Many scholars focus on the material dimensions of political behaviour to understand how individuals, groups, and states act.
Yet values and orientations play an important role in shaping politics — and emotions and sentiments, too, play a part in forming policy, particularly popular politics.
The concept of political culture is marked by a degree of ambiguity, and pinning it down methodologically is more difficult in analysis than material factors such as the economy, which is supported by clear and readily available data.
Political culture can nonetheless be defined as the individual and collective orientation towards politics — in other words, the influence of thought, emotion, and belief in shaping political orientation independently of any consideration of material gain.
The question is: does the American voter cast their ballot because of what they believe in or the values they hold, or because of their socioeconomic circumstances? Does this voter support a candidate because that candidate calls for prayer in public schools and opposes abortion, or because his economic policies reduce inflation and create jobs for people?
Emotions undoubtedly influence the substance of politics, and not every political behaviour is calculated on rational grounds. The domain of political culture is therefore the domain of sentiment rather than reason — though separating the two is possible analytically, not in reality. The overlap between the two domains is extensive and far-reaching.
Gabriel Almond, the prominent American political scientist, is considered the first to have used the term political culture, in 1956. He defines it as "the set of political orientations, attitudes, and behavioural patterns that an individual holds towards the political system, its various components, and towards their own role as an individual within the political system."
Almond and his colleague Sidney Verba went on to conduct a major study titled The Civic Culture, published in 1963. The study examined five democratic countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, West Germany, and Mexico.
The study divided political culture into three classifications: first, participant political culture; second, subject political culture; and third, parochial political culture. The two researchers used opinion polling as a means of determining which category the citizens of these countries belonged to.
These classifications devised by the two scholars carry significant implications for the stability and continuity of political systems that are categorised as democratic.
Participant political culture is characterised by knowledge of the political system, its constitution, and its institutions — and, most importantly, by the individual's confidence in their ability to influence policy in general.
Subject political culture, by contrast, denotes individuals who have knowledge of the political system and its institutions but do not believe they have the capacity to influence it. Parochial political culture, as the name suggests, is concerned solely with its immediate surroundings; those within it know little of the political system or its structure, and do not believe they can exert any influence on it.
It goes without saying that these classifications relate to ideal types — that is, they are used to measure the degree of correspondence with reality, and that these classifications do not exist in their pure form.
The findings of the study, which took several years to complete, were largely as expected. Britain ranked first in possessing a participant political culture, as the British combined active participation and confidence in their ability to influence with, at the same time, adherence to laws and respect for political authority — which facilitates the process of governance.
The United States was distinguished by active participation and a high level of confidence in the ability to influence, yet this active participation came at the cost of Americans' respect and regard for political authority. Germany, the most developed country in Europe, saw its citizens marked by political passivity towards political authority.
Italians, for their part, appear to suffer from political alienation owing to low levels of social capital.
They seem to be enclosed within narrow circles such as the family, or within political and partisan factionalism, which leads to fragmentation. As for Mexico, according to the study, it was passing through a transitional phase of political culture, combining parochial political culture with pride in the nation and in the Mexican Revolution.
Although a great deal of time has passed since the study, its substance remains influential. It has been criticised on several grounds, and the concept has been developed by many researchers, extending beyond politics to issues of development and progress. Some hold that Confucian culture played a role in the development of the Asian Tigers and China.
The eternal question, however, remains: does culture exert a direct influence on politics, or is it politics and the political system that shapes patterns of political culture? Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri inclines towards the latter, as he says: "The young men among us are raised upon whatever their father has accustomed them to."