Unit 8 Learning Objectives
How does political culture influence the legislature?

After studying this unit you should be able to:

• Define political culture.

• Explain why political culture may influence the functioning of a given political regime.

• Discuss some instances in which the performance of political institutions was actually influenced by political-cultural factors.

• Assess whether it is correct to argue that the adoption of ethics rules, ethics codes, ethics reforms are facilitated by specific types of political cultures.

• Explain why the proper functioning of an ethics regime requires the existence of a homogeneous political culture among the individuals to whom it applies.

• Discuss whether it is true that MPs actually have a homogenous set of political attitudes, orientation, principles and values.  

Introduction

What is meant by political culture? Do certain types of political cultures encourage greater compliance with ethics reforms, or even prevent the occurrence of ethics violations entirely? This unit will un-package the concept of political culture in order to investigate whether the effectiveness of ethics reforms are influenced by specific types of political culture. Political culture will be defined as the pattern of individual attitudes and cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations toward politics among the members of a given political system (Gabriel Almond and Sydeny Verba). The Political Culture and Ethics unit considers why these orientations might influence how a political system functions and, taking it a bit further, what kind of analysis has already been done and what are the results? (Robert Putnam in his Making Democracy Work (1993).