Anticipatory Systems in Political Culture Research

The theories about anticipatory systems have revealed a research paradigm which is concerned with the relationship between complex (living as well as non-living) systems, models which such systems embed and employ in their own operation and dynamics, and their environments. During the past decade, political anticipation has acquired substantial consideration in political science, international relations and security studies areas. By constructing political scenarios, political anticipation has been defined and employed as the means to overcome (desirable or non-desirable) political crises or the situations which require with necessity the elaboration of instruments with which they can be approached. Anticipatory systems are but one of the research areas which have also been in the focus in various area like mathematics, complex adaptive systems, and computational social science. As a difference from the anticipative systems which have been primarily developed and employed for their predictive capacities, the domain of anticipatory systems is concerned with their conceptual definition and characteristics, mathematical formalism, and applications to a wide variety of areas of concern from nature to society and polity. Political culture could not escape this condition since individual as well as collective (mass) attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, mass emotional phenomenology in connection to political power, policy or dynamic political contexts are at the heart of political culture research. These issues are often connected to crisis situations in social and political environments. The dynamics of complex social and political systems could evolve such that control might become ineffective and social and political crises could not be avoided. In order to approach such situation, anticipatory systems are studied for their capacity to reveal, explain or reproduce the behavior of complex social and political systems and, therefore, recommend approaches aimed at avoiding crisis situations. This paper approaches the anticipatory condition of the political culture, the state (polity) operation and dynamics, and of the relationship between political culture and polity. Our approach aims at describing both polity and political culture as anticipatory systems and reveal the classic roots of this approach. Several formal models are presented such that a political system which contains a political culture can be described in terms of anticipatory systems and employed in proving that political culture plays the role of an anticipative component of the political system, thus guiding its operation and dynamic evolution. Political attitudes toward the state and the role they played in the historical events of 1989 are analyzed in case studies regarding the CEE countries and employ WVS data in order to prove empirical support to this idea.