The Many Voices of Political Culture: Assessing Different Approaches

Works in political culture have employed a variety of approaches with different assumptions and methodologies. Commentary on the field, however, generally fails to take account of these differences or to assess the merits of the different approaches. Recent works that typify five different approaches are evaluated in terms of the ways that they conceptualize preference formation and the linkage between preferences and cultural norms. The tendency in most approaches to conflate preferences and norms points to the need for further theoretical development.