The Concept of Political Culture

"'Political culture': the expression has of late gained general currency," said Hughes in 1988. That same year, at a session of the American Historical Association that turned into a discussion of political culture, Baker observed that despite the concept's "problems of definition," it had "become a popular and over-used buzz-word." As the millennium approached, Silbey was able to write that political culture studies had become "a major enterprise." "We seem to live," said Silbey, "in a scholarly age when political culture is a dominant explanatory and descriptive theme." But he added that the notion remained amorphous, "too easily bandied about in different guises." The concept of political culture is indeed important to historians--too much so for them to remain complacent regarding its casual deployment. ¹

The concept of political culture has attracted a long line of critiques from political scientists, but this essay, by a historian, is not yet another revisionist assault. Historians at the very least need to be informed by an understanding of the concept's tangled history in both history and political science (especially). They must become more self-conscious and more comparative in outlook. Although the political culture approach has often been used in a way that slights issues of hegemony and power, that flaw is not necessarily inherent in the concept or approach.

Historians give "political culture" a variety of meanings; many, or most, have finessed "problems of definition" by simply not bothering with any definition at all. In many cases, this situation need elicit no concern, since what authors mean by "political culture" can be demonstrated by their usage and implicit explanatory frameworks. Yet, political scientists, among whom the modern concept originated four decades ago, have engaged in a virtually continuous assessment, re-evaluation, and criticism of the political culture concept's theoretical grounding, methodological implications, and substantive results. That historians appear to be oblivious to these debates is not surprising, given their current indifference to political science, and the relative unfashionableness of "science" per se, especially among the new cultural historians. But this inattention to the ongoing controversy seems to be at odds with the current interest in tracing the epistemological foundations of historical practice that has engaged, in particular, the new cultural historians. ²

Why has a concept that specialists find so difficult to pin down ("like nailing jelly to the wall") enjoyed such popularity? "Umbrella" concepts often climb into vogue because of their indeterminateness. "Political culture" belongs with those "catchwords" that serve as "deliberately vague conditioning concepts." More than thirty years ago, Pye, one of political science's modern pioneers on the subject, observed that "the mere term 'political culture' is capable of evoking quick intuitive understanding, so that people often feel that without further and explicit definition they can appreciate its meaning and freely use it." That very accessibility, however, signaled "considerable danger that it [would] be employed as a 'missing link' to fill in anything that cannot be explained in political analysis." ³

Such ambiguity is characteristic of the often synergistic border between disciplines, but deeper reasons exist for the concept's currency. Its origin in comparative politics suggests implications that historians tend to ignore. Furthermore, many new cultural historians employ "political culture" in ways that evade certain classic considerations of political life, namely, power, and who exercises it--in other words, who gets what, why, and how?

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed what Kammen called "the steady expansion of the reach of social history." The "new social history" encircled other sub-fields and pressured historians in various specialties to rebaptize themselves as social historians. As a result, the "social bases of politics" enjoyed considerable explanatory popularity. Likewise, in the 1990s, everyone appeared to become a cultural historian. Neither generalization is literally true, but the new cultural history's imperatives have become so pervasive and dominant that many historians who treat political life seek to legitimize their work by claiming that it illuminates "political...