Explaining Politics

Culture, Institutions, and Political Behavior

Oliver Woshinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135901332
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This unique text offers a comprehensive overview of who participates in politics and why, how social and political institutions shape that involvement, and, ultimately, what form citizen political participation takes. Drawing on a multitude of factors to explain politics and political behaviour, Woshinsky shows that political outcomes depend on a complex interplay between individuals and their environment. Psychology, personality, and ideology, together with culture, institutions, and social context shape political behaviour. Explaining Politics offers a wealth of comparative examples and practical applications through a lively and engaging narrative.

Part I
CULTURE AND POLITICS

1
THE IMPACT OF CULTURE

Geography and cultural difference

People behave, from one place to another, in remarkably dissimilar ways. Brazilians bear hug when they meet friends. The French shake hands formally, and the Japanese bow. Transferring the pattern of one culture to another can produce dramatic misunderstandings. Bear hugging a Japanese businessman would hardly improve your chances for a contract. Fail to shake hands with a Frenchwoman each time you meet, and she will see you as a boor and a cad.¹

Anecdotal accounts of human diversity can be fascinating, and they can also make a serious point. It pays to understand the variety of human mores, because every social pattern impinges in some way on politics. Candidates for office in Japan or France do not throw their arms around constituents while campaigning; in Brazil they do. Try it in Japan, or fail to do it in Brazil, and you will get nowhere in your bid for office.

In the same manner, what you eat (far-fetched though it may seem) will influence your political fortune. Imagine a politician in Israel known to dine on roast pig. Or an American politician who admits to loathing hot dogs and apple pie, or a Hindu politician in India caught eating a steak. All three would soon be ex-politicians, having horrified most other members of their culture.

P.J. O’Rourke, the flamboyant American journalist, once described some harrowing (though hilarious) adventures in Lebanon for his bestseller, Holidays in Hell. One day he and his guide roamed the countryside looking for a farmer he was supposed to interview.

“It’s hard to know what your driver is doing when he talks to natives. He’ll pull up somewhere and make a preliminary oration, which draws five or six people to the car window. Then each of them speaks in turn. There will be a period of gesturing, some laughter, much arm clasping and handshaking, and a long speech by the eldest or most prominent bystander.

Then your driver will deliver an impassioned soliloquy. This will be answered at length by each member of the audience and by anyone else who happens by. Another flurry of arm grabbing, shoulder slapping and handshakes follows, then a series of protracted and emotional good-byes.

‘What did you ask them?’ you’ll say to your driver.

‘Do they know of your friend.’

‘What did they tell you?’

‘No.’”²

Cultures vary. People differ radically from each other, depending on where they live and how they have been raised. Despite the old cliché, people are emphatically not “just the same the world over.”

As human behavior varies from place to place, so too does political behavior. The direct American manner of asking questions would get nowhere in a Lebanese village. In like vein, a “straight-talking,” “no-nonsense” American-style politician would fail miserably there in a bid for office. That behavior would be seen as coarse and rude. By the same token, the circuitous and loquacious style of Lebanese interaction would spell career disaster for any American politician dim enough to adopt it.

Political behavior and culture

No human activity occurs in a vacuum. Everything we do takes place within a system of norms and expectations that shape our behavior. Whether we are going to a wedding, shopping, running for office, or yes, eating, we will act in ways dictated by our culture. To understand behavior anywhere, then, we must understand the culture in which that behavior occurs. Likewise, to understand politics anywhere, we must understand the culture within which political acts are embedded.

Let’s return to the George W. Bush we’ve already met in that “alternate universe.” Say that our ambitious friend settles on another tactic for gaining power. He invites his chief political rival and his rival’s leading followers to a magnificent feast. After the meal, supporters of Bush build a huge fire in the back yard. There he proceeds to toss onto the blaze several valuable paintings by Picasso that had been hanging on the walls of his estate. Not to be outdone, Bush’s rival sends his backers out to the driveway, where they unload from his van a large number of expensive Monet paintings. (He “just happens” to have brought these along.) The man and his cronies proceed calmly to toss these works of art onto the same bonfire that had destroyed the Picassos.

Unfazed, Bush simply orders more valuable paintings to be torn from his walls and burned, while his rival urges his supporters to bring in more art from the van for the same purpose. After some hours of this mutual destruction, Bush’s rival runs out of paintings, to the raucous jeers of Bush and his people. The defeated guests slink away, shamefaced, and all the people of the land acknowledge the greatness of their new leader, George W. Bush.

Naturally, seeking public support in this way would appear insane to contemporary Americans. Yet it was standard fare in the rivalries for status and power of traditional Kwakiutl society. The Kwakiutl, a tribe of Native Americans who have lived for centuries in the Pacific Northwest, established hierarchical dominance by public displays of wealth. For them, nothing indicated wealth better than the easy ability to destroy objects of value.

What was the rationale here? Conspicuous destruction implies enormous wealth. A leader thereby shows that the destroyed objects, valuable as they may appear to outsiders, mean little to him because he has so many of them. “I can destroy all these goods,” he is saying, “because I have so many more that even this level of destruction means nothing to me. But if you run out of goods to destroy, then that means that you had much less than I did to begin with. Thus, you rank much lower in status than I do, and your public humiliation testifies to my greatness and superiority.”³

This contest of powerful leaders was known as a “potlatch,” and these ritual ceremonies of material destruction were quite common in Kwakiutl culture. Of course, they didn’t destroy paintings, but they did ruin equivalent works of art. They burnt beautiful blankets, for instance, and broke artistically etched copper engravings.⁴

Naturally, this type of power-seeking behavior, while rational among the Kwakiutl, would bring a political claimant nothing but derision in contemporary Washington. It might lead to an appointment with a psychiatrist, but never to power. Thus, a George Bush of our time and place—that is to say, any American politician in the early twenty-first century—would never behave in this manner.

Socioeconomics and political action

Culture provides the setting within which politics occurs.⁵ And cultures vary enormously from place to place, from era to era. Imagine the following scene. Your neighbors, a poor but hardworking couple with several young children, tell you that they see no sense in keeping their twelve-year-old son in school. Instead, they have pulled him out of classes and sent him to work in the local coal mine. After working 12 hours a day for 6 days a week, the boy brings home enough money to save the family from destitution. These neighbors express nothing but pleasure at this improvement in their fortunes.

Outraged, you report your neighbor to local government officials, only to be told that they can do nothing about the situation. Indeed, they inform you that you are a nosy busybody and should start minding your own affairs. Individuals, they say, are free to sell their labor, or the labor of their dependents, as they see fit. Interfering with “the sanctity of contracts” is neither the business of government officials nor of prying neighbors. Stunned, you slink out of City Hall and ask yourself: “What kind of society am I living in anyway?”

As it turns out, you are not living in contemporary Bangladesh. Nor are you living in Thailand, Nigeria, or Guatemala, all countries where the scenario just sketched might be plausible. You are indeed living in the United States, but through a time-warp accident, it’s not the United States of today—but of 1900. Economic and social conditions were rather different then, and they shaped the politics of that time in ways different from those we recognize today.

In 1900, no society was wealthy enough to fund government for a role that today we take for granted: provider of a social safety net. In our time if a family cannot make ends meet, it can receive a range of government assistance. The USA provides less of a safety net than many modern nations do, but we still have food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, social security, unemployment compensation, and various other programs to help the unfortunate. The nation has become much wealthier since 1900; it is also become more willing to use public funds to aid the less fortunate.

Indeed, governments everywhere have enacted laws to help families make ends meet. Foremost among such measures in the USA are those insuring a minimum level of pay (minimum-wage bills) and reduced rates of taxation for lower-income groups (e.g., the earned-income tax credit). Governments in other industrialized nations use other methods, but they achieve the same results. As a consequence of twentieth-century economic policy-making, few families in wealthy countries today find themselves in such dire straits that they would need to send young children into dangerous and grueling jobs for 50 or more hours a week.

Even very poor families that might want to send their children to work are legally prohibited from doing so. Indeed, they are required to take advantage of one of the major government-benefit programs in modern societies: free education for all. In most developed nations, children are legally obliged to attend school until they are essentially adults (15 or older, depending on the country). Anyone who takes a 12-year-old out of school could be in serious trouble. This was true almost nowhere in 1900.⁶

The troubles of anyone trying to follow the 1900 scenario today do not stop with school authorities. Sending children to work in a coal mine could land parents in jail for child abuse. They might have children taken from them by angry state officials. Anyone who cooperated with the parents and actually put this child to work could be hauled into court for violating child-labor laws.

Furthermore, any attempt to put children into a standard workplace would meet stiff resistance from employed adult workers. They would see this action as a threat to their own livelihoods. Various forms of protest, from lawsuits to full-blown strikes, would promptly ensue. Most significant of all, a cascade of politicians, media figures, and community leaders, once the story became known, would rise up to denounce “this travesty of parental responsibility.”

Living as we do in one of the world’s wealthy, modern societies, we know that forcing children to do dangerous work for long hours during regular school time is unthinkable. Yet, just a few decades ago in all the world’s “wealthy, modern societies,” it was just as unthinkable to do otherwise. Few politicians, government officials, or public figures worried much about this widespread practice.

From these examples, we can conclude that what is legally, morally, and politically unthinkable in one era can be standard and normal in another. Thus, to understand political action (or any human behavior, for that matter), we must place it in its proper historical and cultural context.

Changing class structure/changing perspectives on class

The reason for these different perspectives on child labor is simple. Over the past century, personal wealth in advanced industrial nations has shot up dramatically. Whereas societies in 1900 were too poor to provide assistance to the large number of people who lived in poverty, over 100 years later, many nations are wealthy enough to provide generous assistance to the (now) relatively small number of impoverished citizens.

In addition, attitudes towards the poor have changed. Along with their increasing wealth, citizens in modern societies have come to believe that it is right and proper to help the needy. Indeed, ignoring their plight would be considered shocking. To illustrate, the Pew Research Center found in March, 2007, that 69 percent of Americans believed that “it is the responsibility of government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.” These attitudes are consistent and long term. They reflect similar findings from similar polls by the same organization over the previous two decades. More striking, over half of respondents agreed that “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt.”⁷

Given the different political climate, politicians who might have been silent in 1900 would today react with outrage at the discovery of a factory operating under nineteenth-century working conditions. Politicians, like the rest of us, pay attention to social expectations. Like the rest of us, they do not wish to commit professional suicide. They pass the laws expected of them in their time, and they avoid passing the laws that are seen by contemporaries as outrageous.

Changing times … changing popular political ideas

This discussion leads to another important conclusion: Political ideas reflect the conditions of the age. No one was touting the virtues of democracy in Henry VIII’s time. No one today hails the benefits of an absolute monarch. Political ideas go hand in hand with the social and economic conditions of the time.

In an age when poverty was near-universal, society—acting collectively through government—could do little to alleviate that condition. Thus, no one advocated government safety-net programs. Instead, citizens and politicians alike developed ideas to justify and rationalize the then current (and seemingly inevitable) government policy of non-intervention in citizens’ lives. Societies in the past just were not rich enough to help the huge number of people living in poverty. In 1900, for instance, wealth per capita in the USA (technically, GDP per capita in constant 2000 dollars) came to US$4,943. In 2000, that figure was US$34,788, a seven-fold increase in wealth.⁸ It is clearly easier to consider helping others when you are seven times richer than you once were.

Political philosophies of an earlier day helped better-off citizens justify a harsh reality: no one, including government, could provide a decent life for most people. A popular belief known as Social Darwinism held sway for decades, starting in the late nineteenth century. It stressed “survival of the fittest,” suggesting that those who do well in any society earn their position through superior talent and effort. These people should reap great benefits, the argument went. To discourage these achievers and encourage non-productive “slackers” would be to elevate the weak and incompetent to positions of power and status at the expense of the robust and effective. That would undermine national vitality and lead to “social decadence.” Naturally, such beliefs helped those who already enjoyed money and power justify their situation. It furth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction: personality and environment
• PART I Culture and politics
• PART II Individuals in politics
• PART III Institutions and systems in politics
• Notes
• Glossary