Do you agree with the view that Political culture of a society is highly significant aspect of the Political System? Give reasons in support of your answer. (2006)
Gabriel A. Almond introduced the concept in “Comparative Political Systems” (1956), arguing that every political system is embedded in a particular pattern of orientations to political action. Lucian W. Pye later described political culture as the attitudes and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process. The view in the question is sound: culture decides whether institutions work, whether authority is accepted and how change happens. It should be read, however, as a conditioning factor that is itself shaped by structure and power, not as a first cause.
What Political Culture Denotes
- Almond and Sidney Verba (The Civic Culture, 1963), surveying five nations, broke orientation into cognitive, affective and evaluative elements.
- From these they derived parochial, subject and participant cultures. Stable democracy, they argued, rests on a civic culture: a blend in which active citizens are balanced by a reserve of trust and deference.
Reasons for Agreeing
- Legitimacy and stability. In David Easton‘s terms, culture supplies diffuse support, a store of goodwill that carries a regime through unpopular decisions. Without it, every crisis becomes a crisis of the regime itself.
- Same institutions, different results. Westminster-style constitutions given to many new states survived in India but collapsed in Pakistan and Nigeria. Weimar Germany had a democratic constitution but too few committed democrats. Robert D. Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993) found that Italian regional governments with identical powers performed very differently, in line with their stocks of social capital.
- Explaining change. Ronald Inglehart‘s post-materialism links generational value shifts to new movements. Milan W. Svolik (2019) found that polarised voters often trade democratic principles for partisan gain, which helps explain backsliding by elected rulers.
- The Indian case. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly (4 November 1948) that constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment and must be cultivated. W. H. Morris-Jones described Indian politics as speaking modern, traditional and saintly idioms. The electorate’s rejection of the Emergency in 1977 shows a participant culture setting limits to power from below.
Reasons for Caution
- Circularity. Brian Barry (Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, 1970) objected that civic culture is identified in stable democracies and then used to explain their stability.
- Reverse causation. Institutions also shape culture. West Germany’s subject culture became more civic under the Basic Law, a change Almond and Verba acknowledged in The Civic Culture Revisited (1980).
- Structure and inequality. Carole Pateman argued that low efficacy among workers and women reflects unequal structures, and that the civic-culture model treats their apathy as healthy.
- Power. For Antonio Gramsci, consent is manufactured through hegemony, so what surveys record as culture may be successful domination.
- Pluralism within. National averages hide sub-cultures of caste, region and class, and the parochial-to-participant ladder carries a Western bias.
Conclusion
Political culture is highly significant, but as the medium through which institutions work and not as their independent cause. Culture and structure shape each other. India shows this best: constitutional design gave its people democratic habits, and those habits now protect the design.