Political culture is understood, as subjective aspect of politics. Subjective aspect means beliefs, symbols and values, which people express towards political objects, institutions, process, etc. It defines the situation in which political action takes place.36 This means nature of the political process in different countries can be explained and understood with reference to how people think about politics, how and what demands they raise? Are they are supportive to the political system and structures and that too, whether in an individual capacity or as ethnic, tribal, religious and caste groups? While understanding the functioning of the political system and political process, political culture helps us understand the people’s attitudes and orientation to political system. This is important because one gets to know the kinds of demands being made by the people, the way they are expressed and organized by the associational and interest groups, and coordinated and formulated in terms of policies and programmes by political parties or any such institution. If we look at the input-output flow of the political system, nature of inputs (demands, pressures, supports) would be crucial for the political system to decide on outputs (allocation, welfare, taxation, policies and programmes, etc.). Nature of inputs, both demands and supports, depends on what kind of political culture prevails. If we recall Weber’s description of sources of legitimacy, support is based on traditional, charismatic and rational bases. In political culture also, nature of support will depend whether the political culture is characterized as parochial, subject or participant.
To study political systems in a comparative manner, political theorists have discussed about the scale of political development. While analysing roles, structures, input and output functions and political process, elements of differentiation, autonomy and secularization are applied. Almond and Powell’s Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach uses the criteria of sub-system autonomy and role specificity, structural and role differentiation and cultural secularization for comparing political systems. They call these ‘developmental variables. Absence or presence of these variables can be scaled and level of political development can be determined. Political culture provides a relevant entry point for such a study as relationship between structures, roles and orientations are relevant for comparing political systems. With the help of political culture, the nature of political process, roles, structures, demands and upward support flow and outputs and downward policy flow and nature of political participation can be known. Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba’s study Political Culture and Political Development uses political culture for analysing political systems.
How political culture is geared to different types of roles and structures become relevant for comparative analysis. In some political systems, head of a tribal community may also officiate as chief in political matters. It may also happen that those who are head in tribal or social organization also become political representatives. Almond and Verba, citing James Coleman, says that this type of political culture is present amongst the African tribal societies and autonomous local communities.37 Due to intermixing of political, socio-religious and economic roles, it is said that the political aspect does not appear separate from the rest of the aspects of society. This is referred to as a lack of differentiation in roles and structures, or structural differentiation. This means there are no specialized roles for a legislator different from an executive or a judge and between interest and pressure groups from political parties. Further, there may not be separation between the religious head from that of a political head and decision on political and economic aspects are mixed with religious and social aspects. People are not oriented in terms of rational and empirical calculation and option analysis rather behave as per traditional or parochial relations. This indicates lack of cultural secularization. Neither are there autonomous structures for specialized functions. For example, in developed countries with a stable democratic set-up, the role of a political party is different from the role of a pressure group and the legislature from the judiciary. They also enjoy relative autonomy from each other. However, in parochial political culture there is lack of subsystem autonomy.
A developmental approach aims at comparing how different political systems progress on a graph of certain parameters such as sub-system autonomy, structural differentiation (e.g. pressure groups and political parties different, executive different from judiciary, etc.) and cultural secularization. Higher autonomy, differentiation and secularization mean the political system is highly developed. In their analysis, they have used political culture, political socialization, subcultures, lag between structural and cultural changes (e.g. introduction of adult suffrage on the basis of rational individual decision-maker as structural change but people still voting as caste, religious and ethnic groups), etc.
The concept of political culture as tool of analysis has been used by a host of theorists and analysts. Gabriel Almond and James Coleman’s (eds) The Politics of Developing Areas, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture, Gabriel Almond and G. B. Powell’s Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach, Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba’s (eds), Political Culture and Political Development, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s (eds) The Civic Culture Revisited and Almond, Powell, Strom and Dalton’s Comparative Politics Today apply the concept of political culture to the study of countries and functioning of political system. While Almond and Verba studied Britain, France, Germany, Mexico and USA; Almond, Powell, Strom and Dalton have analysed England, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, India, Nigeria and the United States.
Applying the classification of political culture in terms of parochial, subject and participant or a combination of them, we can understand the nature and level of the following:
Leave a Reply