political culture

political culture
The norms , values , and symbols that help to legitimate the political power system of a society (for example, in the United States, the constitution, democracy, equality, the flag). When a political culture collapses or is thrown into doubt, a crisis of legitimacy is created, as happened in Central Europe and the former USSR in 1989-91. Political culture, like culture in general, is made up of fragments of received knowledge which people in a given society take to be truth. Scandals, revelations, failures, and political disasters can quickly undermine citizens' faith in the whole system. For this reason the preservation of political culture is a major preoccupation of politicians and state bureaucrats at every level.
The modern use of this term dates from the period after the Second World War. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) is a classic comparative study of political attitudes and democracy in five countries, aiming to show how cultural development and political development move hand in hand. The value of the concept does not depend on this particular political agenda. More recent research has tried to distinguish between ‘real’ political cultures (which citizens actively believe in and support) and ‘imposed’ political cultures (which are no more than artificially created ideologies imposed on citizens by threat or force). A question for the future is how once-powerful political cultures like those of the United States and the old Soviet Union will adapt to the centrifugal pressures of ethnicity and nationalism.

Dictionary of sociology. 2013.

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