We have long known that creating democracy is more than a matter of installing the right

political plumbing. Constitutions and voting systems may be democracy’s necessary

conditions, but they alone are insufficient. Political machinery, no matter how carefully
crafted, depends upon shared behaviors and habits of mind—what historians and political
scientists often call “political culture.”

The term first came to prominence around 1963, when political scientists Gabriel Almond and
Sidney Verba published a study that used the relatively new tool of opinion surveys to identify
attitudes about power and the state held by citizens of five democratic nations. The survey data,
they claimed, revealed the existence of distinct national “political cultures” that favored or
inhibited the establishment of enduring representative governments. They argued that the “civic
culture”—an essentially Anglo-American political culture that blended a habit of deliberation
with respect for the state—offered the best chance for creating stable democratic politics.

Political culture proved to be an attractive and protean idea. Almond and Verba’s work
clothed an old argument about the cultural basis of politics in a mantle of cutting-edge
scholarly rigor. Historians were quick to embrace the possibilities that this offered.
Mainstream scholars of the American Revolution, in particular, saw a way for political history
to assimilate compelling new work on revolutionary culture and society emerging from
scholars on the left: studies of mariners and crowds in revolutionary politics, new histories of
political action by the enslaved and disenfranchised. When women’s history appeared in the
1970s, it too found a logical place within this paradigm.

Historians’ investment in political culture paid quick dividends by creating longer-term

deficits. Scholars of the revolutionary era seized on the language of political culture while
leaving their methods perilously loose. Some influential authors, such as Gordon Wood, made
lavish use of allied terms like “ideology” without defining them at all. The result, predictably,
was a rather muddy sense that “culture” mattered, but little clarity about what culture was or
how it actually affected politics.

No consensus exists on how to define democracy, but legal equality, political freedom and
rule of law have been identified as important characteristics.These principles are reflected in
all eligible citizens being equal before the law and having equal access to legislative
processes.[citation needed] For example, in a representative democracy, every vote has equal
weight, no unreasonable restrictions can apply to anyone seeking to become a representative,
and the freedom of its eligible citizens is secured by legitimised rights and liberties which are
typically protected by a constitution. Other uses of „democracy” include that of direct
democracy.

One theory holds that democracy requires three fundamental principles: upward control
(sovereignty residing at the lowest levels of authority), political equality, and social norms by
which individuals and institutions only consider acceptable acts that reflect the first two
principles of upward control and political equality.

The term „democracy” is sometimes used as shorthand for liberal democracy, which is a
variant of representative democracy that may include elements such as political pluralism;
equality before the law; the right to petition elected officials for redress of grievances; due
process; civil liberties; human rights; and elements of civil society outside the government.
Roger Scruton argues that democracy alone cannot provide personal and political freedom
unless the institutions of civil society are also present.