Political Culture Defined

Political culture is the pattern of individual attitudes and orientations toward politics among members of a political system (Almond and Verba, 1963).  It is the subjective realm that underlies and gives meaning to political actions. Several components influence individual political orientations such as beliefs, and affective orientations like feelings of attachment about political objects, and evaluative orientations like judgments and opinions about political objects. These three dimensions are interrelated and can be combined in a variety of ways.

These orientations can significantly influence the way a political system works.  In fact, the demands made upon a system, the responses to laws and to appeals for support, and the conduct of individuals in their political role, are shaped and conditioned by an orientation pattern. Cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations form the latent political tendencies and propensities for political behavior.

Robert Putnam (1993) revisited the concept of political culture. According to Putnam, the differences in performance are due to the interaction of two sets of factors: one is socio-economic modernity, and the other is civic community or political culture. Putnam explains the inconsistency of regional governments’ success through the Italian example, in which the institutional performance in Northern Italian regions is more efficient and productive than in the Southern regions.  He defends a correlation between institutional performance and development, but he suggests that this correlation may be spurious. In fact “what our simple analysis cannot reveal is whether modernity is a cause of performance …whether performance is perhaps in some way a cause of modernity, whether both are influenced by a third factor…or whether the link between modernity and performance is even more complex” (p.86).

After developing an interesting measure of “civic-mindedness”, Putnam finds that institutional performance is highly correlated with such a characteristic, and that this conclusion should be considered as a determinant of performance.