Claiming More Space: Political Culture, its Explanation and its Logics. A Neo Post-Structuralist Approach

The notion of political culture has emerged as a foundational principle within the field of modern political science. Emerging at a time of intellectual change, it served as a foundational principle of American political science, asserting its autonomy from other sciences. However, from the outset, the theory, its disruptive power, and its methodologies were compelled to compromise. Theory and research model were marked by the sociological models of Talcott-Parsons, and so the methodology by the behaviourism of modern psychology. After a period of decline in the 1970s, the so-called 'political culture renaissance' of the late 1980s sought to challenge the hegemony of rational choice models with Wildawsky's concept of cultural rationality. At the same time, longitudinal studies led by Inglehart, Welzel and others sought to anchor political culture within a comprehensive, long-term conceptualisation of Western emancipatory values, using extensive data sets. More recent developments in post-Soviet countries have drawn on predictive and computational models, as well as disciplines such as the physics of electromagnetic fields. The concept of political culture has followed all the dominant models in the social sciences but has been subject to extensive scrutiny, with numerous criticisms. The evolution of the concept's application, the radical divergence between interpretative and 'mainstream' post-positivist approaches, and the history of all possible interpretations have collectively engendered a sense of theoretical discontent. The issue of political culture can be termed 'ptolematisation', whereby an inadequate paradigm is 'filled in' with each new interpretation in an attempt to make it work. However, what is necessary for political culture is a Copernican revolution involving political science itself. S. Welch's (2013) work constitutes the basis for a novel interpretation of political culture change and inertia, predicated on the philosophical contributions of Polanyi and Wittgenstein. The present study draws upon these concerns and extends and discusses their implications with regard to the explanation that a study of political culture must provide. I draw upon the logic of critical explanation and retroduction in Political Theory by Glynos and Howarth, as it can exhaust the explanation process. This explanation provides a justification for the explanans, which makes the explanandum intelligible through persuasive practices. The explanandum consists of social phenomena that are mediated by existing theoretical structures and discursive practices. Having established the character of the explanandum, the contribution turns to the manner in which discourses and practices are articulated in an attempt to explain the establishment and maintenance of political cultures. To this end, the concept of political and phantasmatic social logics is employed to characterise social practices and regimes and to account for their transformation or resistance to change. To this aim, the current research is built upon the findings of the doctoral thesis that focused on Tuscany in the 19th century, and which illustrated the presence of sub-logics, such as the seduction of domination, and their interplay.