Question

I was given a political science assignment where I need to write 500 words on political culture. Could you list some ideas that will get me to that word count?

Answer 1

Political culture describes how culture impacts politics. It encompasses both the political ideals and operating norms of a polity. Political culture is thus the manifestation of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics. A political culture is the product of both the history of a political system and the histories of the members. Thus, it is rooted equally in public events and private experience. Political culture, in political science, a set of shared views and normative judgments held by a population regarding its political system. The notion of political culture does not refer to attitudes toward specific actors, such as a president or prime minister, but rather it denotes how people view the political system as a whole and their belief in its legitimacy. American political scientist Lucian Pye defined political culture as the composite of basic values, feelings, and knowledge that underlie the political process. Hence, the building blocks of political culture are the beliefs, opinions, and emotions of the citizens toward their form of government. Political culture is the property of a collectivity—for example, a country, region, class, or party. While most studies of political culture concentrated on national cultures, some studies focused on territorially defined units at the subnational level, such as the political cultures of American states, Canadian provinces, or Italian regions. Other studies analyzed the cultural attributes of social groups such as the political elite, the working class, and the like.

The term 'political culture' is used in the field of social science. It refers to historically-based, widely-shared beliefs, feelings, and values about the nature of political systems, which can serve as a link between citizens and government. Different countries have different political cultures, which can help us understand how and why their governments are organized in a certain way, why democracies succeed or fail, or why some countries still have monarchies. Understanding our own political culture can also provide clues to political relationships, such as those we share with each other or our governments. In the United States, we may be tempted to think of political culture in terms of our voting status as a Democrat or a Republican. However, it's important to understand that political culture differs from political ideology. The term 'political ideology' refers to a code of beliefs or views about governments and politics that may influence the way we vote or whether or not we support certain legislative actions.

For example, two people can share a political culture, but have different political ideologies. In other words, a right-wing conservative can be from the same political culture as a left-wing liberal. In other words, political culture is something we share, while a political ideology is something we use to define ourselves and make political decisions.

In a parochial political culture, like Mexico, citizens are mostly uninformed and unaware of their government and take little interest in the political process. In a subject political culture, such as those found in Germany and Italy, citizens are somewhat informed and aware of their government and occasionally participate in the political process. In a participant political culture, like the United Kingdom and the United States, citizens are informed and actively participate in the political process.

Other theories of political culture address how political culture takes root and is transferred from generation to generation through political socialization and include Seymour Martin Lipset's formative events theory, which describes the long-lasting effects of key events that took place when a country was founded; Louis Hartz's fragment theory, which explains the long-lasting effects of European colonization on countries and societies; and Roger Inglehart's post-materialism theory, which explains the long-lasting effects of childhood economic and social conditions.

The political culture of a society is directly related to its political socialization where the political culture of a society is acquired through political socialization. In any political system the concept of political culture is important to the society, politics and government through aspects in: promoting the relationship between the government and its people; identifying the rights and responsibility of the people; determining the obligations of the government; and identifying the limits of the government authority. The political culture of any society it can be found that it is divided in three levels, that are, system level, process level, and policy level . The system level incorporates the views of leaders and citizens on the values that hold the political system together for instance government legitimacy, national pride and identity. The second level refers to the expectations of political functions and people’s relationship to the political system, for instance citizen roles, rights perceptions, and government principles. The third level refers to expectations of people and leaders to the policies from the government; they include government policy priorities, and government roles.

Political culture theory has passed through several periods of intensive development and high interest from both social and political science research. Its success has been based on the explanatory power of its arguments regarding the intermediate role culture plays in the relation between the citizens and the dynamics of the polity structure, organization and operation. It has also known long periods of critics and harsh denials of its very explanatory power, philosophical backgrounds, and methodological means.One such critical aspect is that political culture theory does not actually provide for an ontology and epistemology of its own, it just suggests dimensions of comparative analysis without having fundamentally specified what it is and how it works . Moreover, it employs attitude measurements and evaluations of attitudes’ impact on political behavior or action deliberation without actually having provided for attitude operationalization. Attitude research has ever since developed an impressive conceptual and methodological endeavor for achieving an operational form of the attitude structure as it has been defined by Allport. The spectacular historical development in attitude fundamental and methodological research has not been closely followed by similar efforts in political culture theory and methodological research. Another critical aspect is that political culture theory has not integrated culture and state studies in a unified conceptual and operational framework .

Observing the methodological developments in the political culture research and connected areas, one could expect that they would have effects on the ontological and epistemological aspects which have long been waiting for a sound approach in political culture theory. There are several possible explanations of such expectations.

ne such possible explanation could regard a new view based on a new type of support—the big data—the advanced technologies of the artificial as well as social media provide for the approaches on political participation in both virtual and real environments, which potentially modify the classic view on mass attitudes formation and change, political identities or political involvement. Not only that attitude survey research and, consequently, attitude measurements would be substantially transformed by the new technologies and the research methodologies they support, but the fundamental, methodological, and operational research on mass attitudes emergence as well as research on attitude structural components—affect and emotions, values and beliefs—have already been re-considered, and this seems to be only the beginning of a long and sophisticated chain of changes.

Another possible explanation addresses the actual need that political culture research could employ the virtual generative experiments which provide for the simulations of the potential dynamic evolutions of society and polity by means of the artificial societies and artificial polities methodologies. Though initially inspired and developed within the areas of conflict studies and international relations, these theories as well as their associated methodologies, mainly based on artificial agents, complex adaptive systems, and artificial life technologies, have seriously questioned political methodology means and, moreover, have indeed changed the research methodologies in other social sciences, like sociology and social-psychology. The impact of these radical changes has resulted in new disciplines, and have confirmed similar phenomena which happened in economic sciences or linguistics.political culture theory has employed attitude measurements as means to define the political culture as the theory about the relationship between the individual as citizen and the state viewed as an open polity . Classic political culture theory has provided for the modelling of the relationship between the individuals and the state, and this has thoroughly revealed both the need for such a concept and the strong methodological constraints to achieve a model of this relationship. The reasons were complex enough to explain the “crisis” which they generated between theory and methodology in political culture theory.Methodologies in political culture research have started to be intensively employed after the cognitive revolution and mostly starting with the 1990s. Such developments have characterized many areas outside classic original domains of political culture theory, namely political behaviour and comparative politics. Their outcomes have divided the area into, roughly, classic and external areas. While the classic area keeps its attachment to the original type of approach, the “assault” has been prepared for long time outside it. There are several areas which contribute to the domain: initially, the nation identities and nationalism and the democracy areas have divided the domain. Later, several other areas have provided for conceptual and methodological research: (1) policy and public administration

(2) democracy-building

(3) state-building

From a methodological and epistemological perspective, the political culture research is a meeting place for at least three paradigms:

(1) positivist and post-positivist epistemologies as inherited from the classic theory survey methodologies of collecting and analysing data based on the empirical data

(2) constructivist epistemologies based on the methodologies of complex emergent systems

(3) culturalist and rational choice-based policy studies

No matter if developed in its own courtyard or in some conceptual neighbourhood, research approaches on issues which are addressing political culture are emphasizing

(1) a pragmatic orientation toward widening and diversifying the methodological issues

(2) the need for methodological considerations which could potentially offer the ground for epistemological clarifications