Cultural Approach

7 Key excerpts on "Cultural Approach"

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  Grand Theories and Ideologies in the Social Sciences

  • H. Wiarda(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Summarizing their conceptual understanding of political culture, Almond and Verba hold that it “refers to the spe- cifically political orientations—attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system. It is a set of orientations toward a special set of social objects and processes [. . .] The political culture of a nation is the particular distribution of patterns of orientation towards political objects among the members of a nation.” 3 It is the very understanding that differ- ences in political cultures are enduring and substantial that lends the concept—in the eyes of its disciples—great leverage in the analysis of political outcomes and makes it a potent explanatory variable. This chapter invites the reader on an informative excursion trip into the exiting world of political culture studies. Following a short explanation of the intellectual roots and conceptual origins of the approach, it will trace the development of the concept, introduce its main spokesmen and traditions, and present the major existing schools of thought. In doing so, it will explore how adherents to the Po l i t i c a l C u lt u re 61 approach define the cultural prerequisites for democracy, what aspects of political culture are regarded as facilitating democratic politics and governmental performance, and what factors form and reform a political culture. It will further outline the major contributions of the political culture literature to the field of comparative politics and contrast these, where appropriate, with other approaches presented in this book. A brief appreciation of the major criticisms leveled against the approach and its methodological limitations will be followed by an overall assessment of the usability of the theory and its prospects as a serious contender as a grand theory in comparative politics.

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  The Political Dynamics of School Choice

  Negotiating Contested Terrain

  • L. Fusarelli(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 CULTURAL DYNAMICS: POLITICAL CULTURE AND LANGUAGE IN POLICYMAKING At its core, policymaking is a relational process situated within a specific, nested context, involving a series of complex interpersonal interactions- some collegial, some confrontational. The nested con- text within which policymaking takes place- the intensely political environment of a state capitol-sets the parameters of policymaking, shaping the contours within which this relational process operates, with important implications for policymaking. Forty years ago, in his seminal, if oft-misused and little understood, The Semi-Sovereign People, E. E. Schattschneider issued a radical statement about the power of agenda-setting when he asserted, "the definition of the alternatives is tl1e supreme instrument of power. " 1 Schattschneider did not argue that the selection of a preferred option was the ultimate test of power, but rather that the proce ss by which certain policy options are considered within the range of acceptable alternatives, while others are not, is the ultimate test of power. Since policymaking is fundamentally an interpersonal, relational process, we begin by examining the cultural context within which policymaki ng takes place. POLITICAL CULTURE Beginning with the pioneering work of Daniel Elazar, political culture is defined as the "political thoughts, attitudes, assumptions, and values of individuals and groups." 2 It is a type of "mind set" that limits the range of policy alternatives considered. 3 In any culture, L. D. Fusarelli, The Political Dynamics of School Choice © Lance D. Fusarelli 2003 16 THE POLITICAL DYNAMICS OF SCHOOL CHOICE most people will "take for granted a particular course of action or con- sider only a few alternatives. " 4 As a result, culture plays a significant role in shaping how problems are defined and solutions adopted.

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  European Political Cultures

  • Roger Eatwell(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22

  The leading contemporary American defender of the Cultural Approach to politics, Ronald Inglehart, has argued that the political culture approach argues (1) that people’s responses to their situations are shaped by subjective orientations, which vary cross-culturally and within sub-cultures; and (2) that these variations in subjective orientations reflect differences in socialisation experience, with early learning conditioning later learning.23 He adds that cultural theory implies that culture cannot be changed overnight, though the young are easier to influence. Indeed, observed cross-cultural differences reflect the experience of generations, even centuries, rather than relatively short-run factors.

  Inglehart’s main work has been based on large-scale opinion poll surveys, including the European Union’s Eurobarometer, and surveys remain a central tool in the Cultural Approach. Kavanagh’s distinction between affective and evaluative support also remains an important part of the political scientists’ armoury. For example, studies of the attempt by the Western Allies after 1945 to remake Germany’s authoritarian political culture were for a long time concerned with the fear that opinion poll evidence showing growing support for democracy was really picking up a feel-good factor which resulted from West Germany’s economic miracle.24 Recent studies of East German attitudes towards reunification have similarly been concerned that the basis of support lay more in instrumental economic expectations than in deep-rooted admiration for the (West) German political system and society. Eurobarometer

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  Comparative Politics

  Principles of Democracy and Democratization

  • John T. Ishiyama(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The idea that political culture involved something much more fundamental than attitudes and orientations about particular political systems was particularly appealing to many European scholars, working at about the same time as Elkins and Simeon. These scholars took a much broader view of political culture, rather than attitudes associated with particular kinds of political systems (as had Almond and Verba and Lijphart). David Robertson (1985, p. 263) defines political culture as “the totality of ideas and attitudes towards authority, discipline, governmental responsibilities and entitlements.” Richard Rose (1980, pp. 116–117) thinks of political culture as sets of “values, beliefs and emotions,” that are “taken for granted” by individuals and essentially “give meaning to politics.” Dennis Kavanagh (1985) thinks of political culture in a similar way, arguing that it “disposes its members to regard certain forms of political behaviour and institutions as ‘normal’ and others as ‘abnormal.’ ” Richard Topf (1989) thinks of political culture as comprised of attitudes and stances that people adopt to make sense of politics. Topf proposes that political attitudes are viewed as “expressions of ‘values,’ or better, of positions in the moral order, constitutive of the political culture.” Stephen Welch (1993, p. 34) provides yet another way to think of political culture, not so much as a set of assumptions, but as a set of “resources.” According to this approach, political culture supplies images, symbols, myths, traditions, which enable people to make sense of their situation or predicament which generates certain needs that influence the selection and interpretation of the available cultural resources. Thus, the original notion that political culture was associated with attitudes about particular political systems has increasingly been replaced with the idea that political culture is a set of attitudes and orientations that help people make sense of politics.

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  Rational Choice Theory

  Potential and Limits

  • Lina Eriksson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Agents use them for common knowledge about types of players, expected actions, for equilibrium selection, for grasping what options are open to them and the likely consequences of choosing a particular option. The list goes on. Fully explicated, it would be no short list, and neither are the items negligible. Theories based on the Cultural Approach can be said to answer the questions that need to be asked before the RC approach can even get going: questions about the viable options, the interests of the parties involved, who the relevant agents are and how they can be expected to behave, and so on. But the Cultural Approach also needs the RC approach Cultural theories are often said to lack a clear micro-level mecha-nism through which the factors they emphasize affect political outcomes via individual actions. What these theories need is an account of how individuals react to and are influenced by these factors and decide to take action on the basis of such influence. This would obviously be an account of how individuals are influenced, but it would also be an account of agency: people are not blindly influenced by or act on any cultural element or identity (some rich aunts actually are murdered). But in many cultural theories agency disappears from the picture completely, and these theories risk portraying agents as mindless vessels for cultural factors (Johnson Culture, identity and symbols 115 2002; Lichbach 2003). Further, the picture of political action tends to lose all connections to political life as such, in favour of never-changing values and norms to which agents are blindly socialized. We thus need a theory that describes how cultural factors affect agents in ways that leave some room for agency. But the relation between the factors the Cultural Approach emphasizes on the one hand and politics on the other is a two-way relation. Such factors affect political outcomes but they also change as a result of politics.

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  Culture and Politics

  A Reader

  • NA NA(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  PART K Concept and Applications Introduction A prominent political culture theorist laments that "the term culture, unfortu- nately, has no precise, settled meaning in the social sciences" (Eckstein 1988, 801). The three readings in this part all offer different definitions of culture, par- ticularly political culture. Yet it is not clear that, overall, the absence of a settled meaning is a problem. The resulting "heuristic openness" (Kaplan 1964) enables researchers to employ different specific meanings in order to explain various specific dependent variables. What is important, as Elkins and Simeon suggest in chapter 2, is this specificity rather than the adoption of one settled definition. Although various theorists conceive of political culture differently, a range of commonly applied conceptions can be delineated. For most researchers culture centers on certain mental orientations or predispositions: peoples' beliefs, values, and affective commitments. Yet various scholars employ these common foci dif- ferently. Some (Eckstein 1988) emphasize culture as a scheme of selective atten- tion and interpretation. Others (Ross, chapter 3 herein) stress the contributions to identity that these mental predispositions provide. While these distinctive ori- entations share a focus on culture as interpretative schemata, the former per- spective often lends itself more easily to incorporation into a social science designed to produce empirical generalizations. Generally, scholars recognize beliefs, values, and affective commitments as predispositions to action. But they differ on the firmness of linkages between mental orientations and action and also as to whether actions resulting from cultural predispositions are appropri- ately included as culture. For instance, Almond (chapter 1, herein) perceives firmer linkages and evinces a greater willingness to count actions as culture than Elkins and Simeon (1979).

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  Foreign Policy Decision-Making (Revisited)

  • R. Snyder, H. Bruck, B. Sapin, Kenneth A. Loparo, Valerie Hudson(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Suffice it to say here, the term "approach" means many things not exduding the purposes and philosophical disposi- tion of various writers. It may be more important to characterize a given au- thor as arealist (again, in a technical philosophical sense) than to identif)r hirn with the power school of thought. It may be as important to know that an author is trying to demonstrate errors in a nation's foreign policy as to know that he employs an assumption of inevitable conflict among states. Fi- nally, "approach" may merely call attention to a focus of interest evident in recent writings, such as the role of ideals versus self-interest in the formation of foreign policy. We wish to make it very dear that what we intend here is no destructive criticism. We do not imply that any scholar's work as a whole or in part, is good or bad or should or should not have been undertaken. It would be un- gracious, improper, and fallacious to make sweeping condemnations of the labors of our colleagues in this field. When we say that we are attempting to "evaluate critically" the existing ways of defining and organizing the study of international politics, we mean that we are interested in trying to identif)r and characterize the various intellectual properties involved. To say that a writer's system is based on single causation does not necessarily mean such a practice is wrong per se or lacks utility, but only that certain analytical con- sequences folIowand that the criteria for judging any frame of reference or Decision-Making as an Approach to the Study 0/ International Politics 45 testing hypotheses should be applied if one wishes to be rigorous. Once again it is necessary to emphasize the range of choice open to the observer- teacher, both with respect to general schemes which encompass the field and to specific research problems.

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