American Political Culture
American political culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, and attitudes that shape the political behavior and institutions in the United States. It encompasses principles such as individualism, liberty, equality, and democracy, and influences the way Americans view government, citizenship, and civic engagement. This culture has a significant impact on the country's political processes and policies.
7 Key excerpts on "American Political Culture"
eBook - ePubPolitics and Public Policy
Strategic Actors and Policy Domains
- Donald C. Baumer, Carl E. Van Horn(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...Before examining the specific arenas in which public policy is formulated and implemented, we should consider the broader context within which political institutions and policymakers, and those who try to influence them, operate. A DURABLE POLITICAL CULTURE Political culture can be defined as the attitudes and beliefs of citizens about how political institutions and processes ought to work, about fellow citizens and their place in the political process, and about the proper rules of the political game. 1 Several enduring values of the American Political Culture have shaped public policy from the beginning of the republic. Individualism, the right of people to pursue their self-interest and to be responsible for their own well-being, is a fundamental American cultural value. Personal freedom, which is closely linked to individualism, has meant the right to pursue self-improvement and protection from government interference. Along with individualism, the sanctity of contracts and the right to acquire and own property contribute to the free market ideology that prevails in the United States’ political and economic system. 2 Americans also believe in democracy—the right of every citizen to participate in the political process. Support is widespread for equal treatment under the law, political equality, and equality of opportunity. In addition to these core political values, cultural values, such as religious freedom and the centrality of the nuclear family, have significant political implications. It must be noted, however, that in many ways, the United States does not live up to its political ideals, that it is a society with racist and sexist elements. As recently as the 1950s and early 1960s, black Americans did not have equal access to public schools or the voting booth. Even today, although government officials repeatedly express their commitment to breaking down racial barriers, few truly racially integrated communities exist in the United States...
eBook - ePubAmerican Difference
A Guide to American Politics in Comparative Perspective
- Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Michael R. Wolf(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...American individualism also causes its citizens to be more in favor of competition and less likely to support income redistribution than citizens in other democracies. Finally, American ideology is different than other countries’ ideological beliefs. The United States has a much more truncated ideological spectrum compared to other democracies. American Democrats and Republicans are both liberal parties and occupy a much smaller ideological space than parties in other countries. This stems in part because of the very different historical experiences that shaped political debate and ideology in the United States compared to other democracies. Thus, Americans are ideologically further to the right than publics in other democracies, causing Americans to favor economic policies such as private ownership of business and to place greater value on personal responsibility. Points to Remember Political culture is the shared political norms, values, and beliefs of a citizenry about politics. The term political culture refers specifically to attitudes toward the political system and attitudes toward the role of citizens in the system. A participatory political culture requires that people can largely self-govern themselves outside of governmental decision making and in their own interest and implies that citizens understand how to influence government and the outputs of democratic government. Three interrelated characteristics help to define a democratic or civic political culture. First, democracies require citizens who engage their government and demonstrate high levels of political interest. Second, people have to trust one another in social relations or the vacuum in interpersonal relations among citizens makes deciding who gets what, when, and how in self-governance next to impossible...
eBook - ePub- Aaron Wildavsky(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Introduction: Political Cultures with Michael Thompson and Richard Ellis Political culture entered the lexicon of political science in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Intimately linked with the so-called behavioral revolution, the term signalled a move away from the study of formal institutions to the informal behavior which breathed life into them. Political culture was heralded as a concept capable of unifying the discipline. By relating the behavior of individuals to the system of which the individual was a part, it promised to “bridge the ‘micro-macro’ gap in political theory.” 1 In recent decades, however, the concept of political culture has fallen out of academic fashion amidst criticisms that it is tautological, that it is unable to explain change, that it ignores power relations, and that its definition is fuzzy. We have no intention of bombarding the reader with the myriad definitions of political culture that have been tried and discarded only to reappear without agreement among scholars. One study counted no less than 164 definitions of the term culture. 2 Among students of political culture, the most widely accepted definition views culture as composed of values, beliefs, norms and assumptions, that is, mental products. 3 This “mental” definition of culture has the virtue of clearly separating the behavior to be explained from the values and beliefs that are doing the explaining. On the other hand, a definition of culture that separates the mental from the social has the unfortunate tendency of encouraging a view of culture as a mysterious and unexplained prime mover. This disembodied view of political culture leads to it being treated as a residual variable, an explanation of last resort dragged in to fill the void when more conventional explanations fail. A recent study appearing in a preeminent political science journal typifies this usage of culture...
- Howard Wiarda(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Political Culture and Democracy RONALD INGLEHART AND CHRISTIAN WELZEL The political culture school argues that the values, beliefs, and skills of mass publics have an important impact on politics in general and on democratic institutions in particular. A culture is a system of attitudes, values, and knowledge that is widely shared within a society and is transmitted from generation to generation. While human nature is biologically innate and universal, culture is learned and varies from one society to another. These orientations are learned, not genetic, but they are relatively central and enduring so they change slowly, largely through intergenerational population replacement. The literature on political culture and democracy implicitly assumes that a pro-democratic set of attitudes at the individual level is conducive to democratic institutions at the societal level. But is this actually the case? Any statistically significant test of the impact of mass attitudes on democracy would require a large number of countries, but most of the empirical research to date has been carried out in single countries or a small number of countries. An exception is the World Values Surveys/European Values Surveys, which now cover almost seventy societies, providing a sufficient number of cases to carry out statistically significant analyses of the empirical linkages between mass attitudes and a society's actual level of democracy. This chapter analyzes data from these surveys and finds that mass attitudes are correlated with the actual presence or absence of democracy at the societal level, but the effectiveness of given items varies a good deal, and many of them are relatively weak predictors. We also find indications that certain other items—that do not explicitly mention democracy—are very strongly linked with stable democracy in given societies...
eBook - ePubReligion and Politics in America
Faith, Culture, and Strategic Choices
- Allen D. Hertzke, Laura R. Olson, Kevin R. den Dulk, Robert Booth Fowler(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It is one thing to insist that government ought not to support religion through financial support or other resources; it is quite another to argue that private citizens should suppress their religious commitments when they vote, contribute money to political organizations, or advocate for their values or policy views before political leaders. American Political Culture is much more accepting of political activism by religious individuals and groups than it is of government support for religion. 20 Indeed, the enduring openness to religious participation in public life is often cited as one feature of American “exceptionalism” that distinguishes the United States from its closest political cousins in Western Europe. 21 On this score, religion and political culture are mutually supporting. Religious groups in the colonial era and the early Republic realized that it was in their interest to distinguish the separation of church and state from the separation of religion and politics. Many groups believed that keeping government out of religious affairs was a way of protecting their religious liberty—a belief we chronicle much more fully in Chapters 11 and Chapter 12. Yet that same freedom, which complements the Madisonian emphasis on fostering competing interests in a system of checks and balances, gave religious groups an opportunity to take part in the democratic process itself, thereby adding their voices to the pluralism of American politics. As we have seen, many religions have welcomed this opportunity to participate. American Political Culture has not always been open to all manifestations of religious engagement in the world of politics. The history of the United States is replete with examples of religious minorities losing political access when they are perceived as being too far outside the mainstream...
eBook - ePubAgitpop
Political Culture and Communication Theory
- Arthur Asa Berger(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Some American intellectuals draw the line at Jerry Lewis, but I suspect they will come around eventually.) The topic I am investigating here involves the relationship that exists between the four political cultures that we find in complex societies (according to Aaron Wildavsky) and the various kinds of popular culture found in American society. Is it possible to predict which television programs, sports, foods, drinks, and other aspects of popular culture will be favored by each of the political cultures found in America? Before I discuss this subject, let me say something about Wildavsky’s work on political cultures in democratic societies. Wildavsky on Political Cultures in Complex Societies Wildavsky has argued, in a number of books and papers, that there are four basic political cultures found in all complex societies. (See “Conditions for Pluralist Democracy or Pluralism Means More than One Political Culture in a Country,” 1982; and “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation,” undated.) He sets the stage for explaining what the four political cultures are like by discussing cultural theory: The dimensions of cultural theory are based on answers to two questions: “Who am I?” and “How Should I Behave?” The question of identity may be answered by saying that individuals belong to a strong group, a collective, that makes decisions binding on all members or that their ties to others are weak in that their choices bind only themselves. The question of action is answered by responding that the individual is subject to many or few prescriptions, a free spirit or one that is tightly constrained. Thus we find two considerations of utmost importance: whether group boundaries are strong or weak and whether prescriptions are few or many...
eBook - ePubPower, Politics, and Society
An Introduction to Political Sociology
- Betty Dobratz, Lisa Waldner, Timothy Buzzell(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the United States, participation in the work of a political party is a mechanism for exercising influence over policy. Interest-group work and lobbying are other examples of the kinds of efforts that formalized organizations use to create channels of political participation. Interest groups typically activate citizens over single-policy issues. For example, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) keeps its members informed of federal and state legislation changing policies on Social Security (SS), Medicare, or health-care reform. The AARP works with both political parties in the United States to create favorable policy outcomes for persons who approach retirement as defined by law, or to support programs designed to help aging segments of the population. Members are typically encouraged to send letters or contact their representatives in Congress when policies concerning this segment of the population become a concern. One of the more interesting statements of pluralist thinking in the modern era was that offered by Theodore Lowi (1969). He argued that liberalism is a product of advanced wealth in a society, and through history, this pushed democratic societies to develop new forms of citizenship. Traditional capitalism was the seedbed of American civic ideas about political participation: “The United States is a child of the Industrial Revolution. Its godfather is capitalism and its guardian Providence, otherwise known as the ‘invisible hand’” (3). It created a political culture or liberal philosophy that civic life in America was a function of beliefs in individualism, rationality, and nationalism. Thus, early American liberalism accentuated many basic tenets of capitalism. These ideas went hand in hand in defining citizenship. Lowi argues that, in the nineteenth century, the United States was characterized by pure capitalism, a near laissez-faire philosophy about economic activity with little government involvement...
