Camelia Florela Voinea

European Journal of Political Culture

ISSN 2784 - 0271 ISSN – L 2784 – 0271

Volume 1, Issue No.1 (March 2021), pp.46-56

Published: 30 March 2021

Anticipatory Backgrounds in Classic Political Culture Theory. Why Would It Matter?

Reflections on political participation

Camelia Florela Voinea

European Research Center for Political Culture

Faculty of Political Science

University of Bucharest

Romania

camelia.voinea@unibuc.ro

Motto:

“… Each kind of polity – traditional, authoritarian, and democratic – has one form of culture that is congruent with its own structure….”

Almond and Verba, 1963 (p.33)

“… we are interested in the respondents, not as individuals, but as members of complex social systems. We wish to make statements, based on those separate interviews, about the general state of attitudes in these nations. And we wish to make statements about the relationship between these attitudes and the way in which the political system operate. In particular, we are interested in understanding democratic political systems”

Almond and Verba, 1963 (p.41)

Abstract

The classic political culture theory is essentially concerned with the issue of political participation. Political culture theory is addressed as theoretical, methodological, and empirical support to the study of the relationship between the citizens and the state (polity). The idea of this approach is to define both the citizen’s attitude and the polity as anticipatory systems as they could be considered communication systems from the perspective of Luhmann’s system theory (Luhmann, 1995, 2012). As such, political attitude and polity are viewed as structurally coupled systems: each of them contains a model of the other, and each is the environment of the other. Moreover, each of them consists of multiple (functionally differentiated) subsystems. Political culture theory might represent the root of new science, a science of participation, which might re-unite humans and non-humans into a new conceptual and techniqual milieu. The conceptual and pragmatic roots of a science of participation lie in the core conceptual construction of the classic political culture theory. The citizens and the state dynamically build-up a coupling relationship whose complexity is what pertains to ‘political participation’. Some reflections are included about political culture theory and political participation.

Keywords: political culture, political participation, anticipatory systems

Introduction

Classic political culture theory has provided theoretical, methodological, and empirical support to the idea that political culture plays a fundamentall role in the relationship between the citizens and the state (polity). Policy dynamics is explained by means of two fundamental concepts: the open polity as a research methodological paradigm of governance in a democracy, and political attitudes as a research methodology for the study of the interaction between the individual citizens and the state (Almond and Verba, 1963).

For a theory in comparative analysis, political culture theory identifies two main background methodologies which have dominated the social and political research in the second half of the 20^th century: system theory and attitude measurement. In Almond and Verba’s theory there is a fundamental dimension of comparison between any two polities which receives empirical support from the attitude survey research: it is the classic reactive (behavioral) paradigm of stimulus-response which has been associated with the notion of cybernetic feedback in control theory and with structural-functional paradigm in system theory. Political culture theory introduces in this respect a reactive view over both the citizens and the state. Citizens’ reactivity is expressed and evaluated in terms of attitudes, which are themselves assumed to be the outcome of a bilateral reactive relationship between the citizens and the state. Attitudes measurement thus provides for the means to evaluate the effects determined by each term of this relationship onto the other: a quantitative description of the governance performances in terms of the type, strength, and polarity of citizens’ attitudes as the expression of their acceptance / rejection of a public policy.

Attitudes as binary variables and the danger of joining divergent paradigms

The classic definition of attitudes is based on the “A-B-C” structure which includes affect and emotions, beliefs, and cognitions (Allport, 1935; Rosenberg and Hovland, 1960). In Allport’s seminal study, the attitude conceptualization succeeds to integrate divergent or weakly convergent theories and ideas into a new theoretical body. Nevertheless, Allport’s definitional framework has ever since remained insufficiently operationalized such that the operational specification of attitudes has never reached their real complexity, interdependence and sensitivity to context.

An impressive body of mathematical, statistical, and computational techniques has been created for developing more and more sophisticated attitude change analysis methodologies: multifactorial analysis, structural equantions, system dynamics, agent-based modeling and simulation have achieved more and more accuracy in describing and explaining attitudes and their role in social and political action. One issue has however remained problematic in the attitude measurement: the operationalization of attitude as a binary variable.

In their foundational work on political culture, Almond and Verba employ attitude measurement as the basic research methodology. At the beginning of the 1960s, the empirical data collected and analysed by employing the survey research methodology was by far the only methodological choice able to provide support to an impressive research project like the comparative analysis of democracy, governance and society in five countries. Attitudes measurement was able to provide for a multifaceted instrument in achieving a grassroot perception over the relationship between the citizens and the governance in a democratic society. The capacity of this research methodology to achieve performance and accuracy of data processing as well as a high degree of generality and reliability of conclusions was, therefore, beyond doubt. At that time, attitude measurement has offered the proper methodology employed ever before in sociology, social-psychology and also in political sociology. As far as it has been employed in political science, political analysis and political methodology, the perceptions of various research communities were almost the same: it has represented a breakthrough.

Notwithstanding this glamorous picture, attitude measurement proved problematic. More often than not, the main weak point identified and criticized by many authors in political culture theory was attitude measurement. Moreover, the utility of employing the attitude concept in the basic methodology of the political culture theory was quite severely questioned (Welch, 2013). All this has started with an operational choice which has been strongly contested: the representation of the attitude as a binary variable (Krosnick and Smith, 1994). The arguments in favor of this choice have not been in much agreement with Allport’s definition of attitude. The outcome of attitude as acceptance/rejection of the attitudinal object has been too much a reductionist choice with respect to how Allport has defined the concept of attitude. A dichotomic outcome of an action deliberation process which is actually performed in the attitudinal space is too poorly specified for what attitude takes until it is formed and even more if it is changed. The missing link between the idea of a binary variable and the rich structural-functional definition of attitude has been a methodological research debate subject for long time. It was right here, between conceptualization and operationalization that the advanced technologies of the artificial have found their space, purpose, and utility in attitudes evaluation. A brief history of attitude research emphasizes a fast sequence of paradigmatic shifts induced by the advance of cognitive theories in social and political psychology and also by the development and the continuous sophistication of both teories and technologies of the artificial which have provided the means to employ artificial intelligence, artificial life and artificial agents in the modeling and simulation studies of society and polity dynamics. However, the methodology of attitudes measurement has remained rather unchanged: the empirical support provided by the survey research has not been replaced by the generative methodologies based on the advanced technologies of the artificial. On the contrary, this huge empirical support has been employed in validating and calibrating the various models of attitude dynamics which employ modeling and simulation methodologies based on artificial agents and complex adaptive systems (Hegselmann, Müller and Troitzsch, 1996).

As a long-term consequence, a differentiation emerged between the classic operationalization of attitudes as binary outcomes of evaluation processes based on information processing, and the operationalization of attitudes as complex dynamic outcomes of interaction processes based on both information processing and sophisticated cognitive as well as reflexive processes in complex systems endowed with self-organizational and self-referential characteristics (Voinea, 2016).

The study of the dynamics of this relationship between the citizens as individual agents, on the one hand, and the state as a political organization and functional structure based on institutional agents, on the other hand, has started to increasingly require a change in both the conceptual and methodological approach. Political culture theory has been dramatically challenged by this differentiation: its comparative analysis status has remained attractive, while its conceptual status has been drastically questioned because of the weak ontological and epistemological grounds.

While classic political culture theory (Almond and Verba, 1963; Converse, 1964) is based on the attitudes measurement methodology for assessing the degree of acceptance or rejection of the governmental policies by the individuals and society, the later evolutions of the political culture research proved significant changes especially in what regards the research methodologies and the research issues (Voinea, 2020). In just few decades and under the high pressure of theoretical and research methodological achievements in several connected areas, political culture research has proved a fast process of intensive employment of the research methodologies which are based on the advanced technologies of the artificial and simulation, big data and web semantics, data mining and machine learning. The process has revealed a wide range of methodological approaches which are concerned with the relationship between the citizens and the state. Beside political attitudes, the political culture research issues have included values, emotions and beliefs thus extending the range of citizens’ capacity of expression and manifestation with respect to the governance performances, efficiency, responsibility and responsiveness (Inglehart, Klingemann and Welzel, 2005). Furthermore, the research issues progressively covered meaning formation from collective perceptions and storytelling (Polletta and Callahan, 2017; McBeth, Shanahan and Jones, 2005), political narratives (Graef, Da Silva and Lemay-Hebert, 2018; Patterson and Monroe, 1998), policy narratives (Shanahan et al., 2011; Wagenaar, 2011; Fischer, 2003; Roe, 1994) or governance narratives (Magalhães and Veiga, 2018; Turnbull, 2016).

Lately, the theories about anticipatory systems have revealed an interesting way out of the political culture theory’s dilemma between valid and useful comparative analysis outcomes and weak conceptual and operational backgrounds.

Political Culture and Polity in a New Modelling Framework: Anticipatory Systems

Anticipatory systems theories (Miller and Poli, 2021; Poli, 2010; Dubois, 1998; Rosen, 1985) and research methodologies (Leyesdorff, 2021, 2003; Louie, 2017; Leyesdorff and Dubois, 2004) have been developed as an advanced conceptual approach to reflexive systems, that is, complex, self-oganizing, self-referential systems.

They are meant to operationalize the concept of adaptivity in terms of complexity and self-organization as an alternative to traditional cybernetic systems. Complex social and political systems with characteristics of autonomy and adaptivity to dynamic contexts have represented the subject of other types of theoretical and methodological theories, like the emergentism and social simulation (Cederman, 2005; Sawyer, 2005; Axelrod, 1997; Cederman, 2005). Anticipatory systems model the type of reflexive systems able to dynamically adapt on the basis of the dynamics of their internal model(s).

The idea of this approach is to define both the citizen’s attitude and the polity as anticipatory systems as they could be considered communication systems from the perspective of Luhmann’s system theory (Luhmann, 1995, 2012). Each of these systems contains at least two anticipatory mechanisms: (1) meaning construction and processing, and (2) asynchronous operation of the differently codified subsystems at each moment of time, which provides for reflexive characteristics to emerge since each subsystem is provided with representations of the other subsystem(s) by means of codification (Leyesdorff, 2003).

As such, political attitude and polity are viewed as structurally coupled systems: each of them contains a model of the other, and each is the environment of the other. Moreover, each of them consists of multiple (functionally differentiated) subsystems. Some of these are viewed as anticipatory systems, while others are viewed and defined as stabilisers (that is, drivers of other systems toward achieving and maintaining stability) for the other subsystems.

We thus define two types of anticipatory subsystems:

Strong anticipatory systems (AS), which are defined following Rosen’s definition of an anticipatory system (1985), that is, a system which contains a model of itself;

Stabiliser systems (SS), which are defined following Schwartz’s definition of a value system (Schwartz, 2012). A stabilizer (sub)system plays the role of self-reinforcing system which is thus able to enhance stability of the structurally coupled system, and of the system which include it as a model of the system itself. Example: a value subsystem is a stabilizer for a political attitude system since it (self)reinforces when political attitude system faces uncertainty or incapacity of decision-making.

From an operational point of view, a political attitude could be defined as a system with anticipatory features which consists of several functionally differentiated subsystems. From a socio-psychological point of view, the attitude system consists of three subsystems (“A-B-C” model), each depending on the other subsystems and on the whole system as well: (A) subsystem: affect, feeling and emotions; (B) subsystem: beliefs; (C) subsystem: cognitions.

The structural coupling (Maturana and Varela, 1973) of citizen’s attitude could thus be defined by a set of (imbricated) internal models as follows (see Figure 1):

· Value subsystem, is a model for the belief subsystem, and it is viewed as a stabilizer in the sense defined by Rosen (1985);

· Belief subsystem, viewed as an anticipatory system which contains a model of itself, namely a value system, and employs it in making predictions;

· Emotional & affect construction subsystem, is viewed as a destabilizing system, which introduces sensitivity to context, path and other structurally coupled unstable subsystems, like the behavioral subsystem;

· Behavioral subsystem, which is defined as a weak anticipatory subsystem which includes a model of itself and employs it in making predictions;

· Cognitive subsystem, which includes knowledge & learning subsystem, information processing, and meaning processing & generation;

(ii) Polity is described (in a much simplified architecture) as a strong anticipatory system with multiple imbricated internal model subsystems and active systems (see Figure 2): (1) internal model subsystem includes: norms and values; (2) active systems: Policy-making, Citizens with individual Attitudes.

Defining a polity as an anticipatory system structurally coupled with another anticipatory system, that is, the citizen(s) allows for the definition and description of a structural coupling as described by Maturana and Varela (1973). The dynamic operation of the structural coupling can be described with a mathematical formalism (Louie, 2017); Dubois, 1998) based on the model i (Mi) at a moment of time (t) and a system j (Sj) at a moment of time (t). Reflexivity is operationally achieved by means of different time scales for each system and any of its internal model(s). The dynamics of the system Sj(t) can be described as depending on the internal model(s), Mi(t) and the context (environment E) (Leyesdorff, 2003). The difference from a classic cybernetic system resides in the capacity of an anticipatory system to autonomously guide its own operation by means of its own internal model(s), whose dynamics is/are essential for the operation of a structural coupling (Voinea, 2017).

Political participation in a full structural coupling in which the citizens and the polity are defined as anticipatory systems can thus be described by means of a set of processes able to generate, update, capture, and communicate meaning from one another. Meaning communication could therefore by achieved by means of codification and not necessarily as some symbolic internal representation and human-like memory and memory activation.

Moreover, in such a setting, political participation is not defined anymore as based on a cybernetic control (feedback) mechanism. It could be defined as a complex dynamic entity which is based on structurally coupled type of operations such that the couplings (citizens, polity) are following dynamic trajectories which are dependent on one another. Thus, both citizens and polity are contributing to the dynamics of the whole entity.

Just imagine a team of designers who altogether work and contribute to the same project at the same time. This idea of political participation as a scenario of a society and polity “in-the-making” is closely related to social innovation theories.

Why Would It Matter?

The classic political culture theory is essentially concerned with the issue of political participation. All the other details are addressing all (or almost all) the other issues from individuals to societies, from cultures to systems, from reactivity up to the complexity of the environmental context.

What the criticism and the debates around political culture theory have actually revealed during the past eight decades? What its own bouncing back and forth between the front and the back stage of the political science does actually mean?

One answer could be that all this ‘tormented’ story of political culture theory proves its impressive resilience against philosophical disproof. No matter how strongly challenged, no matter how strong the philosophical arguments that disprove it, political culture theory is standing still. Moreover, it succeeds to preserve an image of undeniable utility in the minds of the students and people reflecting on its own arguments. And this might be what matters, after all. Why would it matter?

A possible answer is that the political culture theory is not a ‘dead’ area: it is open to change and new theory development.

Another possible answer is that the overwhelming collection of various theoretical and methodological outcomes based on different research methodologies and the advanced technologies of the artificial and communication represents as well a collection of conceptual gains able to provide answers to the epistemological inquiries. In turn, all this might help in finding the proper ontological answer to the criticism concerning its philosophical status.

A third possible answer and perhaps as interesting as it might look quite mysterious is that political culture theory might represents the root of new science: science of participation. It is undoubtedly an idea rooted in this conceptual and pragmatic backgrounds. What is more than that is some built-in basic piece which political culture theory proved to have from its inception until now: a kind of seed of a new science of participation which re-unites humans and non-humans into a new conceptual and techniqual milieu.

‘Political participation’ is the matter which stands still in the conceptual architecture of the classic political culture theory no matter how hard its critics. It is the ontology and epistemology of political participation which has to be found, first of all. We will not call it “political culture” anymore, this might be true. The conceptual and pragmatic roots of a science of participation lie in the core conceptual construction of the classic political culture theory. The citizens and the state dynamically build-up a coupling relationship whose complexity is what pertains to ‘political participation’. All the philosophical as well as operational dimensions of this relationship is what has actually shaped a classic approach in political culture theory, but most of all, is what has to be found in the development of this new science of participation. Some theories already proved this argument either inside or outside the political culture theory itself: human empowerment (as Insider) as well as the political narrative (as an Outsider) are arguments which attract everyone’s attention and need to be taken into consideration.

Participative democracies as well as participative types of communities and polities require with necessity that (political) “participation” is defined as a basic brick of new theory development in political and social theories as well as in the research methodologies. It is one way to reach conceptual horizons beyond what we actually know right now, namely social networks, socializing media, crowdsourcing, narratives, big data, autonomous agent, artificial societies …

It is one way amongst many others, for sure, but it is worth trying since ‘political participation’ refers to what the classic political culture theory has initially and essentially approached. Moreover, it has always been a challenge which stands still.

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Corresponding Author:

Camelia Florela Voinea, European Research Center for Political Culture, Department of Public Policy, International Relations and Security Studies, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, Romania.

E-mail: camelia.voinea@unibuc.ro

Copyright @ 2021, Camelia Florela Voinea

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