Is Political Culture Passé?

‘What do you work on?’ ‘Political culture.’ ‘You mean that stuff that Almond and Verba did in the sixties?’ ‘Well, yes, among other things.’ This paper examines whether a defensive response to this understandable question is necessary, or possible, or might indeed be improved upon. For the concept of political culture and the research it gave rise to appear to have the dual infirmity of both drifting into distant memory and fragmenting into innumerable independent programmes, such that, while the expression is still often encountered, it is less and less clear what it is intended to refer to. ‘Political culture’ itself was introduced as an improvement on earlier ways of addressing its broad subject matter, like the idea of ‘national character’ and the associated ‘psychocultural’ approach to politics, epitomized by research into the ‘authoritarian personality’. So there cannot be any complaint in principle at its being superseded by terms which improve on it by greater specificity, or compatibility with new modes of investigation. Moreover, a positive gloss on this process can readily be found in the view that the acquisition of knowledge proceeds through ever-increasing specialization. Concepts left behind by such progress might have an afterlife as portmanteau terms, serving certain classificatory needs, but as the successor concepts themselves burgeon into programmes with their own internal debates, even this usage has diminishing utility. While there is nothing to be gained by trying to push back the tide of time, there may nevertheless be some benefit in trying to grasp the ‘field’ in its overall shape – especially if one entertains the less positive and more jaundiced view that specialization increasingly has the character of competitive branding and eventuates in a degree of duplication. Conceptualizing political culture might at least make some such unproductive pathways more identifiable. Moreover, the recent rediscovery of the fragility of democracy even in zones of its supposed ‘consolidation’ adds relevance to the foundational political culture research mentioned at the outset. The breadth of the field of successor concepts makes it hard to address in a paper, ranging from long-standing alternatives such as identity and ideology (some versions of which overlap considerably with the idea of political culture) to numerous more recent coinages or rediscovered traditions such as social imaginary, social representations or collective memory. Bursts of interest in civil society, social capital and trust, sometimes explicitly linked with political culture and sometimes not, also demand attention. Even the broadest and, consequently, most anodyne of summary descriptions, such as that political culture research is concerned with the ‘subjective’ aspects of politics, seem in the face of such an array to carve out arbitrary exclusions. Nevertheless this paper seeks to demonstrate that periodic conceptual stocktaking, despite its unavoidable schematism when done briefly, has value. Research programmes should not be self-contained universes, and understanding their genealogies and affinities – the ‘family resemblances’ of the political culture genus – is one way to avoid that.