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Political Culture, Political Structure and Political Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
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In The Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’. I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with which The Civic Culture itself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’.
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References
1 Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), p. 33.Google Scholar
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6 This is the major argument of those recent theorists of democracy, the majority, who claim that the ‘classical’ theory of democracy is unrealistic and needs drastic revision. The final chapter of The Civic Culture provides one example of this argument; other examples are briefly discussed in Pateman, Carole, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 3–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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38 The typical working-class view of a gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’, in contrast to the middleclass view of society as an ordered hierarchy, has often been remarked upon. One investigator found that manual workers interviewed had a general picture of government as ‘a group of men who arrange to keep themselves in power and don't care about the interests of the common people’. Lipsitz, Lewis, ‘Work Life and Political Attitudes’, The American Political Science Review, LVIII (1964), 951–62, p. 958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Evidence of the divergent views of the political structure of different income groups in the U.S.A. can be found in Form, William H. and Rytina, Joan, ‘Ideological Beliefs on the Distribution of Power in the United States’ American Sociological Review, XXXIV (1969), 19–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In a very interesting article Mann has collected together evidence of different perspectives of middle- and working-class individuals over a variety of areas, Mann, Michael, ‘The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy’, American Sociological Review, XXXV (1970), 423–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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42 Almond, and Verba, , The Civic Culture, p. 340.Google Scholar They also argue that because, like any other government, a democratic government must govern, i.e. ‘have power and leadership and make decisions’, citizens cannot be very active politically; that would upset the ‘balance’ between ‘power and responsiveness’ of leaders necessary for democratic government (pp. 340–4). This argument that a stable democratic system requires apathy is common to many recent writers on democratic theory, who stress the dangers to stability of a significant increase in popular activity. One of the more emphatic statements on these lines can be found in Sartori, Giovanni, Democratic Theory (New York: Praeger, 1965).Google Scholar Sartori also argues that apathy ‘is nobody's fault in particular, and it is time we stopped seeking scapegoats’ (p. 88).
43 See figures VI.I and 2 showing that the higher the educational attainment of the respondents the higher their level of competence.
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48 See the discussion in Mann, ‘The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy’.
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