Abstract
The Civic Culture by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba is a path-breaking work within political science. Although The Civic Culture still provides inspiration for studies, new approaches to political culture have identified alternative citizen orientations that may be replacing the value orientations identified at the time. The more recent studies have examined specific attitudes such as political trust, party identification, and political efficacy or types of political subcultures such as critical citizens, stealth citizens or disenchanted citizens. These studies provide insights into the developments of specific attitudinal orientations, but do not discern the mix of political orientations among the population, which The Civic Culture suggests is central for democratic stability. The implications of these changes for the composition of political cultures are therefore still unknown. In this article, we, as suggested by The Civic Culture, examine the composition of political cultures to shed new light on the differences in political culture between old and new democracies. We use the fourth round of the European Social Survey to examine this question in 25 European democracies. The results suggest that there is a need to revise some of the main conclusions of The Civic Culture when it comes to the connection between political culture and democratic stability. Although civic citizens are widespread in old democracies, there is no single political culture sustaining a stable democracy. We also find considerable heterogeneity in the composition of the political cultures within old and new democracies alike, suggesting that there may be considerable variation in the cultural conditions for creating a stable democracy.
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Notes
The typology of political subcultures presented by Almond and Verba is based on four dimensions (orientations toward system in general, political role of the self, objects related to input and output, system), while our typology is based on only two dimensions capturing the essential differences for the present purposes. Our labels of the political subcultures differ from Almond and Verba to acknowledge these differences.
While this dichotomy neglects disruptions of democratic rule in the old democracies, which occurred in several countries such as Spain and Portugal, it makes it possible to examine differences between new and more mature democracies. An empirical analysis supports the decision to use the dichotomy instead of number of years since the differences between old and new democracies are stronger than the correlations between years of democracy and shares of subcultures (Years of democracy from the database Democracy and Dictatorship, Cheibub et al. 2010). For the quality of democracy, the values on Polity-index for the countries in year 2008 were between eight and ten with a mean value of 9.56, which clearly shows the lack of variation in this regard. For more on this, see Table 2.
The construction of the two indexes (political trust and political efficacy) has been evaluated using the Rasch model (Rasch 1960/1980), which examines the psychometric structure of the composite measures (e.g., if adding raw score values are justified by the data). Additionally, we have examined the assumption of invariance of responses across groups, i.e., that the items or index means the same in different countries using the Rumm2030 software (Andrich 1988; Andrich et al. 2008). These analyses confirm the construction of the two indexes and indicate that the constructed indexes function similarly across countries, meaning the indexes are invariant across countries and function in a similar manner in all countries. The results of these analyses are available upon request from the authors.
We used exploratory factor analysis to ascertain that the variables constitute two separate dimensions in accordance with the structure of the typology (see Table 6). The results support the results since two dimensions are extracted, where ‘Political trust’ and ‘Satisfaction with democracy’ load strongly onto the first dimension (Orientation toward political system) while ‘Political efficacy’ and ‘Political interest’ load strongly onto the other dimension (Orientation toward political role). Furthermore, both the strengths of the factor loadings and the amount of variance explained (76.23%) indicate that the four variables load onto two separate latent dimensions in accordance with the typology. A possibility would be to use the factor loadings rather than the four variables in the subsequent analyses. However, this option is not chosen since it is an inherent assumption of the typology that the two dimensions are independent of each other, whereas the factorial solution allows partial dependency between the dimensions. The underlying variation would also be reduced by using the factor values. For more on methods of classification for these purposes, see Denk and Christensen (2014).
The eta2-measure is defined as the variation between groups in relation to the total variation. Hence, if the eta2 score is below 0.5 it indicates that most of the variation is found within the groups. The differences may still be statistically significant, since this only concerns whether the differences between the groups are sufficiently large in comparison to the total variation, not whether the differences within the groups are larger.
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Denk, T., Christensen, H.S. & Bergh, D. The Composition of Political Culture—A Study of 25 European Democracies. St Comp Int Dev 50, 358–377 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9174-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9174-6