Carole Pateman

Democracy, Feminism, Welfare

Terrell Carver, Samuel Chambers, Samuel A. Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415781121
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136683206
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Carole Pateman's writings have been innovatory precisely for their qualities of engagement, pursued at the height of intellectual rigour. This book draws from her vast output of articles, chapters, books and speeches to provide a thematic yet integrated account of her innovations in political theory and contributions to the politics of policy-making. The editors have focused on work in three key areas:

Democracy

Pateman's perspective is rooted in a practical perspective, enquiring into and speculating about forms of participation over and above the 'traditional' exclusions through which representative systems have been variously constructed over time. Her work pushes hard on theorists and politicians who make easy assumptions about apathy and public opinion, who bracket off the workplace and the home, and who see politics only in partisan activity, voter behaviour and governmental policy.

Women

Pateman's innovatory and still-cited work on participation antedates the feminist revolution in political theory and many of the practical struggles that developed through the later 1970s. While woman-centred, her concerns were always worked through larger conceptions of social class, economic advantage, power differentials, 'liberal' individualism and contracts including marriage. Her feminism was innovative in political theory, and within feminism itself. As a feminist Pateman defies categorization, and her concepts of 'the sexual contract' and 'Wollstonecraft's dilemma' are canonical.

Welfare

Pateman's innovation here is an integration of welfare issues – in particular the proposals for a 'basic income' or for a 'capital stake' – into her broad but always rigorous conception of democracy. This is argued through in terms of citizenship, taken as the result of a social contract. In that way Pateman puts liberalism itself through an imminent critique, drawing in the practicalities and risks of life in late capitalist societies. Her theory as always is political, taking in neo-liberal attacks on 'welfare states' and the stark realities of international inequalities. Pateman's career achievements in democratic and feminist theory are brought productively to bear on debates that would otherwise occur in more limited, and less provocative, academic and political contexts.

PART I

Democracy and
political theory

1

POLITICAL CULTURE, POLITICAL STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL CHANGE (1971)

In The Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’ (1965: 33). I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with which The Civic Culture itself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’ (1965: 207).

The major claim made for the usefulness of the concept of political culture is, in the words of The Civic Culture, that it provides ‘the connecting link between micro and macropolitics’ (1965: 32). Similarly, Pye states that ‘it is the problem of aggregation – which involves the adding up of the discoveries of individual psychology in such a manner as to make community-wide behaviour understandable in the light of individual actions –…for which the concept of political culture holds such great promise’ (1965: 9). In discussions of political participation, the use of the concept of political culture has not fulfilled this promise. Attention has remained almost entirely focused at the level of individual psychology. Furthermore, that political participation does pose a problem of ‘community-wide behaviour’ has hardly been recognized.

The problem is that of the social pattern of political participation, and the social distribution of a low, and high sense, of political efficacy. Empirical studies show that aspects of our own political culture, such as a low sense of political efficacy, that are related to low rates of political participation, tend to be concentrated (like apathy itself) among individuals from a low SES background.¹ A relatively random distribution of different levels of the sense of efficacy would be unremarkable but the existing pattern, on the face of it, does call for some attempt to be made at an explanation. Yet in most recent work on democracy and participation no such attempt is made; in fact it is argued that the existing pattern of political participation and apathy must be taken as the starting point for discussions of democracy. It is claimed that if we are to talk realistically about democracy then we must accept that the ordinary citizen is unlikely to become more interested or active in political affairs than he is at present.²

To argue that we must take the existing social pattern of political participation as unchangeable or given is to say that we must take the existing political culture, or at least part of it, as given, and this leads to a one-sided view of the relationship between political culture and political structure. In his article on ‘Political Culture’ in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968), Pye states that ‘if the concept of political culture is to be effectively utilized, it needs to be supplemented with structural analysis, but the difficulty is that political structures can be seen on the one hand as products reflecting the political culture, while on the other hand they are also “givens” which shape the political culture’. It is this second aspect of the relationship that has been neglected in recent discussions. Attention has been focused on the way in which the political structure reflects the existing political culture as, for instance, in the various, and now familiar, discussions of the contribution to the maintenance of a stable democratic structure made by those aspects of our own political culture related to political apathy and disinterest. If it is assumed that the social pattern of political participation, and the culture that underlies this pattern, cannot be significantly changed, then there is no point in looking at the neglected side of the political culture/structure relationship; the features of the culture in question have already been assumed to be incapable of being ‘shaped’ in a more participatory direction.

Several factors have contributed to this conclusion about the pattern of Anglo-American political participation and political culture, including the tendency for researchers into political socialization to concentrate on childhood socialization and an implicit evaluative assumption, in many discussions, about the way in which the existing system does work. Both these aspects will be discussed later. Also important is a lack of clarity in the use of the concept of political culture itself. The multi-dimensional nature of the concept is often obscured because attention is focused on one of its components, the psychological, at the expense of another element that would raise the question of the significance of the neglected side of the political culture/structure relationship.

The concept of political culture is used to cover an extremely wide range of political phenomena.³ However, it is typically summed up along the lines suggested by Dawson and Prewitt (1969): ‘Political culture, conceptualized roughly, is the pattern of distribution of orientations members of a political community have towards politics’ (1969: 27). These writers do not define ‘orientations’ but it is clear that they are using it to cover all the ways in which the individual can regard politics, that is to refer to ‘all the perceptions (cognitions, knowledge), affects (feelings and attitudes), and evaluations (values and norms) through which a person relates himself to social objects’ (Easton and Dennis 1969: 5). An investigation of a political culture, therefore, will include the three sides of the individual citizen’s relationship to politics: his value perspective; any relevant personality or psychological factors; and cognitive aspects, i.e. his knowledge and beliefs about his own political structure and the way it operates. Thus if all three aspects of a political culture were considered the neglected side of the relationship between political culture and political structure could not be avoided. The cognitive element contains a built-in reference to the impact of political structure on political culture.

One reason that this connection is often overlooked is that the term ‘orientations’ is also used more narrowly to refer to the psychological aspect of the political culture. This is how, following Parsons, it is used in The Civic Culture (although, notwithstanding their definitions, Almond and Verba attempt to stretch the term to cover all three aspects). It is worth looking more closely at the definitions in The Civic Culture and, briefly, at what Parsons has to say about culture because the Parsonian framework remains focused at the micro level and has nothing to say about the problem of the relationship between culture and structure; indeed, it eliminates any such problem.

Gabriel Almond is usually credited with introducing the notion of political culture to the study of politics in his essay on Comparative Political Systems, published in 1956, and most recent discussions refer one back to that source. In that essay Almond says that Parsons has provided the basis for his approach and he defines political culture as ‘patterns of orientation to political action’, and orientations as ‘attitudes towards politics’ (Almond 1956: 396). In The Civic Culture Almond and Verba state that they are using the concept of culture in the sense of ‘psychological orientation toward social objects’ (my emphasis) and that orientation ‘refers to the internalized aspects of objects and relationships’; political culture then refers to ‘the political system as internalized in the cognitions, feelings, and evaluations of its population’ (Almond and Verba 1965: 13–14).⁴ However, they do not make clear why orientations should be defined as ‘psychological’ and ‘internalized’ when part of what is covered by the notion is cognitive factors, i.e. beliefs and knowledge about the political system. What does ‘internalized’ mean in such a context? It becomes clear a few pages later, during Almond and Verba’s discussion of their typology of political cultures, the parochial, the subject, and the participant, that essentially all that is meant by ‘internalized’ is that the individual ‘understands’ or is ‘aware’ that he is a member of a political system with a central political authority, and that he has some knowledge of, and feelings about, that authority. It is this that is lacking in the parochial political culture (Almond and Verba 1965: 16ff).

These muddles in the Almond and Verba definition of political culture illustrate some of the difficulties of attempting to use Parsons’ conceptual framework to talk about political culture; difficulties that do not generally seem to be appreciated by the writers who so frequently refer to him and so, presumably, regard his work as helpful. Parsons has a good deal to say about culture and socialization but it is odd that his work is rarely discussed in writings about political culture.⁵ Orientation is an extremely important concept in Parsons’ theory and he says that it is ‘a structural concept and designates a relatively stable aspect of a system’ (Parsons 1961: 337). Action has an orientation ‘when it is guided by the meaning which the actor attaches to it’ (Parsons and Shills 1951: 4). The orientation of the actor ‘concerns the “how” of his relation to the object world, the patterns or ways in which his relations to it are organized’ (Parsons 1951: 7). How does the actor obtain, or come to have, the orientation that he has? The answer that Parsons gives to this question is that it is a result of socialization, of the internalization of culture; more specifically, of normative culture because it is, says Parsons, ‘inherent in an action system that action is…“normatively oriented”’ (1951: 36).

Culture, or the cultural system, of which political culture is a sub-system, plays a crucial role in the Parsonian framework; it is from culture that the ‘order’ in the system derives. The cultural system is concerned with ‘patterns of meaning’ (Parsons, Shills, Naegele and Pitts 1961: 34) and it is not precisely analogous to the social or personality systems in that it has, as it were, a dual status. Parsons says that cultural patterns can be both ‘an object of orientation’ and an ‘element in the orientation of action’ and can be ‘transferred’ from being an object to become an element in orientation (Parsons and Shills 1951: 6–7, 67). This transference can be illustrated by the dyadic model. If a stable pattern of interaction is to be maintained between ego and alter then they must have mutual (normative) expectations about each other’s behaviour and their situation must have a common normative meaning or definition for them both. That is to say, the expectations, the culture or patterns of meaning, must not be merely ‘an object of orientation’ for ego and alter but they must both have internalized it to become ‘an element in the orientation of action’, part of their motivation, their psychologies. ‘What was once an object becomes a constitutive part of the actor…it is part of his personality’ (Parsons and Shills 1951: 8). Thus the concept of orientation in Parsons’ theory is essentially psychological, and Black, in his well-known critique of Parsons, paraphrases orientations as ‘acquired predispositions to respond in certain ways to given stimuli’ (Black 1961: 272).

Parsons stresses that although the social and cultural systems are analytically distinct they are also, and this is a central feature of systems of action, ‘interpenetrating’ (Parsons et al. 1961: 990). This interpenetration has just been described: it is the internalization (in the personality system) of normative culture that gives rise to and ‘controls’, or institutionalizes, stable patterns of interaction – or social structures. Parsons places great emphasis on the fact that ‘a fundamental proposition about the structure of action systems [is]…that their structure as treated within the frame of reference of action consists in institutionalized patterns of normative culture’ (Parsons et al. 1961: 36; Parsons’ emphasis). Thus if the notions of orientation and internalization are used in their Parsonian sense, there is no question of a problematical relationship between culture and structure; culture, in one of its aspects, is structure.

If the Parsonian framework is to be used to discuss political culture and structure, the political structure has therefore to be seen as a structure of shared political values (or shared, internalized, normative culture) that defines their political situation, and underwrites the collective (political) goals, for the members of the polity.

Political power can then be seen in consensual terms as a ‘generalized capacity’ for achieving these collective goals through the exercise of decision making by the occupants of leadership (authority) positions (Parsons 1967). Since Almond and Verba wish to ‘avoid the assumption of congruence between political culture and political structure’ (Almond and Verba 1965: 32–33) their references to Parsons and their definitions of ‘orientations’ and ‘political culture’ are particularly mislead-ing; their approach presupposes that a viewpoint other than the Parsonian one is taken. That is, that the individual’s political behaviour is seen as deriving from more than the internalization of (shared) values and norms, from more than psychological factors. One aspect which must be considered is the influence of the impact upon the individual of the political structure itself, a political structure seen in terms of a structure of power and authority that is, at least sometimes, exercised non-consensually and which places an external constraint on the individual and influences his behaviour and attitudes, i.e. which helps ‘shape’ the political culture.

Almond and Verba also differ from Parsons over the relative importance for political behaviour of childhood and adult socialization. Although Parsons states that learning continues throughout life much of his attention has been focused on childhood socialization within the family, and he argues that the major value orientation patterns, including presumably the political orientations, are laid down in childhood. These form the core of the basic structure of personality and ‘are not on a large scale subject to drastic alteration during adult life’ (Parsons 1951: 203, 208). Adult ego and alter have, so to speak, the process of internalization largely behind them.

This aspect of the Parsonian framework has important consequences for questions of political change. For Parsons all questions about political structure boil down to questions about individual psychology, or at least to questions about the childhood socialization process through which internalization occurs. The only problematical element is internalization; a change in political structure is a change in the socialization process, a change in individual psychology. Parsons states that ‘institutionalization is embedded in the non-rational layers of motivational organization. It is not accessible to change simply through the presentation to an actor of rational advantages in the external definition of the situation’ (Parsons et al. 1961: 74–75). In the political sphere any citizens with ‘non-consensual’ attitudes are regarded as cases of faulty or incomplete internalization. Parsons says that ‘the primary function of superior authority is clearly to define the situation for the lower echelons of the collectivity. The problem of overcoming opposition in the form of dispositions to noncompliance then arises from the incomplete institutionalization of the power of the higher authority holder’ (my emphasis) (Parsons 1967: 318). Again, as Giddens has pointed out, when Parsons talks of ‘power deflation’, i.e. a progressive loss of confidence in political leaders, he ‘conceives the process as basically a psychological one’ (Giddens 1968: 266).

Most recent writers on political socialization, like Parsons, state that socialization is a process continuing throughout life, but the tendency has been for the emphasis to be placed on the earlier years. Dawson and Prewitt, for example, state that

‘new orientations are acquired, but in most instances they occur within bounds established by the deep and persistent orientations acquired during childhood’ and they suggest that the adult is unlikely to alter the more ‘basic’ orientations such as ‘his conception of the legitimate means of selecting political rulers, or broad ideological goals’ (Dawson and Prewitt 1969: 56). The important point is that an interpretation of adult political behaviour basically in terms of childhood socialization (irrespective of definitions of orientation or political culture) will be a largely psychological interpretation. Moreover, since patterns of childhood socialization are not easy to influence, this approach tends to support t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: Doing politics with theory: the writings of Carole Pateman (T. Carver and S.A. Chambers)
• Part I: Democracy and political theory
• Part II: Women in political theory
• Part III: Political theory of welfare
• Index