible to enter a coalition with nonconformist merchants and industrialists, to establish securely the principles of parliamentary supremacy and representation. The traditional aristocratic and monarchic forces assimilated enough of this civic culture to compete with the secularist tendencies for popular sup- 5 E. P. Herring, "On Science and the Polity," Items, Social Science Research Council, Vol. xv. No. 1, Part 2, March 1961, p. 1. 7 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY port and, indeed, to mitigate their rationalism and impart to them a love and respect for the sacredness of the nation and its ancient institutions. What emerged was a third culture, neither traditional nor modern but partaking of both; a pluralistic culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it. This was the civic culture. With this civic culture already consolidated, the working classes could enter into politics and, in a process of trial and error, find the language in which to couch their demands and the means to make them effective. It was in this culture of diversity and consensualism, rationalism and traditionalism, that the structure of British democracy could develop: parliamentarism and representation, the aggregative political party and the responsible and neutral bureaucracy, the associational and bargaining interest groups, and the autonomous and neutral media of communication. English parliamentarism included the traditional and modern forces; the party system aggregated and combined them; the bureaucracy became responsible to the new political forces; and the political parties, interest groups, and neutral media of communication meshed continuously with the diffuse interest groupings of the community and with its primary communications networks. We have concentrated on British experience because the whole story of the emergence of the civic culture is told in British history, while developments in the United States and the countries of the "Old Commonwealth" began after some of the major battles had been won. Actually, in the course of the nineteenth century the development of the democratic culture and infrastructure was more rapid and more unequivocal in the United States than in Britain, since the United States was a new and rapidly expanding society and relatively unimpeded by traditional institutions. Though their basic patterns are similar, the civic cultures of Britain and the United States have somewhat different contents, reflecting these differences in national histories and social structures. On the European continent the record is more mixed. Though their patterns differ in many respects from those of Britain and America, the Scandinavian countries, Low Countries, and Switzerland appear to have worked out their own version of a political culture and practice of accommodation and compromise. In France, 8 an approach to political CULTURE Germany, and Italy the encounters between modernizing tendencies and the traditional powers seem to have been too massive and too uncompromising to permit the emergence of a shared culture of political accommodation. The civic culture is present in the form of aspiration, and the democratic infrastructure is still far from being attained. _The civic culture .and the open polity, then, represent the gTeat and prnblrmafir gills of the West. The technology and science of the West have now already passed out of her unique possession and everywhere are destroying and transforming traditional societies and cultures. Can the open polity and the civic culture—man's discovery of a humane and conservative way to handle social change and participation—spread as well? As we consider the origin of the open polity and the civic culture —indeed, as we consider the areas in the West where their emergence is still in doubt—we may fall victim to one or both of two moods. The first is one of mystery or awe over a process whereby mankind on only a small part of the earth's surface muddled toward a humane and reasoned taming of violence and groped toward its transformation into a constructive instrument available to all interests. As mystery, it becomes a unique cultural heritage unavailable to foreigners. The second mood is one of pessimism, which seems to have replaced the mood of democratic optimism that existed before World War I. How can a set of arrangements and attitudes so fragile, so intricate, and so subtle be transplanted out of historical and cultural context? Or, how can these subtleties and these humane etiquettes survive even among ourselves in a world caught in the grip of a science and technology run wild, destructive of tradition and of community and possibly of life itself? No one can provide definitive answers to these questions. But as social scientists we can put the questions in such a way as to get useful answers. While we may share the mood of wonder and awe at the intricacy of the democratic mechanisms and the unique historical experience out of which they emerged, we are confronted with a contemporary historical challenge for which mood by itself is an inadequate response. If we are to come closer to understanding the problems of the diffusion of democratic culture, we have to be able to specify the content of what has to be diffused, to develop appropriate measures for it, to discover its quantitative incidence and demographic distribution in countries with a wide range of ex- 9 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY perience with democracy. With, such knowledge we can speculate intelligently about "how much of what" must be present in a country before democratic institutions take root in congruent attitudes and expectations. Efforts to deal with this problem have usually been based on impressions and inferences from history, on inferences from democratic ideology, on certain kinds of sociological analysis, or on psychological insights. Thus in our efforts to estimate the prospects of democracy in countries such as Germany and Italy, or in the developing areas of the non-Western world, we frequently try to draw "lessons" from British and American history. It has been argued, for example, that the long continuity of British and American political experience and the gradual process of change have both contributed to effective democratization. Similarly, the growth of a vigorous and numerous middle class, the development of Protestantism, and in particular the nonconformist sects, have been considered vital to the development of stable democratic institutions in Britain, the Old Commonwealth, and the United States. There have been efforts to derive from these experiences some standards as to what attitudes and behavior must be present in other countries if they are to become democratic. Even more common than drawing inferences from history has been our tendency to derive criteria of what has to be diffused from the institutional and ideological norms of democracy itself. It is argued that if a democratic system is based on the sharing of influence among the adult population as a whole, then, if the system is not to be subverted, the individual must use his power intelligently for the good of the polity. Theorists of democracy from Aristotle to Bryce have stressed that democracies are maintained by active citizen participation in civic affairs, by a high level of information about public affairs, and by a widespread sense of civic responsibility. These doctrines tell us what a democratic citizen ought to be like if he is to behave according to the requirements of the system. Still a third type of investigation of the conditions favoring the development of stable democracy are studies of the economic and social conditions associated with democratic systems. This continues an old Aristotelian tradition. Lipset classified the nations of Europe (including the Old Commonwealth) and of Latin America into "stable democracies" and "unstable democracies and dictatorships."6 Assignment to one or the other category was based on the historical 0 Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man, New York, 1960, pp. 45 tt. 10 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL .CULTURE record of these countries. He then drew together the available statistical information on economic and social conditions in these countries, the degree of industrialization and urbanization, literacy rates, and educational patterns. His findings show a relatively convincing correlation between these indices of "modernization" and stable democratization. James Coleman, in a similar analysis that included Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, also found a strong correlation between indices of modernization and democratization.7 The main problem presented by these studies is that the cultural and psychological consequences of "modern" technologies and processes are left to inference. We know that democracies, in comparison to other political systems, tend to have more literate and educated people, that their per capita income and wealth are higher, and that they enjoy in greater proportions the amenities of modern civilization. But this type of analysis not only omits the psychological basis of democratization, it cannot explain the significant deviant cases. Thus Germany and France, which rank high on the indices of modernization, are classified by Lipset as unstable democracies. Cuba and Venezuela, both of which rank high in economic development in Latin America, have long histories of dictatorship and instability. This kind of study is suggestive of hypotheses but does not tell us directly what kind of cluster of attitudes is associated with democracy. Another type of approach to the culture and psychology of democracy is based on the insights of psychoanalysis. Harold Lasswell has gone furthest in specifying the personality characteristics of the "democrat."8 In his list of democratic character qualities he includes (1) an "open ego," by which he means a warm and inclusive attitude toward other human beings; (2) a capacity for sharing values with others; (3) a multivalued rather than a single-valued orientation; (4) trust and confidence in the human environment, and (5) relative freedom from anxiety. While the relation between these characteristics and democratic behavior seems to be clear, Lasswell's democratic qualities are not specifically political attitudes and feeling's, and they may actually be encoum^recTlngreat frequency in societies that are not democratic in structure. Our study grows out of this body of theory about the character- 7 Gabriel A. Almond and James Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas, Princeton, N.J., 1960, pp. 538 ff. 8 The Political Writings of Harold D. Lasswell, Glencoe, 111., 1951, pp. 495 ff.; Lasswell, Power and Personality, New York, 1946, pp. 148 ft. 11 the theory and method of the study istics and preconditions of: the culture of democracy. What we have done amounts to a series of experiments intended to test some of these hypotheses. Rather than inferring the properties of democratic culture from political institutions or social conditions, we have attempted to specify its content by examining attitudes in a number | of operating democratic systems. And rather than deriving the ( social-psychological preconditions of democracy from psychological ! theory, we have sought to determine whether and to what extent I these relations actually exist in functioning democratic systems. We ^ do not argue that our study will shut off speculation and provide the precise and tested propositions of a complete theory of democracy, but, rather, that some of these propositions will survive the test of empirical-quantitative analysis and some will not. This stage of experiment should focus and direct inquiry by providing some answers to old questions and suggesting some new questions. In still another respect we hope to contribute to the development of a scientific theory of democracy. By far the greatest amount of empirical research on democratic attitudes has been done in the United States. In our study we have included, in addition to our own country, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. Why we selected these particular countries is discussed below. Our five-country study offers us the opportunity to escape from this American parochialism and to discover whether relations found in the American data are also encountered in democratic countries whose historical experiences and political and social structures differ from one another. 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 12 an approach to political culture 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 particular, this study has been greatly influenced by the "culture-personality" or '^I^yi^^HJiMr^iUJJWiil1'' to tne 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 ascertain 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 understand the emergence and transformation of political systems grows 8 General theoretical statements of this approach are to be found inter alia in Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, New York 1934; Alex Inkeles and Daniel Levinson, "National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Socio-Cultural Systems," in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Cambridge, Mass., 1954, Vol. n; Bert Kaplan (ed.), Studying Personality Cross-Culturally, Evariston, 111., 1961; Abram Kardiner, The Psychological Frontiers of Society, New York, 1939; Kardiner, The Individual and His Society, New York, 1945; Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry Murray, and David Schneider, Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture, New York, 1955; Harold D. Lass-well, Psychopathology and Politics in Political Writings; Nathan Leites, "Psychocultural Hypotheses About Political Acts," in World Politics. Vol. I, 1948; Ralph Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality, New York, 1945; Margaret Mead, "The Study of National Character," in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell, The Policy Sciences, Stanford, 1951. Particularly relevant to our work is Alex Inkeles, "National Character and Modern Political Systems," in Francis L. K. Hsu (ed..). Psychological Anthropology, Homewood, HI., 1961. And one of the most important recent contributions to the theory of national character and political culture is Lucian W. Pye's Politics, Personality, and Nation Building, New Haven. 1962, which both develops a general theory of personality and political attitudes and applies this to a study of Burmese patterns. Studies of Germany include; R. Brickner, Is Germany Incurable?, Philadelphia, 1943; 13 the theory AND method of the STUDY 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 acculturat-ive 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 empirically. 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. fThe political culture of a nation is the particular distribution of H. V. Dicks, "Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology,'' Human Relations, Vol. rrr, 1950; David Rodnick, Postwar Germans, New Haven, 1948, and Bertram Schaffi-ner. Fatherland. A Study of Authoritarianism in the German Family, New York, 1948. Studies of the United States include: Geoffrey Gorer, The American People, New York, 1948; Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry, New York, 1942, and David Riesman, The Lonely Cr/ymd, New Haven, 1950. Studies ot Russia include: H. V. Dicks, "Observations on Contemporary Russian Behavior," Human Relations, Vol. v, 1952; Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, The People of Great Russia, London, 1949; Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism, Glencoe, 111., 1953; Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority, New York, 1951, and Dinko Tomasic, The Impact of Russian Culture on Soviet Communism, Glencoe, 1953. For England, see Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character, New York, 1955. For France, see Nathan Leites, On the Game of Politics in France, Stanford, 1959; Rhoda Metraux and Margaret Mead, Themes in French Culture, Stanford, 1954, and Lawrence Wylie, Village in The Vaucluse, Cambridge, Mass., 1957. And for Japan, see Ruth F. Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and The Sword, Boston, 1946. 14 an approach to political culture 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.10 Orientation 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 performance, and (3) "evaluational orientation," the judgments and opinions about political objects that typically involve the combination 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 cognitions and evaluations of the nation as "large" or "small," "strong" or "weak," arid 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-avis 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, of bureaucracies; (2) incumbents of roles, such as particular monarchs, legislators, and administrators, and (3) particular public policies,, decisions, or enforcements of decisions. These structures, incumbents, and decisions may in turn be classified broadly by whether they are involved 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 io Gabriel A. Almond, "Comparative Political Systems," Journal of Politics, Vol. xyin, 1956; Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, pp. 53 ff. 15 the theory and method of the study an approach to political culture 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 FIGURE 1 Dimensions of Political Orientation 1. 2. 1. 4. System as Self as General Input Output Object Objects Objects Object Cognition Affect Evaluation administration and enforcement. What we are referring to is a difference in emphasis, and one that is of great importance in the classification of political cultures. The distinction we draw between particir^nt and subject political cuTtmeTTurm^^ erne or absence of orientation toward specialized input structures. •FOr-OW"da^fiHS^lSf"fioTprcaI cultures it is not of great importance that these specialized input structures are also involved in the performance of enforcement functions and that the specialized administrative 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 enforcement. 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. 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 16 system in general terms, its history, size, location, power, "constitutional" 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? FIGURE 2 Types of Political Culture System as Self as General Input Output Active Object Objects Objects Participant Parochial 6 0 o 0 Subject 1 0 I 0 Participant I 1 i 1 4. How does he perceive of himself as a member of his political system? What knowledge does he have of his rights, powers, obligations, and of strategies of access to influence? How does he feel about his capabilities? What norms of participation or of performance 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 parochial 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 diSu$&^fci- 11 Almond and Coleman, Politics of the Developing Areas, p. 254. THE THEORY AND METHOD OS THE STUDY 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 implies the comparative absence of expectations of change initiated by the political system. The parochial expects nothing from the political system. Similarly, in the centralized African chietdoms 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 Empire 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 occasional 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 subcontractor who recompensed himself as liberally as he could for the advances he had paid to his employers. Often the village was responsible 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 religious law and local custom."12 In this kind of polity the specialized agencies of central government 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 similarly unspecialized structures and operations of their tribal, religious, occupational, and local communities. What we have been describing is extreme or pure parochialism wibid., pp. 378-79. 18 AN approach to political CULTURE that occurs in simpler traditional systems where political specialization 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 it. The Subject Political Culture. 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 "downward 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 developed democratic institutions is likely to be affective and normative 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 political 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 processes: 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 political objects. They tend to be oriented toward art "activist" role of the self in the polity, though their feelings and evaluations of such a roje may vary frprn 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 19 THE THEORY AND METHOD Or THE STUDY 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 subject 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 parochial 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 orientations are acquired. Actually, some of the most significant dif- j ferences in the political cultures of the five democracies included in our study turn on the extent and the way that parochial, subject, j 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 imperfections of the processes of political socialization, personal preferences, and limitations' in intelligence or in opportunities to learn j will continue to produce subjects and parochials, even in well- j established and stable democracies. Similarly, parochials will continue to exist even in "high" subject cultures. j Thus there are two aspects of cultural heterogeneity or cultural j "mix." The "citizen" is a particular mix of participant, subject, and j parochial orientations, and the civic culture is a particular mix of citizens, subjects, and parochials. For the citizen we need concepts 5 of proportions, thresholds, and congruence to handle the ways in which his constellation of participant, subject, and parochial attitudes 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 1 what "mix" of citizens, subjects, and parochials is related to the ef- 18 See below, chaps, viii and x. 20 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE fecfive performance of democratic systems. When we compare the political cultures of our Sve 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 structures 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 structures 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. Particularly 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. 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 cognitive, affective, and evaluative orientations to the appropriate "We have borrowed the concept "AUegiant" from Robert E. Lane's book, Political Ideology, New York, 1962, pp. 170 ff. 21 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY objects of the polity approach unity, or perfect congruence between culture and structure. But congruence between culture and structure 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 FIGURE 3 _Congruence/Incongiuence Between Political Culture and Structure* ___Allegiance_Apathy Alienation Cognitive Orientation 4. ^ _j. Affective Orientation + o _ Evaluative Orientation + 0 „ * A (+) sign means a high frequency of awareness, or of positive feeling, or of evaluation toward political objects. A {-) sign means a high frequency of negative evaluations or feelings. A (0) means a high frequency of indifference. 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. But this scale is only a beginning, since the incongruence may take the form of a simple rejection of a particular set of role incumbents (e.g., a particular dynasty and its bureaucracy); or it may be an aspect of a systemic change, that is, a shift from a simpler pattern of political culture to a more complex one. We have already suggested that all political cultures (with the exception of the simple parochial ones) are mixed. Thus a participant culture contains individuals who are oriented as subjects and parochials; and a subject culture will contain some parochials. We use the term "systemically mixed" political cultures to refer to those in which there are significant proportions of both the simpler and more complex patterns of orientations. When we say these cultures are systemically mixed, we do not intend to suggest that there is an inevitable tendency for the development to complete itself. The 22 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE process of political culture change may stabilize at a point that falls short of congruence with a centralized authoritarian structure or a democratic one; or the development may take a course such as in Britain, where a slow, continuous pattern of cultural change was accompanied by correspondingly continuous changes in structure. Political cultures may remain systemically mixed for a very long time indeed, as witnessed by the experience of France, Germany, and Italy in the nineteenth and present centuries. When they do remain mixed, however, there are inevitable strains between culture and structure, and a characteristic tendency toward structural instability. If the three types of political culture represented in Figure 2 are the pure forms of political culture, we may distinguish three types of systemically mixed political cultures: (1) the parochial-subject culture, (2) the subject-participant culture, and (3) the parochial-participant culture. The Parochial-Subject Culture, This is a type of political culture in which a substantial portion of the population has rejected the exclusive claims of diffuse tribal, village, or feudal authority and has developed allegiance toward a more complex political system with specialized central governmental structures. This is the classic case of kingdom building out of relatively undifferentiated units. The chronicles and histories of most nations include this early stage of shift from local parochialism to centralized authority. But the shift may stabilize at a point that falls short of a fully developed subject culture. The loosely articulated African kingdoms, and even the Ottoman Empire, are examples of stable, mixed subject-parochial cultures where the latter predominates and central authority takes the form of a primarily extractive, dimly cognized set of political objects. The problem of cultural change from parochial to subject patterns is a difficult one, and unstable moves back and forth are common in the early history of nations.16 What we are suggesting is that the composition of this class may be viewed as subvarieties arranged on a continuum. At one ex- 15 The classic case is that of the succession to King Solomon in the kingdom of Israel. When Solomon died, the parochial (tribal and lineage) leaders of Israel came to his son Rehoboam, saying, "Thy father made our yoke hard; but do thou now make lighter the hard service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us and we will serve thee." Rehoboam's older counselors advised him to lighten the yoke and pay more respect to the autonomy of the persisting parochial tribal and lineage groups. His younger men—fanatical modernizers—offered him the celebrated advice to tell the traditional leaders of the people, "My little finger is thicker than my father's loins. . . . If 23 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY treme we might place the political culture under Prussian absolutism, which went rather far in suppressing parochial orientations; at the other, the political culture in the Ottoman Empire, which never went further than an extractive external relationship to its constituent, more or less parochial units. The contrast between Prussian and British absolutism is an interesting one from this point of view. We have already made the point that even "high" political cultures are mixes, and that the individual orientations comprising them are also mixes. In Prussia, in the typical individual case, we may assume that the intensity of the subject orientation was much stronger than that of the parochial, while in Britain we suggest there was greater balance, and, furthermore, the parochial and subject strata were more congruent. These psychological mixes may explain the contrast between the eighteenth century Prussian and British authority images: the first, of Kadavergehorsam; the second, of the self-confident, if deferential, country squire, merchant, and yeoman. Similarly, the cultural mix in Prussia probably involved more of a polarization between a persisting parochial subculture—exemplified in the extreme case by the peasantry on the East German estates—and a subject subculture among those groups most affected by the impact of Prussian absolutism: the bureaucracy down to the lowest levels and the increasingly large proportion of Prussian manpower undergoing the Prussian army experience. Thus change from a parochial to a subject political culture may stabilize at a number of points on the continuum and produce different political, psychological, and cultural mixes. We also suggest that the kind of mix that results has great significance for the stability and performance of the political system. The Subject-Participant Culture. The way in which the shift from a parochial to a subject culture is solved greatly affects the way in which the shift from a subject to a participant culture takes place. As Pye points out, the inculcation of a sense of national loyalty and identification, and of a propensity to obey the regulations of central authority, is the first priority problem in the my father has burdened you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke; if my father hath chastised you with whips, then will I chastise you with scorpion thorns" (I Kings 12:4-11). The consequences of Rehoboam's acceptance of the advice of the young mod-ernizefs, as told in the rest of Kings, suggest that too violent an attack on parochialism may cause both parochial and subject orientations to decline to apathy and alienation. The results are political fragmentation and national destruction. 24 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE emerging nations.16 In the shift from a subject to a participant culture, the parochial and local autonomies, if they survive, may contribute to the development of a democratic infrastructure. Certainly this is what happened in the British case. Local authorities, municipal corporations, religious communities, and merchant groups in which the tradition of guild freedoms still persisted became the first interest groups in the developing British democracy. The lesson is a significant one. Precisely because the development of a subject culture in England stopped short of destroying local and parochial structures and cultures, these could become available at a later time and in modified form as an influence network that could relate Britons as competent citizens to their government. The more massive impact of the Prussian state authority drove parochial institutions into privacy, or assimilated them to state authority. Thus the era of democratization in Germany began with a great gap between the private and public spheres, and the infrastructure that emerged failed to arc across from individual, family, and community to the institutions of governmental authority. In the mixed subject-participant culture a substantial part of the population has acquired specialized input orientations and anr activist set of self-orientations, while most of the remainder of the! population continue to be oriented toward an authoritarian governmental structure and have a relatively passive set of self-orientations. In the Western European examples of this type of political eulturel —France, Germany, and Italy in the nineteenth and present centuries—there was a characteristic pattern of structural instability with an alternation of authoritarian and democratic governments. But more than structural instability results from this kind of cultural mix. The cultural patterns themselves are influenced by the structural instability and the cultural stalemate. Because participant orientations have spread among only a part of the population, and because their legitimacy is challenged by the persisting subject subculture and suspended during authoritarian interludes, the participant-oriented stratum of the population cannot become a competent, self-confident, experienced body of citizens. They tend to remain democratic aspirants. That is, they accept the norms of a participant culture, but their sense of competence is not based on experience or on a confident sense of legitimacy. Furthermore, the structural instabilities that frequently accompany the mixed sub- 16 Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation Building, pp. 8 S. 25 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY ject-participant culture, the frequent ineffectiveness of the democratic infrastructure and of the governmental system, tend to produce alienative tendencies among the democratically oriented elements of the population. Taken together, this kind of a political cultural stalemate may produce a syndrome with components of idealist-aspiration and alienation from the political system, including the infrastructure of parties, interest groups, and press. The mixed subject-participant culture, if it persists over a long period of time, also changes the character of the subject subculture. During the democratic interludes the authoritarian-oriented groups must compete with the democratic ones within a formally democratic framework. In other words, they must develop a defensive political infrastructure of their own. While this does not transform the subject subculture into a democratic one, it certainly changes it, often to a significant degree. It is not accidental that authoritarian regimes that arise in political systems with mixed subject-participant cultures tend to have populistic overtones, and in the more recent period of totalitarianism these regimes have even adopted the democratic infrastructure in a grossly distorted form. The Parochial-Participant Culture. In the parochial-participant culture we have the contemporary problem of cultural development in many of the emerging nations. In most of these countries the political culture is predominantly parochial. The structural norms that have been introduced are usually participant; for congruence, therefore, they require a participant culture. Thus the problem is to develop specialized output and input orientations simultaneously. It is not surprising thai most of these political systems, always threatened by parochial fragmentation, teeter like acrobats on tightropes, leaning precariously at one time toward authoritarianism, at another toward democracy. There is no structure on either side to lean on, neither a bureaucracy resting upon loyal subjects, nor an infrastructure arising from responsible and competent citizens. The problem of development from parochial to participant culture seems, on first look, to be a hopeless one; but if we remember that most parochial autonomies and loyalties survive, we may at least say that the development of participant cultures in some of the emerging nations has not yet been precluded. The problems are to penetrate the parochial systems without destroying them on the output side, and to transform them into interest groups on the input side. 26 an approach to political culture Political Subculture and Role Culture We have already made the point that most political cultures are heterogeneous. Even the most fully developed participant cultures will contain surviving strata of subjects and parochials. And even within that part of the culture that is oriented toward participation there will be persistent and significant differences in political orientation. Adapting the terminology of Ralph Linton to our purposes, we use the term "subculture" to refer to these component parts of political cultures.17 But we have to distinguish at least two types of subcultural cleavage. First, the term may be used to refer to population strata that are persistently oriented in one way toward policy inputs and outputs, but are "allegiantly" oriented toward the political structure. Thus in the United States the left wing of the Democratic party and the right wing of the Republican party accept as legitimate the structures of American politics and government, but differ persistently from each other on a whole range of domestic and foreign policy issues. We refer to these as policy subcultures. But the kind of cleavage we are most interested in is that which occurs in systemically mixed systems. Thus in a mixed parochial-subject culture one part of the population would be oriented toward diffuse traditional authorities, and another toward the specialized structure of the central authoritarian system. A mixed parochial-subject culture may actually be characterized by a "vertical" as well as a horizontal cleavage. Thus if the polity includes two or more traditional components, then there will be, in addition to the emerging subject subculture, the persisting separate cultures of the formally merged traditional units. The mixed subject-participant culture is a more familiar and even more contemporary problem in the West. A successful shift from a subject to a participant culture involves the diffusion of positive orientations toward a democratic infrastructure, the acceptance of norms of civic obligation, and the development of a sense of civic competence among a substantial proportion of the population. These orientations may combine with subject and parochial orientations, or they may conflict. England in the nineteenth and present centuries moved toward and attained a political culture that combined these orientations. It is true, of course, 1T Ralph Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality. 27 the theory and method of the study that the Radicals in the first part of the nineteenth century and the Socialist and Labour left-wing groups at a later time were opposed to the monarchy and the House of Lords. But these tendencies resulted in the transformation, not the elimination, of these institutions. Political subcultures in England, consequently, are examples of our first type of cleavage, the one based on persistent policy differences rather than upon fundamentally different orientations toward political structure. France is the classic case of the second type of political cultural heterogeneity. The French Revolution did not result in a homogeneous orientation toward a republican political structure; instead, it polarized the French population into two subcultures, one of participant aspiration and one dominated by subject and parochial orientations. The structure of the French political system has been at issue ever since that time, and what was at first a bipolarization of political culture was followed by further fragmentations, as the Socialists followed the Jacobins, and the Communists the Socialists, and as the right wing divided into a "rallied" and an "unrallied" part. Vertical subcultural phenomena of this kind may be encountered in subject and participant cultures, or may compound the cultural fragmentation o£ mixed subject-participant cultures. We refer to the patterns of orientation in multinational polities, such as the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Here members of special ethnic-linguistic-national groups rejected the legitimacy of the polity that assimilated them, and persisted in their allegiance to their earlier political Systems. Thus a vertical fragmentation combined with a subject-participant fragmentation to produce structural instabilities and disintegrative tendencies of a very high order. On the other hand, policy subcultures may turn into structural ones, as, for example, in the case of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Here the alternative appeared to be the formation of a separate polity. In many European countries the failure of the dominant elites to respond to the moderate demands for structural and policy changes put forward by the left in the first half of the nineteenth century led to the development of the structurally alienated, revolutionary socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist left of the second half of the nineteenth century. In England, the Old Commonwealth, the United States, and the Scandinavian countries, the issues of political structure were re- 28 an approach to POLITICAL CULTURE solved in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: what emerged were homogeneous political cultures, in the sense of structural orientation. The subcultural phenomena in these countries turn on persistent policy differences. Left and right both tend to accept the existing political structure and differ only on the substance of policy and political personnel. What is most interesting is that in this group of countries in the last decades, the policy differences have tended to become less sharp, and there is a larger common body of agreement. In other words, subcultural cleavage has attenuated and cultural homogeneity has extended from structural orientation into policy orientation. This brief discussion of political subculture serves only to introduce the concept. Some of its implications and consequences will be considered at later points in the book. But we would mislead the reader if we were to suggest that our study treats proportionally each aspect of political culture. Our study stresses orientation to political structure and process, not orientation to the substance 6f political demands and outpultsTWe need not apologize for this emphasis, but must point out how this choice may tend to obscure significant dimensions of political culture, and significant relationships between general psychocultural patterns and the substance of politics and public policy. A study that stresses orientation to public policy would require at least as much of a major effort as the present one. It would have to relate systematically types of public policy orientations to types of social structure and cultural values, as well as to the socialization processes with which they are related. A similarly rigorous separation of public policy orientation, general culture orientation, and socialization patterns would also be necessary, in order for us to discover the real character and direction of relationships among these phenomena. We have to introduce still another complication, that of "role culture." The more complex political systems are characterized by specialized structures of roles—bureaucratic, military, political executive, party, interest group, media of communication. These centers of initiative and influence in the political system also produce cultural heterogeneity. The heterogeneity results from two sources. First, the elites who perform these roles may be recruited from particular political subcultures; and second, the process of induction and socialization into these roles produces different 29 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY values, skills, loyalties, and cognitive maps. Since these elites are crucial in the formulation and execution of policy, the kinds of cultural differences existing among them may seriously affect the performance of political systems. For example, in both Germany and France the bureaucratic and military elites were traditionally recruited from the aristocratic and authoritarian subcultures. In addition, the role socialization of these elites reinforced the antidemocratic tendencies and were significant obstacles to the emergence of homogeneous participant cultures. But role culture can be "progressive" as well as "regressive" from a developmental point of view. In many of the contemporary emerging nations the impulse toward political modernization is concentrated in the civil and military bureaucracy and among the political party elites. These elites may aspire toward the development of powerful authoritarian political systems, toward democratic ones, or some combination of the two, without fully appreciating the complexities involved in this pattern of cultural change. In stable, legitimate political systems, role cultures vary in content simply because the tasks performed by these role incumbents and the "corps spirit" to which they are exposed produce differences in cognition, affect, and evaluation. But again we may differentiate patterns of role cleavage according to whether they involve differences in structural orientation or simply in policy orientation. In a stable political system, differences in role culture tend to be limited to the substance, of policy. The legitimacy of the structure of the system is accepted. In unstable ones policy differences combine with differences in structural orientation and may result in cultural fragmentation at the elite level. Thus the fragmentation of general political culture in France was compounded by fragmentation in role cultures, with the higher civil service and the officer corps oriented to an authoritarian structure, and a large part of the political party, interest groups, and communications elites oriented to a democratic structure. Indeed, fragmentation at the level of political elites may persist simultaneously with a trend toward homogeneity at the mass cultural level. The recent experience of the British Labour party is a case in point. Sharp differences with the Conservative party over domestic and foreign policy are concentrated among the constituency militants. For the rank-and-file 30 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE Labour party voter these issues tend to have little salience. His ties with both class and party have tended to loosen as his economic and social opportunities have improved. The Civic Culture: A Mixed Political Culture At an earlier point we discussed the historical origins of the civic culture and the functions of that culture in the process of social change. Much of this book will offer an analysis and description of the culture and of the role it plays in the maintenance of a democratic political system. It will be useful therefore to spell out, if only briefly, some of its main characteristics. The civic culture is not the political culture that one finds described in civics textbooks, which prescribe the way in which citizens ought to act in a democracy. The norms of citizen behavior found in these texts stress the participant aspects of political culture. The | democratic citizen is expected to be active in politics and to be in- ! volved. Furthermore, he is supposed to be rational in his approach 1 to politics, guided by reason, not by emotion. He is supposed to be I well informed and to make decisions—for instance, his decision on I how to vote—on the basis of careful calculation as to the interests t and the principles he would like to see furthered. This culture, j with its stress on rational participation within the input structures j of politics, we can label the "rationality-activist" model of political | culture. The civic culture shares much with this rationality-activist J model; it is, in fact, such a culture plus something else. It does I stress the participation of individuals in the political input process. | In the civic cultures described in this volume we shall find high | frequencies of political activity, of exposure to political com- | munications, of political discussion, of concern with political af- | fairs. But there is something else. | In the first place, the civic culture is an allegiant participant | culture. Individuals are not only oriented to political input, they | are oriented positively to the input structures and the input process. | In other words, to use the terms introduced earlier, the civic culture | is a participant political culture in which the political culture and | political structure are congruent. | More important, in the civic culture participant political orien- f tations combine with and do not replace subject and parochial | political orientations. Individuals become participants in the politi- \ 31 the theory and method of the study cal process, hut they do not give up their orientations as subjects nor as parochials. Furthermore, not only are these earlier orientations maintained, alongside the participant political orientations, but the subject and parochial orientations are congruent with the participant political orientations. The nonparticipant, more traditional political orientations tend to limit the individual's com- f mitment to politics and to make that commitment milder. In a ; sense, the subject and parochial orientations "manage" or keep in * place the participant political orientations. Thus attitudes favorable to participation within the political system play a major role in the civic culture, but so do such nonpolitical attitudes as trust in other people and social participation in general. The maintenance of these more traditional attitudes and their fusion with the participant orientations lead to a balanced political culture in which political activity, involvement, and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values. A more precise description of the civic culture and of its relevance *• for democracy forms the major substance of this volume. Micro- and Macropolitics. Political Culture as the Connecting Link : Developments in social science methods in recent decades have enabled us to penetrate more deeply into the motivational basis of the political attitudes and behavior of individuals and groups. A substantial literature has accumulated, which includes studies of «-electoral attitudes and behavior, analyses of the relations between ideological and public policy tendencies and deeper attitude or personality characteristics, psychopolitical biographies of political leaders, studies of political attitudes in particular social groupings, and the like. Rokkan and Campbell refer to this focus on the individual, his political attitudes and motivations, whether as individual or as a member of a sample of a larger population, as "micropolitics," distinguishing it as a research approach from "macropolitics," or the more traditional concern of the student of politics with the structure and function of political systems, institutions, and agencies, and their effects on public policy.13 While the relationship between individual political psychology and the behavior of political systems and subsystems is clear in 18 Stein Rokkan and Angus Campbell, "Norway And the United States of America," in International Social Science Journal, Vol. xn, No. 1, 1960, pp. 69 ft. 32 an approach to political culture principle, much of the micropolitical literature is content to assert this relationship in general terms. The implication is given that since political systems are made up of individuals, it may be taken for granted that particular psychological tendencies in individuals or among social groups are important for the functioning of political systems and their outputs. This may indeed be the case when the researcher is concerned with the psychological conditions affecting the behavior of a particular role incumbent or incumbents, such as a particular political decision-maker at one extreme, or an electorate at the other. On the other hand, much of this literature fails to make the connection liciv/een the psychological tendencies of individuals and groups and political structure and process. In other words, the ciinency of political psychology, while it has undoubted value, is not made exchangeable in terms of political process and performance.19 We would like to suggest that this relationship between the attitudes ami motivations of the discrete individuals who make up political sy Op. <:«., pp. 52-53 and 287 ff. ~ 1 ~~ 36 a given empiricaljahj^ "iip from frequencies of specified kinds of orientation toward the 1 various subclasses of political objects. The dismantled scheme that 1 we use in the substantive chapters of the book enables us to discuss I subclasses of political culture, and indeed to specify the more | minute differences between individual political cultures of the I same subclass. I | Our comparative study of political culture includes five demoe- I racies—the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and j Mexico—selected because they represent a wide range of political- | historical experience. At one extreme we selected the United States | and Britain, both representing relatively successful experiments in | democratic government. An analysis of these two cases will tell us | what kinds of attitudes are associated with stably functioning demo- I cratic systems, the quantitative incidence of these attitudes, and their j distribution among different groups in the population. | At the same time, a comparison of Britain and the United States | might be useful as a test of some of the speculation about the dif- | ferences between these two often-compared countries. Two recent \ writers on British politics comment on the persistence of traditional | attitudes toward authority in that country. Brogan points out that | in the historical development of Britain the culturejof democratic ! citizenship, -with is emphasis on ^^^t^^S^k^SS^^^JS?3' j ~^^^s^^t^lmjm.xA^, political culture that stressed the obli- | •gtfons and rights of thesubJEfiL? EcKtpo^SrUs*out^Sat'ISie j Britis¥^poIiricaTculture combines de^^^lo^ard authority with I a lively sens£Athe "pitts ot.dtizenJbnitiativ^ *~" ' I In the United States, on the other hand, independent govern- | ment began with republican institutions, in a mood that rejected | the majesty and sacredness of traditional institutions, and without a j privileged aristocratic class. The functions of government tended J to be relatively limited, and bureaucratic authority was the object | of distrust. The American populist ideology rejected the conception | oi a professional, authoritative governmental service and the cofre- j sponding role of the obedient subject. The spoils system and po- 1 litical corruption further undermined the prestige of governmental | authority. In an even broader sense, and for reasons we cannot deal | 31D. W. Brogan, Citizenship Today, (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960, pp. 9 ff. | 22 Harry Eckstein, "The British Political System," in S, Beer and A. Ulam, The Major j Political Systems of Europe, New York, 1958, pp. 59 if. t 37 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY with here, the general pattern o£ authority in American social systems, including the family, tended to stress political competence and participation rather than obedience to legitimate authority. In our comparison of the British and American political cultures, ■' then, can we establish that Englishmen are more likely than Americans to have incorporated allegiant subject orientations as well as participant ones? And are they better able than Americans to manage the dissonances between democratic activism and "subject = obedience"? * Several considerations led us to select Germany in our comparative study. Prussia, like Britain, had a relatively long period of effective, legitimate government before the introduction of demo- ) cratic institutions. During the German unification in the nineteenth 1 century, the Prussian bureaucratic authoritarian pattern was imposed more or less successfully on the other German states included in the nation. It has been argued that while Germany developed both a Rechtsstaat and a subject political culture, the experiments with democratic participation in the late nineteenth century and in i the Weimar period never developed a participant political culture necessary to sustain these democratic institutions and give them force and legitimacy. Much of the speculation about the stability of contemporary democratic institutions in Germany turns on the | question of the extent to which a sense of the responsibilities and \ opportunities of citizenship and mutual trust among political groupings have actually taken root among the German people. One might conclude from an examination of their histories that Britain and Germany have in common deferential attitudes toward authority, growing out of their long predemocratic experiences with | authoritarian control. But examination of history brings out one most significant difference. British government control in its predemocratic period never became as complete or as exhaustive of initiative as did the German. Brogan points out that even in the centuries when Englishmen were "subjects" there was a broad area ; of autonomy, freedom to form societies and engage in limited self-government.23 In other words, even in the long centuries of British authoritarian government there was a limited participant com- ' ponent in the British political culture. Thus the amalgamation of citizen attitudes with subject attitudes is a centuries-old process, ; long predating the parliamentary and suffrage reforms of the 83 Brogan, op. cit., pp. 14 ff. 38 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These reforms did not founder on a hard and unyielding subject culture, but could root themselves on a long-existent culture of pluralism and initiative. As Krieger points out in his penetrating analysis of the development of German political ideas and movements, the German conception of liberty—from the days of the struggle of the princes against the imperial authority to the attainment of nationhood in the nineteenth century—-was identified with the freedom of the state from external limitations rather than with the initiative and participation of individuals.24 However, democratic political culture tendencies have been, and are, present in German society. They were present in the nineteenth century, in the Weimar period, and are to be observed today. Our study will enable us to establish which elements of a participant culture are present in the German population and which are lacking. We have included Italy and Mexico in our study, as examples of less well-developed societies with transitional political systems. Italy, at least in the South and the islands, has a premodern social and political structure. If we consider Italian political history for a moment, it is evident that Italy never really developed an allegiant national political culture in modern times. The Italian monarchy of the pre-World War I period was denied legitimacy by the Church. The rule of non expedit required that the faithful refuse to accord legitimacy to the new state, refuse to participate in its processes,25 During the Fascist interlude an effective state apparatus developed, but it was more the external control of a society by a coercive authority than a relatively free according of legitimacy to an established political system. In this respect Italy is unlike Britain and Germany, both of which had integrated and legitimate authoritarian systems before the introduction of democratic institutions. In his study of a village in the southern Italian province of Lucania, Banfield characterizes the political culture of this area as "amoral familism," according legitimacy neither to the bureaucratic authoritarian organs of the state, nor to the civic-political organs of party, interest group, or local community.26 It would be incorrect to view all of Italy in these terms, but our own data will tend to sup- 24 Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom, Boston, 1957, passim and pp. 458 ff. 25 D. A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy, London, 1941. 26 Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Glencoe, 111., 1958, pp. 7 ff. 39 THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY port Banfield's claim that the Italian political culture contains unusually strong parochial, alienative subject, and alienative participant components. Democratic aspirational tendencies are also present, primarily concentrated on the left, but these are relatively weak in comparison with the widespread mood of rejection that affects the attitudes of the great majority of Italians toward their political system in all its aspects. We selected Mexico as our fifth country in order to have at least one "non-Atlantic community" democracy. Mexico can hardly be viewed as representing the emerging nations of Asia and Africa, yet no single country could possibly represent the variety of sociopolitical structures and historical experiences of the emerging nations. It has in common with many of these nations a high rate of industrialization, urbanization, and increased literacy and education. Before the revolution, Mexican government and politics were essentially alien, extractive, and exploitative structures resting uneasily on a society made up essentially of kinsmen, villagers, and ethnic and status groups. In the last thirty or forty years, however, the Mexican Revolution has deeply affected the social and political structure and has stimulated modern and democratic aspirations and expectations.27 In contrast to Italy, where a large portion of the population tends to view the political system as an alien, exploitative force, many Mexicans tend to view their revolution as an instrument of ultimate democratization and economic and social modernization. At the same time, the Mexican democratic infrastructure is relatively new. Freedom of political organization is more formal than real, and corruption is widespread throughout the whole political system. These conditions may explain the interesting ambivalence in Mexican political culture: many Mexicans lack political experience and skill, yet their hope and confidence are high; combined with these widespread participant aspirational tendencies, however, are cynicism about and alienation from the political infrastructure and bureaucracy. In addition, Mexico is the least "modern" of our five countries; that is, there is still a relatively large tradition-oriented village population and a high illiteracy rate. Perhaps the Mexican case will provide useful leads about the characteristics of political culture in non-Western countries undergoing similar experiences in modernization and democratization. 27 Robert E. Scott, Mexican Government in Transition, Urbana, 111., 1959, pp. 56 IF. 40 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE * In this brief comparison of the political-historical experience of our five countries, we have been formulating hypotheses about the differences in political culture we might expect to find among them. However, inferences about political culture drawn from history leave unanswered the question of how much of a country's historical experience lives on in the memories, feelings, and expectations of its population, in what form it can be said to live on, which elements of the population are the bearers of which historical memories, and with what intensity. Here newer scientific methods can combine with the more traditional approaches, in our search for living history in j the political cultures of peoples. Our survey will translate the rather simple and massive expectations inferred from history into quantities, demographic distributions, and regularities or relations. There is no necessary conflict between the methods of history and those of the behavioral sciences; they are actually supplemental and mutually supportive. The results of our survey are reported in five parts. Part I is introductory, presenting the general theory of the study as well as an analysis of the methodological problems that arose in the planning and execution of a comparative study of this scale. Part II presents the main body of descriptive data on the differ-1 ences and similarities in the political cultures of our five countries. ", It begins with the dimension of knowledge of the political system in = its governmental and political aspects, proceeds with an analysis of I feelings toward and evaluations of the political system as a whole and f of its various parts, and concludes with an analysis of attitudes toward the self as a political actor. A final chapter shows how these attitudes are related to one another in all five countries, and in r particular how subjective political competence is related to political j awareness, involvement, and morale. f In Part III we deal with the factors that affect political culture. In ! particular we examine the relationships between patterns of social i interaction and of political culture, the relation between organiza- tional affiliation and activity and political competence and participation, and the effects of patterns of participation in family, school, and work group on political attitudes. In Part IV we discuss some of the group differences in our five countries and present summary profiles of the political cultures of our five countries as well as illustrative case histories. THE THEORY AND METHOD OF THE STUDY Part V is a concluding chapter, which analyzes the relationship between the civic culture and the effective functioning of a democratic political system. It also evaluates the prospects for such a culture in the unstable democracies of Western Europe and among the new nations. I I I. I I ! I 42 CHAPTER 2 CROSS-NATIONAL RESEARCH AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR: SOME CONSIDERATIONS OF METHOD One of the most significant recent developments in the social sciences is the revolution in data gathering and data evaluation.1 This revolution depends on developments in the techniques by which data can be collected and analyzed: developments in the theory and method of sampling and in methods of statistical analysis, as well as in the mechanical equipment needed to handle large amounts of data. But the change depends upon more than the availability of research tools; it depends upon a newjittnude_toward the useof„data. The social scientist no longer assumes that the facts of social or political life are known, or that they are easily accessible through casual observation, introspection, or systematic reading. One questions not merely the interpretation of facts, but in the first instance the facts themselves. Most important, perhaps, the criteria by which one accepts or rejects statements about social life are of a special nature. The ultimate criterion is the method by which they are gathered. The method should be relatively systematic and relatively reliable. And it ought to be amenable to replication, so that some other researcher looking at the same body of material would come up with roughly the same facts. Of course all this implies that the method be public and explicit. An important aspect of the new concern with systematically gathered data is the relationship between the facts presented about social life and the universe of facts from which these are drawn. One 1On the "revolution" In social science, particularly in political science, see, among many others: David Truman, "The Impact on Political Science of the Revolution in the Behavioral Sciences," in the Brookings Institution, Research Frontiers in Government and Politics, Washington, D.C., 1955, pp. 202-31; Vernon Van Dyke, Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis, Stanford, 1960, and Roland Young (ed.), Approaches to the Study of Politics, Evanston, 111., 1958. 43