THE RENAISSANCE OF A RUBRIC: POLITICAL CULTURE AS CONCEPT AND THEORY

Abstract

In recent years, several prominent scholars have attempted to reinvigorate political-culture theory and defend it from the challenge that rational-choice theory poses. Yet the primary threat to the ‘renaissance’ of political-culture theory comes not from rational-choice theory but from political culture's continued weakness as concept and theory. Even after the theoretical and empirical defenses provided in recent years, political culture remains poorly explicated along seven distinct dimensions: (1) how to define the concept; (2) how to disentangle subcultures (for example an élite political culture) from a society's overall political culture; (3) how to integrate the many individual-level orientations of which the concept is composed; (4) how to create a societal-level variable from individual-level components; (5) if the foregoing have been resolved, how to measure the concept; (6) how to derive hypotheses about individual political behavior from the subjective orientations under study; and (7) how political culture interacts with institutions and other attributes of a polity to produce a propensity for certain types of political outcomes. With these tasks left uncompleted, political culture remains no more than a rubric under which different authors focus on different individual orientations, employ different measures and different methods of aggregating the orientations, then test different propositions about the links between those individual orientations and politics.