Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T22:21:12.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political Culture and Development: Some Pervasive Themes in the Study of Indian Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

William Vanderbok
William Vanderbok
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the most common themes in the literature on political development is the assumption of an elite—mass gap based on differing educational, occupational, income and social class backgrounds. The saliency of such differences are presumed to be more important in developing than developed nations because of an overlay of Westernization to be found in the elite sectors and a strong traditional orientation among the masses, particularly the rural masses. Urban dwellers are often thought of as residing in a transitional limbo between the old and the new, between a disintegrating traditional self-identity and an emerging modern one.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , February 1978 , pp. 145 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

2 Weiner, Myron, ‘India: Two Political Cultures,’ in Pye, Lucian and Verba, Sidney (eds), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 199–244.Google Scholar

3 Morris-Jones, W. H., ‘India's Political Idioms,’ in Cyril, Henry Philips (ed.), Politics and Society in India (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), pp. 133–54.Google Scholar

4 Franda, Marcus, ‘The Political Idioms of Atulya Ghosh,’ Asian Survey 6 (08 1966), pp. 420–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Kothari, Rajni, Politics in India (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).Google Scholar

6 Nandy, Ashis, ‘The Culture of Indian Politics.’ Journal of Asian Studies 30 (11 1970), pp. 57–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Lloyd, Rudolph and Susanne, H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and Milton, Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York: Praeger, 1972).Google Scholar

8 Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, and Srinivas, M. N., ‘The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization,’ in Philip, Mason (ed.), India and Ceylon: Unity and Diversity (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 67–83.Google Scholar

9 Percival, Spear, ‘The Position of the Muslims, Before and After Partition,’ in Mason, India and Ceylon, pp. 30–150.Google Scholar

10 On single variable discriminations, a sample size of 525 permits assertions to the effect that we are 95 percent sure of being within 4 percent of the true mean.

11 For a presentation of the semantic differential technique see Osgood, Charles E., Suci, George J. and Tannenbaum, Percy H., The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). Essentially it involves taking a concept such as ‘Socialism’, and asking respondents to rank it on several nine point continuums, such as good-bad, or kind-cruel.Google Scholar

12 The statistics reported in Tables 1 and 2 were generated using the breakdown subprogram of SPSS, version 5.01.

13 Now that the initial exploration of hypothesis one has been completed it can fairly be argued that any new research should sharpen the political environment attributes that are measured across groups. For example, instead of using the basic building blocks of caste, wealth and party, attention should focus on such things as majority rule, equality before the law and competitive elections—concepts which may bring into sharper relief tensions between traditional and modern political ualues.Google Scholar

14 Abelson, R. and Tukey, W., ‘Efficient Conversion of Non-Metric Information,’ in Edward, Tufte (ed.), The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 407–17.Google Scholar