European Political Cultures

Roger Eatwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415138673
• eBook ISBN: 9781134772902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comparative study of the political cultures of the major european nations, explores the notion of nationhood as it applies in different political contexts.

1 Introduction

The importance of the political culture approach

Roger Eatwell

INTRODUCTION

Belief in the importance of studying the values which underpin politics can be traced back in time through a variety of major writers, including de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century (who clearly perceived the importance of individualism and the frontier spirit in American politics), and Aristotle and Plato in Ancient Greece (who wrote about a state of mind which encouraged stability or revolution, and the importance of socialisation in forming adults). It is also interesting to note that the Greeks attributed notably different characteristics to Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians – as well as to the barbarian ‘Other’ (who encompassed peoples to the north and west, as well as the east).

However, the actual term ‘political culture’ was coined in the 1950s by Gabriel Almond, an American political scientist, who argued that ‘Every political system is embedded in a particular pattern of orientations to political action’.¹ Together with fellow academic, Sidney Verba, Almond went on in the early 1960s to publish a pioneering five-state (Britain, Italy, Mexico, USA, West Germany) study of such political cultures entitled The Civic Culture, which was based on opinion polls of some 1,000 respondents in each country during 1959.² Behind Almond and Verba’s resulting collections of percentages was the theory that a stable democracy required a specific set of attitudes, based on a complex balance of ‘subject’ and ‘participant’ cultures, and needed high levels of system support and social trust fostered by overlapping memberships of different groups. Their data indicated that Britain and the USA were the paradigmatic ‘civic cultures’. Among the other social scientists who contributed notable early work in this area was Seymour Martin Lipset, who argued that long-enduring democracies were disproportionately found in the wealthier and more Protestant nations.³

The main impetus behind this work was fourfold. First, there was a growing academic reaction to the study of constitutions and institutions – a reflection of the belief that such approaches missed important aspects of political systems (there was a partly parallel reaction in history to ‘high politics’, resulting in a growth of social history). Second, there was the development of behaviourist social science techniques. Arguably the most important of these was ‘scientific’ opinion polling, which had grown up rapidly in the USA during the late 1930s and 1940s. Third, there was a reawakening of interest in the work of some of the classic figures in European sociology, notably Durkheim and Weber, with their emphasis on the crucial role of norms and traditions – for example, the family and religion – in political development. This was partly linked to a fourth factor, namely a widespread concern about why some democratic systems, like Weimar Germany, had collapsed. Linked to this was the fear that Soviet totalitarianism rather than the American liberal democratic-capitalist system was the force of the future (though some, especially in Europe, optimistically envisaged a Third Way’, often epitomised by welfare-democratic Scandinavia).⁴

Almond and Verba were followed by a plethora of (mainly Anglo-American) students employing the term, though not always the same techniques. Some focused on elite interviews; others borrowed from the methodologies of psychology and anthropology, for example using less structured interviews or participant observation. The number of countries studied grew dramatically too. Communist systems witnessed a particularly notable flowering of political culture studies: although in part a result of the increasing academic professionalisation of Soviet studies, this trend reflected the belief that political culture gave important insights into why communist systems arose and especially into the success and failure of the attempt to create a new communist (wo)man. Political culture appeared to have become a major tool in the armoury of social science, probing beyond the façade of formal politics. More generally, the term was borrowed especially by historians, area studies specialists and journalists – though in the process it often became little, if anything, more than a synonym for stereotypes of ‘national character’ (at worst, a comedy in which Heaven was filled with British policemen, French cooks, German organisers and Italian lovers, whilst Hell was populated by British cooks, French policemen, German lovers and Italian organisers).⁵

THE ATTACK ON POLITICAL CULTURE

But it was not long before a major attack was mounted against the political culture ‘school’. One common charge was that the approach had become increasingly debased and confused. Certainly it was a term that was often undefined, and even among those who sought to flesh out the concept there were notably different emphases: for instance, some saw political culture as essentially referring to the values of individuals, whereas others wanted to talk in more group-oriented or institutional terms, and yet others used the term to refer to almost everything (from summaries of national histories to highly specialised studies, such as specific aspects of cinematic culture).⁶ other criticisms fell within three broad (though not necessarily inconsistent) approaches.⁷

The first line of attack pointed to hidden assumptions. It was argued, especially by critics on the left, that Almond and Verba were celebrating ‘actually existing’ Anglo-American democracy, in particular its relatively low levels of participation and deference towards authority. A related line of attack was the relationship between Almond and Verba’s view of an ‘advanced’ political culture and ethnocentric modernisation theory: there seemed to be a clear assumption that all systems should develop along relatively homogenous paths towards some form of largely capitalist economic system and largely non-ideological liberal democratic polity.⁸ Partly because of this, Almond and Verba and most of their followers tended not to be interested in sub-cultures, such as radical class-based or ethnic ones, implicitly seeing these as ‘un-modern’ – although there were a handful of notable studies of sub-cultures, such as Edward Banfield’s work on ‘amoral familism’ in southern Italy.⁹ They also missed the fact that other forms of stable democracy seemed possible, notably ‘consociational’ ones based on ‘elite accommodation’ in ‘pillared’ societies like Belgium or the Netherlands.¹⁰

The second broad form of attack related to more specific methodological issues. Some pointed to the problems of using opinion polls, especially for probing complex attitudes. Such problems were compounded, when transnational comparisons were being made, by difficulties in translating both words and concepts. Ask Germans whether they are ‘racist’ and few will say ‘yes’, as this has been a taboo word since the Nazi era; predictably, these connotations are much weaker in, say, France (though even here there may be some reluctance to admit to what could be seen as an ‘illegitimate’ view). Behaviourist approaches often have a ‘scientific’ air, but what are commonly seen as central aspects of the scientific method – namely verification and prediction – pose serious problems for political culture approaches. In spite of their frequently quantitative façade (only 3 per cent of Italians admired their political system, and so on), there is an important sense in which such studies are qualitative. Almond and Verba, for example, never made it clear exactly what balance of factors made up a ‘civic culture’. And their work certainly did not anticipate the troubles which American and British cultures were to experience during and after the 1960s: for instance, the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalism, and more general decline in system support. Part of the problem here was the difficulty of operationalising some of the central concepts: thus deference has typically been seen as central to British values. But exactly how is deference defined and measured? And what are its causal implications? For example, no matter how defined, some ‘deferentials’ seem to have voted Conservative whereas others have voted Labour.¹¹

A third attack on political culture related more to the causality and primacy implied. Many on the left argued that it was vital to ask how attitudes were formed in the first place, or to stress how powerless individuals were – and not just in dictatorial states like Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal. The focus here was usually on the ‘dominant’ structure of capitalism (though some left-wing approaches, especially the Gramsciite emphasis on the socialising power of ‘hegemonic’ values, were not totally inconsistent with political culture approaches). More commonly, political culture approaches were accused of having problems explaining the causal process by which change took place: the emphasis on the power of socialisation and tradition seemed more suited to explain continuity. Others pointed to the relationship between the civic culture and stable democratic government. For Almond and Verba, the causality ran from the former to the latter. But it could be argued that it was more sensible to conclude that a civic culture was the product of an extended period of stable and good government and the specific nature of its structures. In Britain, for example, this would point to the need to bring back onto centre stage the state and elites, an argument put forcefully by the growing school of the ‘new institutionalists’ who sought to redress the 1950s and 1960s behaviourist fashion. This ability to reverse the causality plausibly was for many the ultimate proof of the flabbiness of the ‘sociological’ method, and played a part in the rise of the ‘harder’ ‘economic’ method encapsulated in rational choice theory, which during the 1970s increasingly came to dominate American political science.¹²

Unquestionably there are problems relating to political culture studies. Moreover, the ‘new institutionalism’ (somewhat misleadingly named as it never really went away, especially among European academics) and rational choice theory have brought many insights. The former, for example, has been used to offer an institutional (broadly defined to include ‘less formal organisational networks’) explanation of historical continuities and cross-national variations in policy.¹³ The latter has taught us, for example, not to study bureaucracy simply in terms of values such as those epitomised by the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, namely technocracy, efficiency and the public interest. It is also necessary to think in terms of bureaucracy’s tendency to maximise budgets and empires. This questioning of the public interest function, and implicitly of collectivist ideologies which claim to be motivated by the public good, has unquestionably since the 1960s been a major factor in the intellectual underpinning of the New Right.¹⁴ But the methodological pendulum has swung too far, especially towards the fashionable rational choice theory. Or it might be more accurate to say rational choice theories in the plural, for it is useful to distinguish between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ theories.

Thin’ approaches are those most influenced by economic theory. They make few assumptions other than that individual actors calculate expected consequences, choose the best actions for their self-interest (subject to information and opportunity costs), and that their behaviour is essentially the same in both the economic and political worlds. Supporters of such approaches describe them as ‘elegant’ and ‘parsimonious’. Critics see their rigid logic as making them of limited value – even of being downright wrong in most cases. Take, for example, the belief that voting behaviour is determined by an attempt to maximise individual economic gain. Certainly there has been a growth of such behaviour in Western democracies in recent years. But does this explain support for parties like the German Greens, whose radical wing seeks zero or negative economic growth? Or does it explain the longevity of many socialist parties, like the Austrian Social Democrats, whose support now seems to be determined partly by habit (‘cognitive dissonance’ in the terminology of psychologists) rather than old class-community norms? And what about Britain in the 1990s, where there is evidence that some voters who are economically optimistic for themselves still vote against government in regions which are economically troubled. It is possible to some extent to resolve these queries: for instance, Green voters have often been portrayed as archetypally non-productive middle-class professionals, who might think that they have little or nothing to lose economically by radical change. But in general, it seems more sensible to conclude that people’s motives and influences are varied, and even in capitalist Western society many people still think in community as much as individual terms.¹⁵

The view that politics is essentially founded on groups has been a major target of rational choice theorists.¹⁶ The role of groups was at the heart of classical sociology: for Marx class was central and based on the mode of production; Mosca held that there was almost a primordial desire to belong to ‘herds’; in the 1940s and 1950s Talcott Parsons argued that new group formation and kinship were necessarily rooted in the process of modernisation, which destroyed old communities. Against this, rational choice theorists like Mancur Olson held that individuals require some separate and selective incentive to act in a group-oriented way. Here the approach seems on especially weak ground except where economic interests are most clear cut (for instance, an Olson-type approach could explain the relative strengths of consumer and producer groups and their role in different countries’ protection policies). Whilst some group behaviour may exhibit such characteristics (note especially the ‘free rider’ problem), it seems more vital to ask how people come to adopt the different identities which underlie groups, and how norms and trust are developed. Rather than assume that behaviour is essentially individually rational, it seems more important in this context to look to the bases of trust, and here ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the importance of the political culture approach
• 2 Austria and Switzerland
• 3 Belgium and the Netherlands
• 4 Britain
• 5 France
• 6 Germany
• 7 Greece
• 8 Ireland
• 9 Italy
• 10 Poland
• 11 Portugal and Spain
• 12 Russia
• 13 Scandinavia
• 14 Conclusion: part one – Europe of the ‘nation-states’? Concepts and theories
• 15 Conclusion: part two – Reflections on nationalism and the future of Europe
• Index