Discuss the political socialisation of open and closed societies. (2025, 10 Marks)
Political socialisation is the process through which individuals acquire political attitudes, values and identities, and through which a society passes its political culture from one generation to the next. Herbert H. Hyman gave the term currency in 1959, and Gabriel A. Almond made it an input function of every political system. How it works depends on whether a society is open or closed in Karl Popper’s sense (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945), a distinction Henri Bergson first drew in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932).
The contrast
| Dimension | Open society | Closed society |
|---|---|---|
| Agencies | Family, school, faith, media and associations compete | Party-state aligns every agency |
| Content | Plural, contested, revisable | One official ideology and history |
| Method | Largely latent and indirect | Manifest, planned indoctrination |
| Aim | Critical, participant citizens | Loyal, mobilised subjects |
| Dissent | Protected | Treated as betrayal |
Open societies
- Socialisation is dispersed, not absent. Conflicting messages from family, peers and media create cross-pressures, and independent judgement grows out of that conflict.
- David Easton and Jack Dennis (Children in the Political System, 1969) found that children learn diffuse support early, through benevolent images of the President and the policeman.
- The state still socialises through curricula, oaths and national symbols, but the content is publicly contestable, which is why textbook disputes recur in India. Reserved seats for women in panchayats have socialised women into leadership roles, and repeated competitive elections taught a largely non-literate electorate the efficacy of the vote.
- The risk is fragmentation: excess openness can breed confusion and polarisation, and algorithmic echo chambers now re-close information worlds from below. Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony warns that consent can be manufactured even within a formally free civil society.
Closed societies
- Agencies are restricted and made to transmit only regime-friendly behaviour: age-graded bodies such as the Komsomol and the Hitler Youth, a cult of personality, controlled media and mass ritual.
- China shows the model today: the Patriotic Education Law, in force since 1 January 2024, writes patriotic and party-led education into schooling and family life.
- Monopoly is never complete. Oppression breeds counter-socialisation: the Indian national movement taught a colonised people to reject imperial loyalty, and the Arab Spring (2011) showed regime messaging failing among the young. Slow post-Soviet change shows how durable closed socialisation can be.
Conclusion
Openness is a continuum, not a binary, and every society mixes transmission with indoctrination. Hannah Arendt located politics in action among plural equals; closed socialisation destroys that plurality, while open socialisation, with all its disorder, preserves the citizen’s capacity to judge. That capacity, not consensus, is the proper measure of a socialisation system.