Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere

2 Political Culture: Approaches and Prospects

C H A P T E R 2 Political Culture Approaches and Prospects Stephen Welch T he idea of ‘‘intelligence culture’’ is not a free-standing invention of intelligence studies but rather is a projection into it of numerous applications of the concept of culture in the social sciences, most obviously the concept of ‘‘political culture’’ that has developed primarily (though not exclusively) within political science. Neither, however, is ‘‘political culture’’ a free-standing invention of political science; rather, it is the projection into it of wider currents of thought that have eddied around the concept of culture since it first began to be used by historians and social philosophers around the time of, and largely in reaction to, the Enlightenment. In the idea of intelligence culture, therefore, we find an application of an already applied concept. It does not, however, follow that one can find out all one needs to know about the concept of intelligence culture by looking at the concept of political culture; nor, by the same token, that the history of the uses of the concept of culture would be a complete guide to the issues surrounding the concept of political culture in political science. When concepts are transplanted, they embark on a new phase of growth within their new environment of discipline or field. At the same time, if the borrowing is anything more than the most superficial deployment of a portentous phrase, various genetic legacies from the donor fields will continue to make their presence felt. / 13 / 14 / Stephen Welch All this is by way of situating the task of this chapter, which is to outline the concept of political culture for the purpose of elucidating that of intelligence culture. It is also by way of acknowledging how presumptuous it would be to dictate to intelligence studies from the perspective of political science how it should conduct its business with the new concept, not least because political science has struggled to define its own applied ‘‘culture’’ concept, political culture, in a manner that frees it from its genetic inheritance. It is by no means a complete guide to the usage of ‘‘intelligence culture’’ to lay out how political culture has been understood. But nor is it irrelevant; and it is the premise of this chapter that it may be helpful. And, incidentally, the possibility that the development of the derivative concept within intelligence studies may in turn, reciprocally, offer useful cues for thinking about political culture should not be overlooked. In this chapter, then, I outline the development and current condition of political culture research and offer a few words about its prospects. In noting how the disciplinary setting of political science both inherits and modifies disputes over culture more generally, I imply the same possibilities for the field of intelligence studies as it works with the new concept of intelligence culture, possibilities that are further considered in the remaining chapters of this collection. The Positivist Mainstream of Political Culture Research: The Almondian Paradigm It has become conventional, despite one or two earlier uses of the phrase ‘‘political culture,’’ to situate the beginning of political culture research in modern political science with the proposal by Gabriel Almond in 1956 that political culture be seen as ‘‘a particular pattern of orientations to political action,’’ in which ‘‘every political system is embedded.’’ Of particular importance, he also said: ‘‘Because political orientation involves cognition, intellection, and adaptation to external situations, as well as the standards and values of the general culture, it is a differentiated part of the culture and has a certain autonomy’’ (emphasis added).1 Almond did two things with this coinage: He invoked the connotations of ‘‘culture,’’ and he simultaneously tried to contain them. Almond’s standing as the founder of political culture research is further supported by his coauthorship with Sidney Verba in 1963 of The Civic Culture, the first major empirical study using the new concept.2 Here, indeed, was the real founding moment of political culture research in the variant that became its mainstream. We need not look closely at the book’s argument, but its aim and method are of interest. Its aim was to contribute to the empirical theory of democracy by discovering what cultural orientations were necessary in order for Political Culture / 15 a stable democratic political system to be successfully embedded. Political culture research is thereby implicitly established as a part of...