The New Political Culture

Terry Nichols Clark, Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975783
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This volume introduces a new style of politics, the New Political Culture (NPC), which began in many countries in the 1970s. It defines new rules of the game for politics, challenging two older traditions: class politics and clientelism.

Preface

What is the New Political Culture (NPC)? Many interpreters misunderstand the NPC by labeling it as "Right" or "Left." The NPC joins elements of both the traditional right and left to make it more than either, and it adds new concerns—like making government more efficient and helping average citizens understand and genuinely participate in policymaking. It is a major new force on the political scene around the world. We do not suggest that traditional right or left parties have disappeared, or that class politics and clientelism are dead. The NPC competes with these past types of politics; indeed, much of politics is debate over whose rules to follow. Our main attention to the NPC in this book, rather than other patterns, follows from the importance of understanding what is new in order to contrast it with the old. When we first began these efforts, many felt that the NPC simply did not exist; some people still ignore it, but more are fighting against it. We do not defend it as morally good; the book attempts positive analysis, not normative assessment. Yet it is clear that the NPC brings many things widely seen as "bad," such as volatile leadership, fragile policy commitments, loose linkages to enduring social groups (like unions, classes, or ethnic groups), and more. Many are detailed below along with traits widely appreciated. In a word, however, average citizens in many countries often support candidates and programs of the NPC, whereas professional politicians, certain interest groups, and traditional party officials often do not. As citizens have grown more important, so has the NPC.

Labeling is a common problem. For instance, new leaders in Italy, Eastern Europe, and Latin America are often labeled "capitalists" or "the New Right." Such labels reflect the observer's (old) ideologies as much as the new leaders they describe. NPC leaders disagree as much with the views of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as they do with Karl Marx and Franklin Roosevelt. It is human nature to pour new wine into old bottles, but the labels are now often wrong. The main conflicts today are not about socialism versus capitalism or more versus less government, but about hierarchy versus egalitarianism. The U.S. Postal Service, General Motors, and armies in every country are all hierarchies that egalitarians seek to level.

Chapter 2 outlines the theory in most detail. Subsequent chapters assess the Chapter 2 propositions with evidence from citizen surveys, census data, and ethnographic work—but especially from 7,000 cities around the world. These comparative urban data were assembled in the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation (FAUI) Project over 14 years, representing a huge investment of time and money by over 500 persons. Some twenty books and more than 200 articles have emerged from the FAUI Project to date, but this is the first on political processes in international perspective. It has been exciting to see how many theories of politics that work in one country must be recast to interpret different countries. Observing such contextual variation both strengthens our theories and chastens our nationalist impulses. Examples are in the Overview.

The book is written for social scientists as well as more general readers, including college students, elected officials, civic leaders, and interested citizens. Most technical points are relegated to notes and appendices to keep the reading clear. But we have not sought to simplify complex ideas when the phenomena themselves are complex, as is the case with the main topic of the book—the New Political Culture.

This is number three of a trilogy of books about the NPC, the last and most comprehensive. The conceptual origin of all three books was an early draft of Chapter 2, "The New Political Culture" (Clark and Inglehart 1989, 1990). It contrasted class politics and the New Political Culture and formulated 22 propositions about where the NPC is important. The second volume is Clark and Rempel (1997), which tests NPC propositions using primarily citizen survey data. Such citizen data are useful to probe individual characteristics like occupation, age, and gender, which are associated with other characteristics in urban data. The first volume is Clark (1994), which tests propositions about the NPC with American urban data, and analyzes policies like growth control and new management techniques as implementing this political culture. The NPC propositions have been adapted to several contexts, such as Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, Japan (in this volume), and, in more detail, in postcommunist Eastern Europe. The NPC paper was translated into Polish and Hungarian and recast for Eastern Europe (in Clark 1993; see also Peteri 1991; Surazska 1995), Spain (Rojo 1990), and Latin America (Landa 1995, 1996). The propositions also helped spark an ongoing exchange about whether "social class is dying" or yielding to postindustrial politics (Clark and Lipset 1991; Clark, Lipset and Rempel 1993; Hout et al. 1995; see Chapter 4 in this volume).

The propositions suggest several processes. Some concern individual citizens (e.g., more highly educated persons should be more socially liberal), whereas others concern social/political system characteristics (e.g., the more ideologically coherent are political parties, the less likely is the emergence of NPC). The propositions are sufficiently complex that several sub-projects were pursued to address them with overlapping teams and different types of data. Although some ideas have been presented to professional meetings and in journal articles, these three volumes report the main results. Each volume pursues those propositions most appropriate to test with a particular type of data or national context.

The three volumes are team efforts. Some initial propositions were sparked by discussions of postindustrial developments in conferences of the FAUI Project. As we compared interpretations, we might hear that "bureaucrats are more important in Oslo," "Japan has few new social movements," and so on. Dozens of such observed differences challenged us to build an analytical framework to interpret them. Our goal throughout has been to explain cases and exceptions by articulating a general theory, which we understand as a set of propositions and assumptions about conditions where the propositions hold. For example, rather than just stating that class politics is important in France and postindustrial politics more important in the United States, we formulate more abstract propositions, such as more education for citizens and weak political parties should promote postindustrial politics. These propositions should in turn capture key processes to explain differences between France and the United States but also differences elsewhere.

Much past research is on one or a few nation-states. Results often differ from one country to the next. This is inherent in "small N" studies: Nations are scarce animals and distinct in part for idiosyncratic reasons. What then? Some suggest in depth case studies of one or two nations (e.g., Skocpol 1979) or comparing a few nations using procedures like "Boolean analysis" (e.g., Ragin 1987). Although each such approach can add insight, we find it useful to conduct case studies of nations or cities identified as theoretically critical and thus interesting to build on for generalizing (such as the rise of new leaders in Eastern Europe, Italy, and France.) We simultaneously try to join case studies with comparative work. The comparative work locates the cases and indicates the generality or distinctiveness of each case. For comparative work we find it methodologically compelling to increase the N and then undertake conceptually-informed comparisons via testing propositions. Put differently, can we build a science better using a handful of scarce dinosaurs—or with thousands of fruit flies? Our approach builds on the methodological innovations in crossnational comparative research of persons like Stein Rokkan in the 1960s. Alas, there has not been substantial methodological progress since. Our assessment is shared by others, for example, recent reviews by Erwin Scheuch and Henry Teune (in Oyen 1990) and Kaase and Newton (1995).

General methodological discussions repeatedly stress the value of a large number of cases to permit unraveling causal processes. A large N can reduce idiosyncrasies of individual cases to "noise." We have sought to achieve this by analyzing either (1) citizens in different countries to assess the importance of individual characteristics like education or age, or (2) local governments to analyze political system characteristics, like income inequalities or party strength. We have correspondingly spent more than a decade assembling and analyzing data for more than 60,000 citizens and 7,000 cities around the world, reported in these three volumes. Thus we study localities and citizens to generalize more precisely about political systems. It is gratifying to be able to report how well many general propositions hold.

We often build on the FAUI Project. Initiated in 1983, the FAUI project has become the most extensive study of local government in the world. It includes more than 550 persons in 35 countries. Participants meet in conferences, via the Internet, and analyze a core of comparable data. Participants have collected and shared data concerning citizens, local public officials, and socioeconomic characteristics of localities, regions, and nations. Many items have been included specifically to map postindustrial politics. Most of these data can now be made available to researchers via the Internet. Contact [email protected].

The wonderful colleagues who participated in the FAUI Project for more than a decade deserve first acknowledgment; many are listed in the Appendix. Vincent Hoffmann-Martinot helped launch the book when he spent a year visiting Chicago, Michigan, and Harvard and helped organize a Paris conference of FAUI colleagues (published as Baldersheim et al. 1989). The FAUI Project is remarkable in doing so much with so little funding; the secret is generous contributions of time and resources from many, many persons. We created a nonprofit organization to pursue several overlapping activities, Urban Innovation Analysis, Inc., whose board members have been unusually wise and helpful, especially Sydney Stein Jr., Ferdinand Kramer, Marshall Holleb, Melvin Mister, Burton Ditkowsky, and Mayor William Morris, who serves as chairman. Lorna Ferguson graciously encouraged FAUI activities from Tokyo to Florence. Rowan Miranda and Richard Balme helped us launch the pooling effort. Mark Grornala closely critiqued all manuscripts. Edward Vytlatcil managed people and data. Pawel Swianiew...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors to the Volume
• Preface
• Bibliography