Awareness of this was made explicit in classic Greek times by Aristotle and during the Enlightenment by Charles de Montesquieu. They argued that different forms of government reflect the kind of virtues that prevail among a people. Awareness of this insight reemerged in explanations of the Nazi takeover in Weimar Germany. Many observers concluded that the causes of this disaster could be summed up in Bracher’s phrase that Weimar was a “democracy without democrats.” The essence of this phrase is that the fate of political systems depends vitally on people’s posture to it, which is probably the most basic premise of the political culture school and certainly one of the most fundamental justifications of survey research in political attitudes and value orientations. Starting from this premise, Almond and Verba (1963) launched the first comparative empirical survey of the mass attitudes that are presumably linked with the stability and functioning of democracies. They concluded that a healthy mixture of “subject orientations” and “participant orientations” was conducive to a “civic culture” that helps democracies to flourish. Under the influence of the student revolt in the late 1960s, a series of comparative survey studies followed, maintaining the existence of strong linkages between mass tendencies in particular individual-level attitudes and value orientations and democratic institutions at the system-level. The emergence of new democracies in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Central Eastern Europe caused another avalanche of studies into political culture. Usually, these studies conclude that mass tendencies in certain individual-level attitudes and value orientations are helpful in consolidating democracy at the system-level. Almost all studies in the political culture tradition claim in one or the other way that mass tendencies in individual-level attitudes and value orientations are important for the functioning of democracy at the system-level. One can reasonably conclude that this is the basic creed of the political culture school. Surprisingly only a small number of political culture studies have actually tested it. Most political culture studies simply maintain that certain individual-level attitudes are important for democracy at the system-level, only to use this claim as a justification to analyze these attitudes at the individual-level. It is almost standard in survey data analyses that scholars justify individual-level analyses of attitudes based on assumptions about the system-level effects of these attitudes—without testing the system-level effects. Using “support for democracy” as a placeholder for other presumably pro- democratic attitudes, the argument usually goes as follows (example): “Support for democracy is an attitude that is important for democracy because ... [here one can insert a number of reasons from the respective literature]. Because of its relevance to democracy, it is important to know what determines support for democracy at the individual-level. isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic96263.files/culture_democracy.pdf
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 17:31:53 +0000
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