Political Culture and Social Capital

Stephen Fisher

stephen.fisher@sociology.ox.ac.uk
http://malroy.econ.ox.ac.uk/fisher/polsoc

• General Argument
• Political Culture: The Civic Culture
• American Exceptionalism
• Social Capital
• Causal models 1: Making Democracy Work
• Causal models 2: Values driving both growth and democracy?
• Contemporary evidence on regime support
• Conclusion

Stephen Fisher, Political Sociology Lectures

 General Argument
Political Culture refers to the pattern of beliefs and assumptions ordinary people have towards the world,
as these pertain to politics. (Tepperman)

- Not the same as ideology, but more diffuse and less goal directed.
- Relatively stable over time and reproduced by political socialization.

General Hypothesis: Culture influences political and social outcomes, especially the quality of democ-
racy, governance, or economic performance.

Those who believe in the importance of culture do not all agree on what aspects of culture are relevant
and what outcomes they influence and how.

General Problem: Which is the correct causal direction?

Some want to argue both ways

e.g. culture influences growth and growth influences culture.

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 The Civic Culture: Almond and Verba, 1963
• Political culture is made up of cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations towards the political
system.
• Three basic kinds of political culture
– Parochial: No cognitive orientations toward the political system
– Subject: Cognitive orientations toward the output aspects of the system
– Participant: Cognitive orientations toward both the input and output aspects of the system
• These cultures are congruent with traditional, authoritarian and democratic systems respectively.
• Congruence is indicated by positive affective and evaluative orientations in the appropriate areas:
– there is a scale from alienation, through apathy to allegiance.
• The Civic Culture is an allegiant participant political culture.
• Pioneering work in cross-national survey research on five countries characterized them as:
– Italy: Alienated
– Mexico: Alienated and Aspiration
– Germany: Political detachment and subject competence
– US: Participant Civic Culture
– Britain: Deferential Civic Culture
• Falls short of making a claim that political culture causes democratic stability.

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 American Exceptionalism
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)

- Democracy in America is successful because of a participatory culture and a belief in equality.

Lipset (Continental Divide, 1963)

• Canadian culture is more statist, deferential to leaders, collectivist and conservative

• US is more independent, distrustful of government, individualistic, liberal and progressive.
• Reasons for the difference are historical
– American Revolution led to a migration of British loyalists northward and a divergence in political
history.

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 Social Capital
According to Putnam (Bowling Alone), Social Capital . . .

• is defined as “The features of social life—networks, norms, and trust—that enable participants to act
together more effectively to pursue shared objectives.”
• is an important factor influencing the quality of democracy, economic performance, health, etc.
• comes in different varieties
– Bonding: within groups
– Bridging: between groups
• is not always a good thing
e.g. power elites have high levels of social capital
• is measured by a mixture of
– public engagement (e.g. voting, political action)
– inter-personal association (e.g. socializing, volunteering)
– inter-personal trust

International Trends (Cabinet Office PIU/Strategy Unit report)

• Declining: US; Australia.
• Stable or ambiguous: UK (high); NL; Sweden; France (low).
• Increasing: Japan; Germany (from low base).

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 Putnam, Making Democracy Work

• Aim: To explain why performance of regional government in Italy is better in the North than the
South

• Explanation: Not the wealth of the North, but it’s civic-community characterized by,
– Horizontal, rather than heirarchical, networks.
– Values of solidarity, civic-engagement, cooperation and honesty.
– Strong conception of citizenship and feeling of efficacy.

• The origins on the cultural difference go back 500 years to when . . .

– the North had republican city states with guilds, mutual aid societies and other civic organizations,
and
– the South had a strong feudal system with heavy church influence.

• Demonstrates the causal influence of civic values by measuring them circa 1900 and showing they
influence current culture and governance. (Fig 5.6)

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 Critiques of Making Democracy Work

Jackman and Miller (APSR, 1996) uses the Putnam data to show that . . .

• The measure of governmental performance is problematic

– The components of the measure are not sufficiently collinear (correlated with each other)

• When the indicators of institutional performance are taken one-by-one, few of them are significantly
correlated with either current or past levels of civic values (Table 3)

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Tarrow (APSR, 1996) accuses Putnam of,

• confusing policy performance with democratic performance (his measure is of the former)
• cherry picking: Finding confirmatory evidence in history and ignoring problematic evidence such as
...
– variation within North and South
– the fact that city states were not so civic or republican
– early measures of civic values are correlated with progressive politics

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 Values drive both growth and democracy?

In the APSR (1988) and Culture Shift, Inglehart argues

• Materialist values in the past improved economic performance (c.f. Weber)

• But wealth generates post-materialism which hinders further growth.

• However post-materialism improves civic culture which is associated with democratic stability. (APSR,
Fig 6)

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Jackson and Miller (APSR, 1996) assess the Inglehart argument and point out

• Years of continuous democracy conflates political stability with the quality of democracy

• Since culture is measured in 1980 we have backwards

causality

• The indicators of culture when taken individually do not predict growth after controlling for wealth
(Table 6).

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Muller and Seligson (APSR, 1994) develop a more complex model and find

• Support for gradual reform (as opposed to the status-quo or revolution) is correlated with the level
of democracy

• The democratic stability has an impact on inter-personal trust

• Otherwise no evidence for association between culture and democracy in either direction. (Fig 4).

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 Contemporary Evidence on Political Culture
Norris (Critical Citizens, 1999) argues that there has been declining trust in government and support for
democracy.

• this is witnessed in attitudes as well as protest behaviour.

Institutional confidence is influenced by,

• extent of political rights and civil liberties

• electoral system
• centralization of the state
• economic development
• being a supporter of the governing party
• some socio-demographic characteristics

Different countries think that government is there to do different things.

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 Conclusion
Political Culture and Social Capital are different things, but they have aspects in common, e.g. turnout
and trust.

The nature of the relationship between either culture or social capital and the quality of democracy is
difficult to establish.

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