Plamen Akaliyski

European Journal of Political Culture

ISSN 2784 - 0271 ISSN – L 2784 – 0271

Volume 1, Issue No.1 (March 2021), pp.23-27

Published: 30 March 2021

Political Culture Research:

Current Ontological and Epistemological Debates

Plamen Akaliyski

Graduate School of System Design and Management

Keio University

Japan

Laboratory for Comparative Social Research

Higher School of Economics

Russia.

plamen.akaliyski@keio.jp

In The Civic Culture, the founding piece of the scientific field in question, Almond and Verba (1963) defined the term “political culture” “as the particular distribution of patterns of orientation towards political objects among the members of a nation” (p. 13). Since the publication of this seminal work, political culture research has undergone a tremendous evolution and experienced a renaissance of relevance in recent decades, as evidenced by titles such as The Civic Culture Transformed (Dalton & Welzel, 2015). While being enriched by a wealth of available survey data and methodological innovations, many key debates surrounding political culture have increased their salience.

To begin with, how do we know it even exists? Political culture is perceived as a latent construct, an amalgamation of attitudes, values, and sentiments, providing structure and meaning to the political life in a given society (Pye, 1965). Political culture is not a tangible matter that can be directly observed. Its existence can only be inferred by measuring it indirectly, most commonly through public opinion surveys, and validated by its predictive properties. Many authors question its utility, and thus presumably its existence, by arguing that political culture has no relationship to political institutions, for example that democratic governance is compatible with non-democratic political culture (Hadenius & Teorell, 2005; Dahlum & Knutsen, 2017). Others, like Inglehart and Welzel (2005) demonstrate that political culture can be validated by powerful external linkages, for instance as a predictor of democracy or as an outcome of socio-economic modernization. Most recently, Welzel (2020) also demonstrates that regime changes are predicted by a misalignment between political culture and the regime type, although the adjustment does not follow instantaneously.

Second, is political culture a property of individuals or of societies? Political culture is conventionally measured at the individual level and many argue that this is the appropriate level at which it should be analyzed (Sokolov, 2018). Other authors claim that culture is inherently a societal level construct, defined as the central cultural tendency in a nation, and therefore aggregates of individual responses serve as indicators of the societal-level political culture (Welzel et al. 2021). Recent developments of societal value polarization and increased support for populism in Western democracies (Norris & Inglehart, 2019) may challenge this conception of political culture as a coherent collective entity, although polarization itself may be also an inherently collective attribute that can only be measured in the aggregate, by looking at the distributional features of individual-level attitudes.

There is a more technical, and yet highly substantive, aspect to this debate. Przeworski and Teune's (1970) The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry left the field with a deep-seated suspicion against group- or country-aggregated attitudes of individuals, fearing some sort of “aggregation bias” that produces artificial numbers inherently alien to the individuals from which they are calculated. But this position is diametrically opposite to Page and Shapiro’s (1992) concept of the “miracle of aggregation.” The logic of the latter authors is that many individuals in opinion polls are uninformed or otherwise unsophisticated in cognitive terms. Hence, a large chunk of the individual responses one receives are random rather than real—what Converse (1964) famously coined “non-attitudes.” Indeed, as Alwin (2007) shows, as much as fifty percent and more of the individual-level variation in survey responses is simply random measurement error. Still, this evidence is not to suggest that survey data are useless in measuring political culture. Some authors maintain that through the process of aggregation (like calculating the country mean in a given attitude), deviations downward and upward from the mean that are random cancel each other out, thus “purifying” a group’s or country’s true central tendency from the random noise at the individual-level. Therefore, Welzel et al.'s (2021) position, for example, is that precisely because of the miracle of aggregation, correlation patterns, dimensional structures and predictive powers surface way more strongly in the aggregate than at the individual level.

Relatedly, methodological debates have emerged on the alleged measurement deficiency of widely used political culture constructs, such as Welzel’s emancipative values. These critiques point out to measurement inequivalence of the construct among individuals from different culture zones (Alemán & Woods 2016; Sokolov 2018). In defense, Welzel and Inglehart (2016) and Welzel et al. (2021) argue that the correct level for analyzing culture is that of society and that the construct validity is verified by their strong external linkages, that is, by being able to predict or being predicted by nomologically related outcomes. An additional element of the same debate is whether political culture dimensions are and whether they should be constructed using a “formative” (index formation) or a “reflective” (latent variable) approach. Although this debate comes over as rather technical in nature, it actually has more deep-layered substantive implications:

• Should we always measure attitudes in the way they cohere in the respondents’ mindsets (which is the “reflective” position preferred by psychologists)?

• Or should we measure attitudes in terms of how they map on a pre-defined construct, of which theoretical reasons suggest that it is consequential (which is the “formative” position preferred by sociologists)?

Perhaps, political culture scholars need to understand the underlying logic of the two positions and accept that both are legitimate for their own purposes and that one should not evaluate one position against the criteria of the other.

Another unsettled question is about the dimensionality of political culture. The literature has been enriched by various frameworks for measuring it, but the overlap between them is incomplete. While Almond and Verba suggested three ideal types of culture, namely parochial, subject, and participant, subsequent operationalizations have used a dimensionality approach, albeit coming up with a different number of dimensions. Inglehart's (1997) initial theory included only one dimension, materialism vs. post-materialism, which in his later work became a component of survival vs. self-expression values, complemented by an additional dimension called traditional vs. secular-rational values (Inglehart & Baker, 2000). These two dimensions were later updated by Welzel (2013) into emancipative and secular value indices. Kriesi et al. (2012) and Hutter et al. (2016), on the other hand, suggest three core political value dimensions: one economic (free market vs welfare state) and two cultural (conservatism vs liberalism in sexual norms; nativism vs cosmopolitanism in migration terms). The number and the nature of the dimensions may indeed not need to be the same across frameworks for them to be real because they can be created for the specific purposes they aim to be used for.

Yet another key debate in the literature is about the determinants of political culture and whether it constitutes an element of a universal process of societal modernization. This debate can be traced back to Weber’s claim that culture drives the economic and political life of societies and to Marx’s counter-thesis that the economic structure determines culture and politics. As a descendant of the later, human development theory maintains that political culture changes as a result of socio-economic modernization and in turn provides support for democratic governance (Welzel et al., 2003), although differences between culture zones have also been acknowledged (Inglehart & Baker, 2000). Critics, however, challenge the universality of this process, arguing that the values of non-Western societies originate in their unique cultural traditions and may be resistant to change (Huntington, 1996). Bomhoff and Gu (2012), for example, demonstrate that self-expression values and their components lack the correlational structure and predictive power in explaining support for democracy in East Asia, in contrast to the rest of the world. A third group of scholars claim that the relationship is reverse, namely that democratic societies socialize their citizens into democratic values, but these values do not need to preexist (Rustow, 1970; Hadenius & Teorell, 2005; Dahlum & Knutsen, 2015).

Regardless of these challenges, political culture research has proven indispensable for understanding our political world. Finding conclusive solutions to the questions posed in these debates would further refine and increase the utility of political culture as one of the key concepts in political science’s toolbox.

I wish the European Journal for Political Culture to be on the frontline of scientific enquiry stretching beyond our current limitations.

References

Alemán, J., & Woods, D. (2016). Value Orientations from the World Values Survey: How Comparable Are They Cross-Nationally? Comparative Political Studies, 49(8), 1039–1067. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414015600458

Alwin, D. F. (2007). Margins of error: A study of reliability in survey measurement. John Wiley.

Bomhoff, E. J., & Gu, M. M. L. (2012). East Asia Remains Different: A Comment on the Index of “Self-Expression Values,” by Inglehart and Welzel. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 43(3), 373 –383. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022111435096

Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In D. E. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and Its Discontent. Free Press of Glencoe.

Dahlum, S., & Knutsen, C. H. (2017). Democracy by Demand? Reinvestigating the Effect of Self-expression Values on Political Regime Type. British Journal of Political Science, 47(2), 437–461. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123415000447

Dalton, R. J., & Welzel, C. (2015). The civic culture transformed: From allegiant to assertive citizens. In The Civic Culture Transformed: From Allegiant to Assertive Citizens. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139600002

Hadenius, A., & Teorell, J. (2005). Cultural and economic prerequisites of democracy: Reassessing recent evidence. Studies in Comparative International Development, 39(4), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02686166

Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. Simon & Schuster.

Hutter, S., Grande, E., & Kriesi, H.-P. (2016). Politicising Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton University Press.

Inglehart, R., & Baker, W. E. (2000). Modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657288

Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. Cambridge University Press.

Kriesi, H.-P, Grande, M., Dolezal, M., Helbling, D., Höglinger, S., Hutter, S., & Wüest, B. (2012). Political conflict in Western Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press.

Przeworski;, A., & Teune, H. (1970). The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. John Wiley & Sons.

Pye, L. W. (1965). Introduction. In Political Culture and Political Development. Princeton University Press.

Sokolov, B. (2018). The Index of Emancipative Values: Measurement Model Misspecifications. American Political Science Review, 112(2), 395–408. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000624

Welzel, C., Brunkert, L., Inglehart, R. F., & Kruse, S. (2021). Non-Invariance? An Overstated Problem with Misconceived Causes. Sociological Methods and Research, 50.

Welzel, C. (2013). Freedom rising: Human empowerment and the quest for emancipation. Cambridge University Press.

Welzel, C. (2020). Democratic Horizons: What Value Change Reveals about the Future of Democracy. Democratization.

Welzel, C., & Inglehart, R. F. (2016). Misconceptions of Measurement Equivalence: Time for a Paradigm Shift. Comparative Political Studies, 49(8), 1068–1094. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414016628275

Welzel, C., Inglehart, R., & Klingemann, H.-D. (2003). The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis. European Journal of Political Research, 42, 341–379.

Corresponding Author:

Dr. Plamen Akaliyski, Post-doctoral Fellow, Graduate School of System Design and Management, Keio University, Japan, and Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, Higher School of Economics, Russia.

Contact Address: plamen.akaliyski@keio.jp

Copyright @ 2021, Plamen Akaliyski

European Journal of Political Culture Vol. 1(1):23-27

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.