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The Civic Culture(s): Groups, Norms, and the Health of Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2020

Jon Kingzette Open the ORCID record for Jon Kingzette [Opens in a new window]  and
Michael A. Neblo
Jon Kingzette*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Michael A. Neblo
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Jon Kingzette, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Democratic institutions need a healthy “civic culture” to function well. Many worry that civic cultures today are decaying in the United States and other established democracies. We note two problems with these assessments. First, there are several ways to measure civic culture, but scholars typically focus only on their preferred approach. Second, most scholars assume a single civic culture, despite racial, ethnic, class, and other differences. So talk of “the” civic culture erases non-dominant groups. Without a framework to integrate different approaches and account for group variation, we cannot assess decline, nor specify for whom. And without those, we are unable to intervene to make things better. We introduce a theory of civic culture as a system of norms that integrates the main approaches to measuring civic culture and does so in a way that leads to a principled framework for understanding racial, ethnic, and other group variation within countries.

Keywords

Civic culturegroup attitudesdemocratic theorydemocratic norms
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 144 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

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