Political Culture
In its attempt to find a universal framework within which political regimes could be compared and the question of political development addressed, the functional approach took the political system as a whole as its starting-point. At the same time, however, it recognized the existence of cultural factors which lay outside the political system proper, but exerted a significant influence on the way which it worked. The final version of Almond and Powell's approach grouped these factors under the heading of 'socialization' or the process by which individuals acquired the attitudes and values which would orient their behaviour in society. As we saw in Chapter 2, political development theorists rejected the idea, derived from modernization theory, that political attitudes and values would have to become wholly 'modern' for political development to succeed. And as we shall see here and in the following chapter, the doctrine for political development came to see the issue of 'culture' as an aspect of elite-mass relations. In both cases, political culture was interpreted in terms consistent with the revisionist theory of democracy.
One of the earliest documents produced by the Committee on Research in Comparative Politics attributed the problems of developing societies to unresolved cultural conflicts arising out of the uneven impact of Western influences on traditional situations (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1023). Its authors went on to spell out succinctly what was to be the enduring core agenda of the cultural approach:
The fundamental cultural conflict between traditional beliefs and Western influences has gone far toward destroying the earlier basis of political consensus, and the increasing number of participants complicates the conscious attempts at developing a new consensus. One of the basic problems for the researcher, then, is to analyze the forces that may be most significant in contributing to or disrupting the evolution of a new pattern of consensus. He will be concerned with discovering the distribution of attitudes and behavior which may in time become institutionalized, and which will provide compatible orientations on the appropriateness of means and ends of political activity (1025; emphasis mine).
Almond's first discussion of the comparative analysis of political systems offered a similar perspective. It defined political culture as 'the particular pattern of orientation to political actions within which every political system is embedded', and endorsed the homogeneous, secular political culture of the Anglo-American political systems, anchored in a fundamental consensus over values:
By a secular political culture I mean a multi-valued political culture, a rational-calculating, bargaining, and experimental political culture. It is a homogeneous culture in the sense that there is a sharing of political ends and means. The great majority of the actors in the political system accept as the ultimate goals of the political system some combination of the values of freedom, mass welfare, and security. There are groups which stress one value at the expense of the others; there are times when one value is stressed by all groups; but by and large the tendency is for all these values to be shared, and for no one of them to be completely repressed (Almond 1956: 37).
In both cases, the analysis of political culture focused on the extent to which political attitudes and values and resulting patterns of behaviour were both shared and conducive to political stability, and the implications when they were not. While the functional approach saw the shaping of values and attitudes through political socialization as one aspect of the system as a whole, other efforts were made from the late 1950s to develop a specifically cultural approach outside the framework of functionalism. This gave rise in the early 1960s to two complementary yet contrasting studies: Pye's Politics, Personality, and Nation Building (1962), and Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963). These texts explored the connections between individual attitudes, values and behaviour on the one hand, and prospects for political stability and democracy on the other, using basic data derived from interviews and surveys conducted with individual citizens. However, they approached the issue from opposite directions. Pye focused on the case of Burma, which he saw as a transitional regime beset with deep-seated problems. Almond and Verba, in contrast, focused on the 'civic culture' they associated with Britain and the United States, and although they introduced Mexico at the last minute as a further case study alongside Italy and Germany, they addressed the issue of countries in transition to modernity only in their closing pages.
These studies were followed by Pye and Verba's collection on Political Culture and Political Development (1965), in the Studies in Political Development series. Despite its title, it abandoned the attempt to produce a cultural theory of political development, moving the debate instead towards elite theory and comparative history. It is best understood, therefore, as a critique of the cultural approach as it stood in the early 1960s. It is considered as such here, along with the set of critical essays on The Civic Culture published by Almond and Verba as The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), and its substantive arguments on elites and comparative history are considered in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively.
After Politics, Personality and Nation Building and The Civic Culture, then, the leading exponents of political development theory made no further attempt to develop a specifically cultural approach. In this chapter we examine the principal arguments of these two studies, and the criticism to which they were subjected within the political development literature.
As we shall see, Politics, Personality and Nation Building, a somewhat idiosyncratic text which fell outside the mainstream of political development theory, was centrally informed by a conservative version of elite theory. Equally, the enormously influential Civic Culture was a restatement of an already established theme – the need for an elite-controlled consensus. Although its ideas as to the kind of political culture appropriate to stable liberal democracy were quickly revised, its core assumptions with those of the revisionist theory of democracy. The eventual incorporation of the issue of 'political culture' within the framework of elite theory in Political Culture and Political Development should therefore be seen as a logical development, already implicit in these earlier studies.
Politics, Personality and Nation Building
In Politics, Personality and Nation Building, Pye set out to investigate 'the basic attitudes and orientations of various key groups in (Burmese) society toward the political process' (Pye 1962: xiii), and to explore their political effects. The political culture was said to include six significant dimensions: the scope of activities, issues, and decisions perceived as relevant to the management of political power; the body of wisdom and knowledge which made it possible for people to comprehend, find meaning in, explain and predict behaviours perceived as being relevantly political; the faith beyond substantive knowledge which was governed by the prophetic words of those perceived as appropriate spokesmen of the future; the values assumed to be most sensitive to political actions; the standards accepted as valid for appraising and evaluating political conduct; and the legitimate identities people could assume in contending for power and the common identity which the polity provides for all (122–4). Pye's central concern was to explain why transitional societies had such great difficulties in creating an effective modern state system. To answer it, he pointed beyond manifest objective problems such as a shortage of capital and absence of trained personnel to 'a level of psychological problems involving attitudes and sentiments which create equal if not more serious difficulties', and a resulting vicious circle going from fear of failure in nation-building to deep anxieties which inhibited effective action, in in turn making imagined failure real and heightening anxiety further. He commented that 'the shocking fact has been that in the last decade the new countries of Asia have had more difficulties with the psychological than with the objective economic problems basic to nation building' (xv). Burma was chosen as a case study on the grounds that the absence of objective handicaps to economic development suggested 'the extreme importance of nonobjective considerations' such as political relations, psychological attitudes, and cultural values (60), but he argued at the same time that the Burmese case study provided 'a basis for appreciating the general problems of political development throughout the under developed world' (xvi).
At the outset, Pye returned to two themes central to his account of the 'non-Western political process' – the psychological motivation which underlay political participation in transitional societies as individuals responded to personal needs and sought solutions to intensely personal problems, with the consequent lack of a connection between participation, public policy preferences, and outcomes; and tendency for leaders to insist upon the existence of conformity precisely when the elements of consensus were lacking, and to adopt authoritarian methods in response to lingering self-doubt (6). In sum, he proposed a psychological explanation for the failure to achieve development, the irrationality of the political process, and the trend towards the adoption of authoritarian forms of rule.
Pye argued that whereas in a modern society the processes of basic socialization, political socialization and recruitment to political roles tended to reinforce each other, in a transitional society they tended to lack coherence, and give rise to crises of identity, and loss of self-confidence. Availing himself of Erikson's concept of 'ego identity', he concluded that
the struggles of large numbers of people in any society to realize their own basic sense of identity will inevitably be reflected in the spirit of the society's political life, and… those conscious and subconscious elements most crucial in determining the individual's identity must have their counterpart in the shared sentiments of the polity. We must assume that in transitional societies in which the socialization process fails to give people a clear sense of identity there will be related uncertainty in the political cultures of the people (53).
In such societies, uncertainty and lack of trust would proliferate, and people would lack the capacity to work together to create the complex organisations which development and modernization required.
Drawing on secondary sources and data derived from 79 interviews with administrative officials, politicians, journalists, educators and businessmen, Pye then diagnosed the Burmese political culture as revolving around feelings of anxiety and aggression, and a consequent tendency to look to charismatic leaders for reassurance (125–6). The political process was characterized by secretiveness and poor communications, and an unusually large gap between public and private discourse on politics, and was intensely personal in nature. The Burmese were held to manifest a compulsive desire to be above others; to have an intense distant fear of criticism, and to crave warm and intimate relationships yet fear that such relationships would require submission to another (128-35). Their political behaviour reflected contradictory extremes of gentleness, religiosity and virtue on the one hand, and violence, malicious scheming and devious thinking on the other. As a result of an uneasiness in human relations stemming from the unpredictable emotional responses of Burmese mothers to their children, and the further effects of acculturation in a modernizing society, politicians would dissimulate and bide their time until in a position to destroy their enemies, then move against them ruthlessly. Political life, as a consequence, was marked by long periods of inaction and lethargy interspersed with outbursts of frantic action (136-44). Power was pursued for the pure pleasure it gave, with no concern for the implementation of specific programmes.
At the same time, the individual experienced complex impulses of awza and ah-nah-deh, which prompted urges to exert influence and leadership on the one hand, and to display self-abnegation on the other, thus investing the pursuit of power with contradictory emotional overtones. Decision-making was seen as dreary and dangerous, and intentions as reflective of the inner self were valued above actions. No connections were perceived between political statements or actions and policy outcomes, with the result that programmes were announced in order to 'demonstrate purity of motive and to realize self-expression', but not followed up on the grounds that political action had little influence over fundamental developments. Similarly, there was no connection between expressed ideology and political behaviour: ideologyies were adopted to lend dignity to the underlying power struggle, but politics actually revolved entirely around personalities (145-57). The politician or administrator tended to see the political process are so complex that he suffered 'a complete paralysis of effort, usually followed by a feeling that others with malicious intentions have been frustrating his desires and making his life difficult (170-1). As a result, the general perception that all manner of things had occurred in his lifetime without foresight or planning bred 'a certain willingness to close (his) eyes to the future and hope for the best' (174).
Pye sought to explain this picture of the Burmese political culture by reference to aspects of infant, adolescent, and political socialization. For example, the blend of optimism and distrust in the (male) character was traced to the infant bliss of breast-feeding on demand, followed by the betrayal of the capricious alternation of affection and coldness from the mother (184-5); other manifestations of uncertainty were attributed to suppressed homosexual feelings for fathers or the monks who provided instruction to young boys (180, ft.6; 192).
Against this background, Pye examined the 'political acculturation of administrators and politicians, identifying at the heart of the process the tragic dilemma that 'some degree of acculturation is necessary for a people to learn about the essentials of nation building, and yet the process of acculturation tends to produce psychological reactions which inhibit and frustrate the nation-building effort' (212). Politicians and administrators alike appeared, at different psychological levels, unable to conquer various forms of ambivalence that in their cumulative effect destroy the capacity for those forms of action necessary for nation building (212.) In the case of administrators, ambivalence towards progress and modernization, confusion over the difference between ritual and rationality in bureaucratic operations, and a fundamental and all-pervasive lack of communication among officials were traced back to the psychological impact of the colonial past. Administrators with a record of service under British rule were resentful that they were given little credit for progress in the colonial period, and inflexibly committed to formal procedures as a result of their confinement to clerical roles. They were jealous of their educational status yet doubtful of their own ability, and burdened with guilt and resentment as a result of the disturbing thought that their loyalty to and admiration for their British superior amounted to a form of treason. This left them with the shameful knowledge that if they had not entirely betrayed their country by collaboration with the colonial enemy, it was only because the British had not accepted them sufficiently as equals to give them the real responsibility they craved. Administrators were unconsciously profoundly demoralized by 'the suppressed thought that they might have become traitors had it not been for the British refusal to accept them' (224). The deep insecurity thus generated provoked a fear of innovation, and unwillingness to be open with subordinates, and a tendency to cling to procedural formality.
If administrators had suffered psychological damage as a result of their exposure to clear but counter-productive role models, politicians suffered from an absence of any realistic role model, and a consequent tendency to set themselves inappropriate and impossible standards, judge themselves as failures, and retreat into passivity. As a result, the political leadership felt powerless to act, anxious to court popularity despite the lack of challenges from below, and inclined to argue that democracy was impossible in Burma, all because of 'insecurities arising from faulty concepts of the role of the popular politician' (250). In addition, their role is mediators between rural and urban Burma caused them to vacillate between opposite images of themselves, with the result that the lack of a stable self-image raised feelings of anxiety and doubt: 'At the core of this confused sense of profession lie deeper self-doubts and an endemic fear of failure. Unable to define their role clearly in their own minds, they cannot be sure that they have not been failures' (252). In addition, they retained from their perception of colonial rule the feeling that government was both omnipotent and effortless, and were locked into a psychological pattern of political immobilism by the belief that 'to suggest the need for effort and sacrifice after independence was to call into question one's omnipotence' (253). These attitudes combined with deeply ambivalent feeling towards tradition and nationalism to produce the 'basic paralysis of will of the Burmese politician' (265).
In the light of this extended analysis, Pye concluded that it was necessary to face the disturbing prospect that 'not only Burma but most transitional societies are likely to be faced in the years to come with increasingly pressing problems' as transitional peoples were 'prone to intensely human but essentially self-defeating political practices' (287). Their only hope of salvation lay in their finding meaning in a fusion of 'world culture' and their own historic cultures, an outcome which could be achieved in two general ways. The first of these was the grand ideological solution' offered by a charismatic leader who had first found integrity in his own quest for identity, but this was rendered unlikely by the tendency of such leaders in contemporary transitional societies to communicate confusion and uncertainty rather than confidence as a result of their failure to resolve the crisis of identity in their own persons. It would therefore have to be combined with a second approach, which entailed 'assisting individuals as individuals as individuals to find their sense of identity through the mastery of demanding skills', thus producing people able to 'meet in their daily lives the exacting but psychologically reassuring standards of professional performance basic to the modern world' and creating 'communities of modernizers who would constitute islands of stability in an otherwise erratically changing world'. Despite his closing endorsement of the 'democratic ideal', therefore, Pye's concrete suggestion aimed at the foreign policy community was that 'the test of profession may prove to be a means overcoming many of the psychological ambivalences produced by the acculturation process' (289).
Pye's fascination with amateur psychology and his tendency to interpret the Burmese political process as essentially irrational for deep-seated reasons of individual psychology gave his analysis an eccentric tone which placed it outside the mainstream political development literature. This aspect of the text is not without interest, both for what it reveals about Pye's disposition to interpret non-Western culture as fundamentally irrational and for the comforting ability of the approach to exclude issues of political economy in general, and imperialist and neo-imperialist exploitation in particular. But at the same time, Pye shared many of the central concerns of political development theory. Reduced to its essentials, his analysis was concerned with the character of elites, and their ability to lead a process of pro-Western modernization. If appropriate elites were to be created, he argued, it would be through the training and advancement of Westernised professional middle classes, who would then provide the basis for future political stability. However, if the reasons for the absence of such elites came down to reasons of upbringing and personal psychology, the prospects for their creation through Western influence and intervention were remote.
The Civic Culture
Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963), researched and written between 1958 and 1962, was published the year after Pye's Politics, Personality and Nation Building. As noted above, it drew its model of the 'civic culture' from Britain and the United States. It sought to 'apply some of the methods developed in the field of systematic survey research to the study of comparative politics' (Almond and Verba 1963: 45), in order to investigate the prospects for the emergence of a similar 'mixed modernizing-traditional' cultures in nations around the world. At first sight, the task appeared overwhelming:
How can a set of arrangements and attitudes so fragile, so intricate, and so subtle be transplanted out of historical and cultural context? Or, how can these subtleties and these human etiquettes survive even among ourselves in a world caught in the grip of a science and technology run wild, destructive of tradition and of community and possibly of life itself? (9).
In order to address the policy issues concerned they would deploy the full battery of theoretical resources produced by the scientific revolution in comparative politics:
If we are to come closer to understanding the problems of the diffusion of democratic culture, we have to be able to specify the content of what has to be diffused, to develop appropriate measures for it, to discover its quantitative incidence and demographic distribution in countries with a wide range of experience with democracy. With such knowledge we can speculate intelligently about 'how much of what' must be present in a country before democratic institutions take root in congruent attitudes and expectations (9-10).
Although many emphases were shared, their analytical framework was more elaborate than that adopted by Pye, and less focused on the detail of individual psychology. And where Pye had studied a small number of elite political actors, Almond and Verba surveyed larger groups of citizens, but sought no direct interview data from elites. Their most significant difference with Pye was that they insisted that political culture was no more determined by the 'general psychological orientation' of individuals than it was by political structure. With this departure from what they described as 'the oversimplifications of the psychocultural literature' they hoped to demonstrate that 'the importance of specific learning of orientations to politics and of experience with the political system has been seriously underemphasized' (34; emphasis in the original). If this was so, of course, political culture was the product of political socialization and public policy, and attitudes could be changed, within limits, by purposive governmental action.
The definitional structure of The Civic Culture followed from this assumption. The term 'culture' was employed only in the strictly limited sense of 'psychological orientation to social objects', leaving aside any other sociological or anthropological usages; and the political culture of a nation was defined as the particular distribution of patterns of orientation towards political objects among the members of the nation' (14–15). Almond and Verba investigated orientations of three kinds, drawn from Parsons and Shils – cognitive affective and evaluative (that is, arising from knowledge, feelings and opinions respectively). Each was explored in relation to four objects – the political system in general, its input and output aspects, and the self as a political actor. On this basis, three types of culture were identified: parochial, where the individual knows little of the political system and expects nothing from it, subject, where the individual has an essentially passive awareness of the system and its outputs, and participant, where the individual is equally aware of the input and output sides of the system, and of the norm of activism (but, it should be noted, is not necessarily an activist). These three orientations were described as congruent with traditional, centralized authoritarian and democratic political structures respectively, but there was no implication that they would coincide: 'political cultures may or may not be congruent with the structures of the political system' (21). The political culture could be described as allegiant where cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations to the political structure were all positive, as apathetic where affective and evaluative orientations were neutral or indifferent; and as alienated where they were hostile or negative.
Finally, and of crucial significance for the character of the 'civic culture', the three levels were cumulative. Neither the individual citizen nor the culture would be exclusively parochial, subject or participant. Participant cultures would harbour numerous minorities of parochial and subjects among their citizens, and participant citizens would exhibit some parochial and subject orientations. In addition, mixed systems combining pairs of the three basic types of political cultures – parochial-subject, subject-participant, and parochial-participant – were possible. Overall what was at issue was 'what "mix" of citizens, subjects and parochial is related to the effective performance of democratic systems' (20-21).
The most significant feature of this elaborate classification was that it deliberately left out a possible fourth model of the citizen in a democratic society – the active citizen playing a full part in debate and decision-making. For Almond and Verba, this was a step forward, and a strong point in their approach. Having laid out their massive framework, the authors outlined the civic culture (see Box 4.1) in terms which contrasted it directly with the rational-activist model 'that one finds described in the civics textbooks' (32).
One of the earliest documents produced by the Committee on Research in Comparative Politics attributed the problems of developing societies to unresolved cultural conflicts arising out of the uneven impact of Western influences on traditional situations (Kahin, Pauker and Pye 1955: 1023). Its authors went on to spell out succinctly what was to be the enduring core agenda of the cultural approach:
The fundamental cultural conflict between traditional beliefs and Western influences has gone far toward destroying the earlier basis of political consensus, and the increasing number of participants complicates the conscious attempts at developing a new consensus. One of the basic problems for the researcher, then, is to analyze the forces that may be most significant in contributing to or disrupting the evolution of a new pattern of consensus. He will be concerned with discovering the distribution of attitudes and behavior which may in time become institutionalized, and which will provide compatible orientations on the appropriateness of means and ends of political activity (1025; emphasis mine).
Almond's first discussion of the comparative analysis of political systems offered a similar perspective. It defined political culture as 'the particular pattern of orientation to political actions within which every political system is embedded', and endorsed the homogeneous, secular political culture of the Anglo-American political systems, anchored in a fundamental consensus over values:
By a secular political culture I mean a multi-valued political culture, a rational-calculating, bargaining, and experimental political culture. It is a homogeneous culture in the sense that there is a sharing of political ends and means. The great majority of the actors in the political system accept as the ultimate goals of the political system some combination of the values of freedom, mass welfare, and security. There are groups which stress one value at the expense of the others; there are times when one value is stressed by all groups; but by and large the tendency is for all these values to be shared, and for no one of them to be completely repressed (Almond 1956: 37).
In both cases, the analysis of political culture focused on the extent to which political attitudes and values and resulting patterns of behaviour were both shared and conducive to political stability, and the implications when they were not. While the functional approach saw the shaping of values and attitudes through political socialization as one aspect of the system as a whole, other efforts were made from the late 1950s to develop a specifically cultural approach outside the framework of functionalism. This gave rise in the early 1960s to two complementary yet contrasting studies: Pye's Politics, Personality, and Nation Building (1962), and Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963). These texts explored the connections between individual attitudes, values and behaviour on the one hand, and prospects for political stability and democracy on the other, using basic data derived from interviews and surveys conducted with individual citizens. However, they approached the issue from opposite directions. Pye focused on the case of Burma, which he saw as a transitional regime beset with deep-seated problems. Almond and Verba, in contrast, focused on the 'civic culture' they associated with Britain and the United States, and although they introduced Mexico at the last minute as a further case study alongside Italy and Germany, they addressed the issue of countries in transition to modernity only in their closing pages.
These studies were followed by Pye and Verba's collection on Political Culture and Political Development (1965), in the Studies in Political Development series. Despite its title, it abandoned the attempt to produce a cultural theory of political development, moving the debate instead towards elite theory and comparative history. It is best understood, therefore, as a critique of the cultural approach as it stood in the early 1960s. It is considered as such here, along with the set of critical essays on The Civic Culture published by Almond and Verba as The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), and its substantive arguments on elites and comparative history are considered in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively.
After Politics, Personality and Nation Building and The Civic Culture, then, the leading exponents of political development theory made no further attempt to develop a specifically cultural approach. In this chapter we examine the principal arguments of these two studies, and the criticism to which they were subjected within the political development literature.
As we shall see, Politics, Personality and Nation Building, a somewhat idiosyncratic text which fell outside the mainstream of political development theory, was centrally informed by a conservative version of elite theory. Equally, the enormously influential Civic Culture was a restatement of an already established theme – the need for an elite-controlled consensus. Although its ideas as to the kind of political culture appropriate to stable liberal democracy were quickly revised, its core assumptions with those of the revisionist theory of democracy. The eventual incorporation of the issue of 'political culture' within the framework of elite theory in Political Culture and Political Development should therefore be seen as a logical development, already implicit in these earlier studies.
Politics, Personality and Nation Building
In Politics, Personality and Nation Building, Pye set out to investigate 'the basic attitudes and orientations of various key groups in (Burmese) society toward the political process' (Pye 1962: xiii), and to explore their political effects. The political culture was said to include six significant dimensions: the scope of activities, issues, and decisions perceived as relevant to the management of political power; the body of wisdom and knowledge which made it possible for people to comprehend, find meaning in, explain and predict behaviours perceived as being relevantly political; the faith beyond substantive knowledge which was governed by the prophetic words of those perceived as appropriate spokesmen of the future; the values assumed to be most sensitive to political actions; the standards accepted as valid for appraising and evaluating political conduct; and the legitimate identities people could assume in contending for power and the common identity which the polity provides for all (122–4). Pye's central concern was to explain why transitional societies had such great difficulties in creating an effective modern state system. To answer it, he pointed beyond manifest objective problems such as a shortage of capital and absence of trained personnel to 'a level of psychological problems involving attitudes and sentiments which create equal if not more serious difficulties', and a resulting vicious circle going from fear of failure in nation-building to deep anxieties which inhibited effective action, in in turn making imagined failure real and heightening anxiety further. He commented that 'the shocking fact has been that in the last decade the new countries of Asia have had more difficulties with the psychological than with the objective economic problems basic to nation building' (xv). Burma was chosen as a case study on the grounds that the absence of objective handicaps to economic development suggested 'the extreme importance of nonobjective considerations' such as political relations, psychological attitudes, and cultural values (60), but he argued at the same time that the Burmese case study provided 'a basis for appreciating the general problems of political development throughout the under developed world' (xvi).
At the outset, Pye returned to two themes central to his account of the 'non-Western political process' – the psychological motivation which underlay political participation in transitional societies as individuals responded to personal needs and sought solutions to intensely personal problems, with the consequent lack of a connection between participation, public policy preferences, and outcomes; and tendency for leaders to insist upon the existence of conformity precisely when the elements of consensus were lacking, and to adopt authoritarian methods in response to lingering self-doubt (6). In sum, he proposed a psychological explanation for the failure to achieve development, the irrationality of the political process, and the trend towards the adoption of authoritarian forms of rule.
Pye argued that whereas in a modern society the processes of basic socialization, political socialization and recruitment to political roles tended to reinforce each other, in a transitional society they tended to lack coherence, and give rise to crises of identity, and loss of self-confidence. Availing himself of Erikson's concept of 'ego identity', he concluded that
the struggles of large numbers of people in any society to realize their own basic sense of identity will inevitably be reflected in the spirit of the society's political life, and… those conscious and subconscious elements most crucial in determining the individual's identity must have their counterpart in the shared sentiments of the polity. We must assume that in transitional societies in which the socialization process fails to give people a clear sense of identity there will be related uncertainty in the political cultures of the people (53).
In such societies, uncertainty and lack of trust would proliferate, and people would lack the capacity to work together to create the complex organisations which development and modernization required.
Drawing on secondary sources and data derived from 79 interviews with administrative officials, politicians, journalists, educators and businessmen, Pye then diagnosed the Burmese political culture as revolving around feelings of anxiety and aggression, and a consequent tendency to look to charismatic leaders for reassurance (125–6). The political process was characterized by secretiveness and poor communications, and an unusually large gap between public and private discourse on politics, and was intensely personal in nature. The Burmese were held to manifest a compulsive desire to be above others; to have an intense distant fear of criticism, and to crave warm and intimate relationships yet fear that such relationships would require submission to another (128-35). Their political behaviour reflected contradictory extremes of gentleness, religiosity and virtue on the one hand, and violence, malicious scheming and devious thinking on the other. As a result of an uneasiness in human relations stemming from the unpredictable emotional responses of Burmese mothers to their children, and the further effects of acculturation in a modernizing society, politicians would dissimulate and bide their time until in a position to destroy their enemies, then move against them ruthlessly. Political life, as a consequence, was marked by long periods of inaction and lethargy interspersed with outbursts of frantic action (136-44). Power was pursued for the pure pleasure it gave, with no concern for the implementation of specific programmes.
At the same time, the individual experienced complex impulses of awza and ah-nah-deh, which prompted urges to exert influence and leadership on the one hand, and to display self-abnegation on the other, thus investing the pursuit of power with contradictory emotional overtones. Decision-making was seen as dreary and dangerous, and intentions as reflective of the inner self were valued above actions. No connections were perceived between political statements or actions and policy outcomes, with the result that programmes were announced in order to 'demonstrate purity of motive and to realize self-expression', but not followed up on the grounds that political action had little influence over fundamental developments. Similarly, there was no connection between expressed ideology and political behaviour: ideologyies were adopted to lend dignity to the underlying power struggle, but politics actually revolved entirely around personalities (145-57). The politician or administrator tended to see the political process are so complex that he suffered 'a complete paralysis of effort, usually followed by a feeling that others with malicious intentions have been frustrating his desires and making his life difficult (170-1). As a result, the general perception that all manner of things had occurred in his lifetime without foresight or planning bred 'a certain willingness to close (his) eyes to the future and hope for the best' (174).
Pye sought to explain this picture of the Burmese political culture by reference to aspects of infant, adolescent, and political socialization. For example, the blend of optimism and distrust in the (male) character was traced to the infant bliss of breast-feeding on demand, followed by the betrayal of the capricious alternation of affection and coldness from the mother (184-5); other manifestations of uncertainty were attributed to suppressed homosexual feelings for fathers or the monks who provided instruction to young boys (180, ft.6; 192).
Against this background, Pye examined the 'political acculturation of administrators and politicians, identifying at the heart of the process the tragic dilemma that 'some degree of acculturation is necessary for a people to learn about the essentials of nation building, and yet the process of acculturation tends to produce psychological reactions which inhibit and frustrate the nation-building effort' (212). Politicians and administrators alike appeared, at different psychological levels, unable to conquer various forms of ambivalence that in their cumulative effect destroy the capacity for those forms of action necessary for nation building (212.) In the case of administrators, ambivalence towards progress and modernization, confusion over the difference between ritual and rationality in bureaucratic operations, and a fundamental and all-pervasive lack of communication among officials were traced back to the psychological impact of the colonial past. Administrators with a record of service under British rule were resentful that they were given little credit for progress in the colonial period, and inflexibly committed to formal procedures as a result of their confinement to clerical roles. They were jealous of their educational status yet doubtful of their own ability, and burdened with guilt and resentment as a result of the disturbing thought that their loyalty to and admiration for their British superior amounted to a form of treason. This left them with the shameful knowledge that if they had not entirely betrayed their country by collaboration with the colonial enemy, it was only because the British had not accepted them sufficiently as equals to give them the real responsibility they craved. Administrators were unconsciously profoundly demoralized by 'the suppressed thought that they might have become traitors had it not been for the British refusal to accept them' (224). The deep insecurity thus generated provoked a fear of innovation, and unwillingness to be open with subordinates, and a tendency to cling to procedural formality.
If administrators had suffered psychological damage as a result of their exposure to clear but counter-productive role models, politicians suffered from an absence of any realistic role model, and a consequent tendency to set themselves inappropriate and impossible standards, judge themselves as failures, and retreat into passivity. As a result, the political leadership felt powerless to act, anxious to court popularity despite the lack of challenges from below, and inclined to argue that democracy was impossible in Burma, all because of 'insecurities arising from faulty concepts of the role of the popular politician' (250). In addition, their role is mediators between rural and urban Burma caused them to vacillate between opposite images of themselves, with the result that the lack of a stable self-image raised feelings of anxiety and doubt: 'At the core of this confused sense of profession lie deeper self-doubts and an endemic fear of failure. Unable to define their role clearly in their own minds, they cannot be sure that they have not been failures' (252). In addition, they retained from their perception of colonial rule the feeling that government was both omnipotent and effortless, and were locked into a psychological pattern of political immobilism by the belief that 'to suggest the need for effort and sacrifice after independence was to call into question one's omnipotence' (253). These attitudes combined with deeply ambivalent feeling towards tradition and nationalism to produce the 'basic paralysis of will of the Burmese politician' (265).
In the light of this extended analysis, Pye concluded that it was necessary to face the disturbing prospect that 'not only Burma but most transitional societies are likely to be faced in the years to come with increasingly pressing problems' as transitional peoples were 'prone to intensely human but essentially self-defeating political practices' (287). Their only hope of salvation lay in their finding meaning in a fusion of 'world culture' and their own historic cultures, an outcome which could be achieved in two general ways. The first of these was the grand ideological solution' offered by a charismatic leader who had first found integrity in his own quest for identity, but this was rendered unlikely by the tendency of such leaders in contemporary transitional societies to communicate confusion and uncertainty rather than confidence as a result of their failure to resolve the crisis of identity in their own persons. It would therefore have to be combined with a second approach, which entailed 'assisting individuals as individuals as individuals to find their sense of identity through the mastery of demanding skills', thus producing people able to 'meet in their daily lives the exacting but psychologically reassuring standards of professional performance basic to the modern world' and creating 'communities of modernizers who would constitute islands of stability in an otherwise erratically changing world'. Despite his closing endorsement of the 'democratic ideal', therefore, Pye's concrete suggestion aimed at the foreign policy community was that 'the test of profession may prove to be a means overcoming many of the psychological ambivalences produced by the acculturation process' (289).
Pye's fascination with amateur psychology and his tendency to interpret the Burmese political process as essentially irrational for deep-seated reasons of individual psychology gave his analysis an eccentric tone which placed it outside the mainstream political development literature. This aspect of the text is not without interest, both for what it reveals about Pye's disposition to interpret non-Western culture as fundamentally irrational and for the comforting ability of the approach to exclude issues of political economy in general, and imperialist and neo-imperialist exploitation in particular. But at the same time, Pye shared many of the central concerns of political development theory. Reduced to its essentials, his analysis was concerned with the character of elites, and their ability to lead a process of pro-Western modernization. If appropriate elites were to be created, he argued, it would be through the training and advancement of Westernised professional middle classes, who would then provide the basis for future political stability. However, if the reasons for the absence of such elites came down to reasons of upbringing and personal psychology, the prospects for their creation through Western influence and intervention were remote.
The Civic Culture
Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture (1963), researched and written between 1958 and 1962, was published the year after Pye's Politics, Personality and Nation Building. As noted above, it drew its model of the 'civic culture' from Britain and the United States. It sought to 'apply some of the methods developed in the field of systematic survey research to the study of comparative politics' (Almond and Verba 1963: 45), in order to investigate the prospects for the emergence of a similar 'mixed modernizing-traditional' cultures in nations around the world. At first sight, the task appeared overwhelming:
How can a set of arrangements and attitudes so fragile, so intricate, and so subtle be transplanted out of historical and cultural context? Or, how can these subtleties and these human etiquettes survive even among ourselves in a world caught in the grip of a science and technology run wild, destructive of tradition and of community and possibly of life itself? (9).
In order to address the policy issues concerned they would deploy the full battery of theoretical resources produced by the scientific revolution in comparative politics:
If we are to come closer to understanding the problems of the diffusion of democratic culture, we have to be able to specify the content of what has to be diffused, to develop appropriate measures for it, to discover its quantitative incidence and demographic distribution in countries with a wide range of experience with democracy. With such knowledge we can speculate intelligently about 'how much of what' must be present in a country before democratic institutions take root in congruent attitudes and expectations (9-10).
Although many emphases were shared, their analytical framework was more elaborate than that adopted by Pye, and less focused on the detail of individual psychology. And where Pye had studied a small number of elite political actors, Almond and Verba surveyed larger groups of citizens, but sought no direct interview data from elites. Their most significant difference with Pye was that they insisted that political culture was no more determined by the 'general psychological orientation' of individuals than it was by political structure. With this departure from what they described as 'the oversimplifications of the psychocultural literature' they hoped to demonstrate that 'the importance of specific learning of orientations to politics and of experience with the political system has been seriously underemphasized' (34; emphasis in the original). If this was so, of course, political culture was the product of political socialization and public policy, and attitudes could be changed, within limits, by purposive governmental action.
The definitional structure of The Civic Culture followed from this assumption. The term 'culture' was employed only in the strictly limited sense of 'psychological orientation to social objects', leaving aside any other sociological or anthropological usages; and the political culture of a nation was defined as the particular distribution of patterns of orientation towards political objects among the members of the nation' (14–15). Almond and Verba investigated orientations of three kinds, drawn from Parsons and Shils – cognitive affective and evaluative (that is, arising from knowledge, feelings and opinions respectively). Each was explored in relation to four objects – the political system in general, its input and output aspects, and the self as a political actor. On this basis, three types of culture were identified: parochial, where the individual knows little of the political system and expects nothing from it, subject, where the individual has an essentially passive awareness of the system and its outputs, and participant, where the individual is equally aware of the input and output sides of the system, and of the norm of activism (but, it should be noted, is not necessarily an activist). These three orientations were described as congruent with traditional, centralized authoritarian and democratic political structures respectively, but there was no implication that they would coincide: 'political cultures may or may not be congruent with the structures of the political system' (21). The political culture could be described as allegiant where cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations to the political structure were all positive, as apathetic where affective and evaluative orientations were neutral or indifferent; and as alienated where they were hostile or negative.
Finally, and of crucial significance for the character of the 'civic culture', the three levels were cumulative. Neither the individual citizen nor the culture would be exclusively parochial, subject or participant. Participant cultures would harbour numerous minorities of parochial and subjects among their citizens, and participant citizens would exhibit some parochial and subject orientations. In addition, mixed systems combining pairs of the three basic types of political cultures – parochial-subject, subject-participant, and parochial-participant – were possible. Overall what was at issue was 'what "mix" of citizens, subjects and parochial is related to the effective performance of democratic systems' (20-21).
The most significant feature of this elaborate classification was that it deliberately left out a possible fourth model of the citizen in a democratic society – the active citizen playing a full part in debate and decision-making. For Almond and Verba, this was a step forward, and a strong point in their approach. Having laid out their massive framework, the authors outlined the civic culture (see Box 4.1) in terms which contrasted it directly with the rational-activist model 'that one finds described in the civics textbooks' (32).
Box 4.1 The 'civic culture'
The civic culture is not the political culture that one finds described in civics textbooks, which prescribed the way in which citizens ought to act in a democracy. The norms of citizen behaviour found in these texts stress the participant aspect of political culture. The democratic citizen is expected to be active in politics and to be involved. Furthermore, he is supposed to be rational in his approach to politics, guided by reason, not by emotion. He is supposed to be well informed and to make decisions – for instance, his decision on how to vote – on the basis of careful calculation as to the interests and the principles he would like to see furthered. This culture, with its stress on rational participation within the input structures of politics, we can label the 'rationality-activist' model of political culture. The civic culture shares much with this rationality-activist model; it is, in fact, such a culture plus something else. It does stress the participation of individuals in the political input process. In the civic culture described in this volume we shall find high frequencies of political activity, of exposure to political communications, of political discussion, of concern with political affairs. But there is something else.
In the first place, the civic culture is an allegiant participant culture. Individuals are not only oriented to political input, they are oriented positively to the input structures and the input process. In other words, to use the terms introduce earlier, the civic culture is a participant culture in which the political culture and political structure are congruent.
More important, in the civic culture participant political orientations combine with and do not replace subject and parochial political orientations. Individuals become participants in the political process, they do not give up their orientations as subjects nor as parochials. Furthermore, not only are these earlier orientations maintained, alongside the participant political orientations, but the subject and parochial orientations are congruent with the participant political orientations. The nonparticipant, more traditional political orientations tend to limit the individual's commitment to politics and to make that commitment milder. In a sense, the subject and parochial orientations 'manage' or keep in place the participant political orientations. Thus attitudes favorable to participation within the political system play a major role in the civic culture, but so do such nonpolitical attitudes as trust in other people and social participation in general. The maintenance of these more traditional attitudes and their fusion with the participant orientations lead to a balanced political culture in which political activity, involvement and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values.
Source: Almond and Verba 1963: 31-2.
The civic culture is not the political culture that one finds described in civics textbooks, which prescribed the way in which citizens ought to act in a democracy. The norms of citizen behaviour found in these texts stress the participant aspect of political culture. The democratic citizen is expected to be active in politics and to be involved. Furthermore, he is supposed to be rational in his approach to politics, guided by reason, not by emotion. He is supposed to be well informed and to make decisions – for instance, his decision on how to vote – on the basis of careful calculation as to the interests and the principles he would like to see furthered. This culture, with its stress on rational participation within the input structures of politics, we can label the 'rationality-activist' model of political culture. The civic culture shares much with this rationality-activist model; it is, in fact, such a culture plus something else. It does stress the participation of individuals in the political input process. In the civic culture described in this volume we shall find high frequencies of political activity, of exposure to political communications, of political discussion, of concern with political affairs. But there is something else.
In the first place, the civic culture is an allegiant participant culture. Individuals are not only oriented to political input, they are oriented positively to the input structures and the input process. In other words, to use the terms introduce earlier, the civic culture is a participant culture in which the political culture and political structure are congruent.
More important, in the civic culture participant political orientations combine with and do not replace subject and parochial political orientations. Individuals become participants in the political process, they do not give up their orientations as subjects nor as parochials. Furthermore, not only are these earlier orientations maintained, alongside the participant political orientations, but the subject and parochial orientations are congruent with the participant political orientations. The nonparticipant, more traditional political orientations tend to limit the individual's commitment to politics and to make that commitment milder. In a sense, the subject and parochial orientations 'manage' or keep in place the participant political orientations. Thus attitudes favorable to participation within the political system play a major role in the civic culture, but so do such nonpolitical attitudes as trust in other people and social participation in general. The maintenance of these more traditional attitudes and their fusion with the participant orientations lead to a balanced political culture in which political activity, involvement and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values.
Source: Almond and Verba 1963: 31-2.
At the outset, the authors did not intend to extend the focus of their research to cover the political culture of any 'emerging nation'. The original set of countries chosen for detailed investigation was Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United States. Mexico was substituted for Sweden at the last minute, but Almond and Verba recognized that it was hardly representative of the emerging nations of Africa and Asia. However, they defined the political cultures of the 'emerging nations' within their framework as parochial-participant, as a result of the recent introduction of participant norms in a predominantly parochial context, and problematic as a result:
It is not surprising that most of these political systems, always threatened by parochial fragmentation, teeter like acrobats on tightropes, leaning precariously at one time toward authoritarianism, at another toward democracy. There is no structure on either side to lean on, neither a bureaucracy resting upon loyal subjects nor an infrastructure arising from responsible and competent citizens. The problem of development from parochial to participant culture seems, on first look, to be a hopeless one; but if we remember that most parochial autonomies and loyalties survive, we may at least say that the development of participant cultures in some of the emerging nations has not yet been precluded. The problems are to penetrate the parochial systems without destroying them on the output side, and to transform them into interest groups on the input side (26).
The content of the 'civic culture' was spelled out in more detail in the conclusion, where it was approved as 'appropriate for maintaining a stable and effective democratic process' (493). Here, again, the target was the rationality-activist model of citizenship, and the mode of behaviour it sought to endorse. The model of the citizen as a rational activist was condemned as empirically false. Citizens in democracies 'are not well informed, not deeply involved, not particularly active; and the process by which they come to their voting decision is anything but a process of rational calculation' (474). For the great majority politics and political activity were not matters of great interest or concern. What is more, this was seen as entirely appropriate. Far from constituting evidence of the malfunctioning of democracy, the 'mixed' political culture they described was central to its proper functioning:
On the one hand, a democratic government must govern; it must have power and leadership and make decisions. On the other hand, it must be be responsible to its citizens. For if democracy means anything it means that in some way governmental elites must respond to the desires and demands of citizens. The need to maintain this sort of balance between governmental power and governmental responsiveness, as well as the need to maintain other balances that derived from the power/responsiveness balance – balances between consensus and cleavage, between affectivity and affective neutrality – helps explain the way which the more mixed patterns of political attitudes associated with the civic culture are appropriate for a democratic political system' (476; emphasis mine).
In the 'civic culture,' then, elites had the freedom to govern, while citizens had a reserve of influence arising from their potentiality for action; elites were aware of it, and responded accordingly, assuming that citizens would act on their demands otherwise. The stability of the system was increased if governmental elites responded effectively to the demands created when significant issues rose.
In conclusion, Almond and Verba turned to the implications of their study for the developing states. Despite their exhaustive analysis, however, or rather because of the nature of the conclusions reached, they could not in the end identify means by which the civic culture could be induced in emerging nations. It could only survive where cooperativeness, trust and actual consensus existed and individuals did not attach too much important to politics; and 'unless the political culture is able to support a democratic system, the chances for the success of that system are slim' (498). Such a culture could not be taught, as 'a major part of political socialisation ... involves direct exposure to the civic culture and the democratic policy themselves' (499). The problem of how to create one in new nations, they acknowledged, 'takes us well beyond the scope of our data'; in the West, it had been a gradual process, relatively crisis-free, untroubled and unforced', marked by the fusion of old and the new attitudes (500). Present conditions, however, were not the same:
The problem in the new nations of the world is that such gradualness is not possible. There is a great demand for participation in politics from many who were only recently parochials. Tremendous problems of social change must be faced all at once. And what may be most crucial: the very acts of creating national boundaries and national identity must go on at the same time. A slow political development may foster a civic culture, but what the new nations of the world lack is the time for this gradual development (501).
As to whether it was possible to find substitutes for this gradual and fusional process: 'there is no clear answer ... and one can only speculate' (501). Education could create some of the components of the civic culture; other channels of political socialization (family, work, voluntary associations) might help; and there was also a need for unifying symbols and cognitive skills: 'stated in these terms, the difficulties confronting efforts to create effective democratic processes and the orientations necessary to sustain them in the developing areas may appear to be insurmountable' (504). Almond and Verba were led to conclude that while education and industrialization might help to promote a democratic opportunity, there were no readily available answers to the question of what other resources might consolidate such tendencies and potentialities. More than five hundred pages on, they were no nearer a solution to the proper identified at the outset than they were at the beginning. They closed with the assertion that if the book could 'create a more sober and informed appreciation of the nature and complexity of the problems of democratization' it would have served its purpose (505). Even as these words were being written, however, the groundwork was being laid for the abandonment of the 'civic culture' as a model for developing states.
The Abandonment of the 'Civic Culture' Model
Despite some differences in method and emphasis, there was considerable common ground between the two major studies reviewed. In particular, each endorsed the idea of a 'mixed' political culture, in which traditional and modern elements were fused, as the best basis for political stability, and each took a pessimistic view of the capacity of the political cultures of developing societies to contribute to stability or democracy. These were, as we saw in Chapter 2, standard themes throughout the whole political development literature. However, the literature was also consistently oriented to making a contribution at the levels of theory and policy, and the authors of these studies found that notwithstanding the depth of theory on which they drew, and the elaborate analytical exercises which they carried out, there were few returns either in theoretical advances, or in the resolution of policy issues. They responded by abandoning the 'civic culture' as a model, and moving away from the attempt to build a separate theory of political culture. Almond went on with Powell to develop further the functional approach reviewed in Chapter 3, while Pye and Verba addressed the issues from a different perspective in an edited volume, Political Culture and Political Development, published in 1965. Over a decade later, Almond and Verba (1980) returned to the theme in a further edited collection, The Civic Culture Revisited. Together, these two volumes offer an internal critique of the 'political culture' approach, of particular interest because the same authors were involved.
At first sight, Political Culture and Political Development had a great deal in common with the two studies reviewed above. The studies it contained arose from the same period, and from interaction between Almond, Pye and Verba in a series of conferences and meetings; Pye and others drew heavily on Almond's ideas, and Verba contributed two chapters, a case study of Germany and a comparative and theoretical conclusion. There were also frequent references to The Civic Culture in the text. The emphasis was squarely on the urgent and unavoidable need to come to terms with the global 'participation explosion' and the increased demands that masses placed upon governing elites, and the message that traditional political orientations must be preserved rather than swept away was reaffirmed. At the same time, though, there were such important differences of emphasis in both method and argument that the volume must be regarded as a significant departure from previous approaches.
Almond and Verba had based the bulk of their argument on data from opinion surveys, and sought to identify and interpret patterns reflected in the responses they received. They offered only the briefest sketches of national political cultures, and made sparing use of historical data. Their primary purpose was to derive from their data a single model of a political culture appropriate for democratization. Pye also collected and analysed material from extended interviews, but he offered a detailed analysis of the Burmese case as representative of all transitional societies. His primary purpose was to depict the political culture of a typical developing state. In contrast, Political Culture and Political Development placed the emphasis upon the variety of empirical situations around the developed and developing world. Pye noted 'the various combinations and constellations of values which may govern different patterns of development' and the variation in the potential for modernization from one 'traditional' culture to another: 'In some societies, the traditional political culture appears to have provided a ready basis for a democratic evolution, while in others the tendencies have been more consistent with authoritarian ways (Pye 1965a: 10–11). On this basis, he opted for an open-ended case study approach. No attempt was made to match the analytical framework of The Civic Culture, and the bulk of the collection was taken up with lengthy studies of Egypt, England, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Soviet Russia, and Turkey. In this one respect, the approach was more in line with the case study methodology adopted in Politics, Personality and Nation Building, but in other crucial respects Pye and his collaborators abandoned the methodology of that study too. The pervasive emphasis on individual psychology was dropped, as were sweeping claims regarding the causal role of psychological variables. And although the careful reader would pick up echoes of Pye's approach to the case study of Burma in his introduction, no attempt was made either to agree and work to a common definition of political culture, or to gather data from interviews and life histories, or even to work to a common analytical framework of any kind, as 'it seemed best to emphasize more the existing richness of area studies than the potential advantages of systematic schemata for defining and classifying political cultures (Pye 1965a: 13). The authors were asked to include 'some historical treatment and some evaluation of the significance of various socializing agents in shaping their particular political culture', but were otherwise given a free hand. The resulting case study chapters delivered a blend of historical narrative and analysis which reinforced the idea of different paths towards political stability, and of different cultural formations within which such stability might be achieved.
Verba's conclusion to the volume as a whole confirmed the shift away from any precise concept of political culture. Using the term because 'it has some currency in the literature, and any substitute word would just introduce more confusion', Verba commented that 'as used in this essay (it) refers to a rather general approach to politics and some imprecision in its definition is probably not too crucial' (Verba 1965b: 513, ft. 1). Its use was further justified not in terms of an elaborate model or distinct causality, but with the bland assertion that it 'serves to focus our attention on an aspect of political life, and such a focus of attention is useful' (515).
Against this background Verba presented political culture, following Parsons, as a system of control vis-à-vis the system of political interactions' (517), stressing that political beliefs were not fixed for all time. He thereby switched attention away from underlying sets of orientations, whether conducive or not to political stability, to the changeability of basic political beliefs, and the role of elites in changing the beliefs of the masses:
The changeability of basic political beliefs is indeed a crucial question to the elites of developing nations. It is customary to think that cultural dimensions are unchanging factors that form the setting within which politics is carried on; that culture conditions politics, but not vice versa ... But the situation is sharply different today. Basic beliefs have now become the object of direct concern and attempted manipulation by the political elites in many nations (520).
This shift in perspective entailed another important change: the abandonment of the claims for the universal desirability of a civic culture. Given the set of circumstances 'new nations' faced, Verba argued in his case study of Germany that the German case might be the crucial one for the new states, rather than those of Britain and the United States, as in 1945 Germany faced the simultaneous problems of creating new basic political attitudes, and rebuilding an economy and a nation (Verba 1965a: 132). He argued that as the case of Germany was one of 'the conscious manipulative change of fundamental political attitudes, in particular of change in the direction of more democratic attitudes', the question arose or whether there was 'a set of political attitudes that is requisite for a democratic political system or, if not requisite, at least conducive to the maintenance of democracy'. In particular, 'is the civic culture the standard one should use in assessing the democratic potential of German political attitudes? (133). His conclusion was that it is not, as the extended quotation highlighted in Box 4.2 makes clear.
It is not surprising that most of these political systems, always threatened by parochial fragmentation, teeter like acrobats on tightropes, leaning precariously at one time toward authoritarianism, at another toward democracy. There is no structure on either side to lean on, neither a bureaucracy resting upon loyal subjects nor an infrastructure arising from responsible and competent citizens. The problem of development from parochial to participant culture seems, on first look, to be a hopeless one; but if we remember that most parochial autonomies and loyalties survive, we may at least say that the development of participant cultures in some of the emerging nations has not yet been precluded. The problems are to penetrate the parochial systems without destroying them on the output side, and to transform them into interest groups on the input side (26).
The content of the 'civic culture' was spelled out in more detail in the conclusion, where it was approved as 'appropriate for maintaining a stable and effective democratic process' (493). Here, again, the target was the rationality-activist model of citizenship, and the mode of behaviour it sought to endorse. The model of the citizen as a rational activist was condemned as empirically false. Citizens in democracies 'are not well informed, not deeply involved, not particularly active; and the process by which they come to their voting decision is anything but a process of rational calculation' (474). For the great majority politics and political activity were not matters of great interest or concern. What is more, this was seen as entirely appropriate. Far from constituting evidence of the malfunctioning of democracy, the 'mixed' political culture they described was central to its proper functioning:
On the one hand, a democratic government must govern; it must have power and leadership and make decisions. On the other hand, it must be be responsible to its citizens. For if democracy means anything it means that in some way governmental elites must respond to the desires and demands of citizens. The need to maintain this sort of balance between governmental power and governmental responsiveness, as well as the need to maintain other balances that derived from the power/responsiveness balance – balances between consensus and cleavage, between affectivity and affective neutrality – helps explain the way which the more mixed patterns of political attitudes associated with the civic culture are appropriate for a democratic political system' (476; emphasis mine).
In the 'civic culture,' then, elites had the freedom to govern, while citizens had a reserve of influence arising from their potentiality for action; elites were aware of it, and responded accordingly, assuming that citizens would act on their demands otherwise. The stability of the system was increased if governmental elites responded effectively to the demands created when significant issues rose.
In conclusion, Almond and Verba turned to the implications of their study for the developing states. Despite their exhaustive analysis, however, or rather because of the nature of the conclusions reached, they could not in the end identify means by which the civic culture could be induced in emerging nations. It could only survive where cooperativeness, trust and actual consensus existed and individuals did not attach too much important to politics; and 'unless the political culture is able to support a democratic system, the chances for the success of that system are slim' (498). Such a culture could not be taught, as 'a major part of political socialisation ... involves direct exposure to the civic culture and the democratic policy themselves' (499). The problem of how to create one in new nations, they acknowledged, 'takes us well beyond the scope of our data'; in the West, it had been a gradual process, relatively crisis-free, untroubled and unforced', marked by the fusion of old and the new attitudes (500). Present conditions, however, were not the same:
The problem in the new nations of the world is that such gradualness is not possible. There is a great demand for participation in politics from many who were only recently parochials. Tremendous problems of social change must be faced all at once. And what may be most crucial: the very acts of creating national boundaries and national identity must go on at the same time. A slow political development may foster a civic culture, but what the new nations of the world lack is the time for this gradual development (501).
As to whether it was possible to find substitutes for this gradual and fusional process: 'there is no clear answer ... and one can only speculate' (501). Education could create some of the components of the civic culture; other channels of political socialization (family, work, voluntary associations) might help; and there was also a need for unifying symbols and cognitive skills: 'stated in these terms, the difficulties confronting efforts to create effective democratic processes and the orientations necessary to sustain them in the developing areas may appear to be insurmountable' (504). Almond and Verba were led to conclude that while education and industrialization might help to promote a democratic opportunity, there were no readily available answers to the question of what other resources might consolidate such tendencies and potentialities. More than five hundred pages on, they were no nearer a solution to the proper identified at the outset than they were at the beginning. They closed with the assertion that if the book could 'create a more sober and informed appreciation of the nature and complexity of the problems of democratization' it would have served its purpose (505). Even as these words were being written, however, the groundwork was being laid for the abandonment of the 'civic culture' as a model for developing states.
The Abandonment of the 'Civic Culture' Model
Despite some differences in method and emphasis, there was considerable common ground between the two major studies reviewed. In particular, each endorsed the idea of a 'mixed' political culture, in which traditional and modern elements were fused, as the best basis for political stability, and each took a pessimistic view of the capacity of the political cultures of developing societies to contribute to stability or democracy. These were, as we saw in Chapter 2, standard themes throughout the whole political development literature. However, the literature was also consistently oriented to making a contribution at the levels of theory and policy, and the authors of these studies found that notwithstanding the depth of theory on which they drew, and the elaborate analytical exercises which they carried out, there were few returns either in theoretical advances, or in the resolution of policy issues. They responded by abandoning the 'civic culture' as a model, and moving away from the attempt to build a separate theory of political culture. Almond went on with Powell to develop further the functional approach reviewed in Chapter 3, while Pye and Verba addressed the issues from a different perspective in an edited volume, Political Culture and Political Development, published in 1965. Over a decade later, Almond and Verba (1980) returned to the theme in a further edited collection, The Civic Culture Revisited. Together, these two volumes offer an internal critique of the 'political culture' approach, of particular interest because the same authors were involved.
At first sight, Political Culture and Political Development had a great deal in common with the two studies reviewed above. The studies it contained arose from the same period, and from interaction between Almond, Pye and Verba in a series of conferences and meetings; Pye and others drew heavily on Almond's ideas, and Verba contributed two chapters, a case study of Germany and a comparative and theoretical conclusion. There were also frequent references to The Civic Culture in the text. The emphasis was squarely on the urgent and unavoidable need to come to terms with the global 'participation explosion' and the increased demands that masses placed upon governing elites, and the message that traditional political orientations must be preserved rather than swept away was reaffirmed. At the same time, though, there were such important differences of emphasis in both method and argument that the volume must be regarded as a significant departure from previous approaches.
Almond and Verba had based the bulk of their argument on data from opinion surveys, and sought to identify and interpret patterns reflected in the responses they received. They offered only the briefest sketches of national political cultures, and made sparing use of historical data. Their primary purpose was to derive from their data a single model of a political culture appropriate for democratization. Pye also collected and analysed material from extended interviews, but he offered a detailed analysis of the Burmese case as representative of all transitional societies. His primary purpose was to depict the political culture of a typical developing state. In contrast, Political Culture and Political Development placed the emphasis upon the variety of empirical situations around the developed and developing world. Pye noted 'the various combinations and constellations of values which may govern different patterns of development' and the variation in the potential for modernization from one 'traditional' culture to another: 'In some societies, the traditional political culture appears to have provided a ready basis for a democratic evolution, while in others the tendencies have been more consistent with authoritarian ways (Pye 1965a: 10–11). On this basis, he opted for an open-ended case study approach. No attempt was made to match the analytical framework of The Civic Culture, and the bulk of the collection was taken up with lengthy studies of Egypt, England, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Soviet Russia, and Turkey. In this one respect, the approach was more in line with the case study methodology adopted in Politics, Personality and Nation Building, but in other crucial respects Pye and his collaborators abandoned the methodology of that study too. The pervasive emphasis on individual psychology was dropped, as were sweeping claims regarding the causal role of psychological variables. And although the careful reader would pick up echoes of Pye's approach to the case study of Burma in his introduction, no attempt was made either to agree and work to a common definition of political culture, or to gather data from interviews and life histories, or even to work to a common analytical framework of any kind, as 'it seemed best to emphasize more the existing richness of area studies than the potential advantages of systematic schemata for defining and classifying political cultures (Pye 1965a: 13). The authors were asked to include 'some historical treatment and some evaluation of the significance of various socializing agents in shaping their particular political culture', but were otherwise given a free hand. The resulting case study chapters delivered a blend of historical narrative and analysis which reinforced the idea of different paths towards political stability, and of different cultural formations within which such stability might be achieved.
Verba's conclusion to the volume as a whole confirmed the shift away from any precise concept of political culture. Using the term because 'it has some currency in the literature, and any substitute word would just introduce more confusion', Verba commented that 'as used in this essay (it) refers to a rather general approach to politics and some imprecision in its definition is probably not too crucial' (Verba 1965b: 513, ft. 1). Its use was further justified not in terms of an elaborate model or distinct causality, but with the bland assertion that it 'serves to focus our attention on an aspect of political life, and such a focus of attention is useful' (515).
Against this background Verba presented political culture, following Parsons, as a system of control vis-à-vis the system of political interactions' (517), stressing that political beliefs were not fixed for all time. He thereby switched attention away from underlying sets of orientations, whether conducive or not to political stability, to the changeability of basic political beliefs, and the role of elites in changing the beliefs of the masses:
The changeability of basic political beliefs is indeed a crucial question to the elites of developing nations. It is customary to think that cultural dimensions are unchanging factors that form the setting within which politics is carried on; that culture conditions politics, but not vice versa ... But the situation is sharply different today. Basic beliefs have now become the object of direct concern and attempted manipulation by the political elites in many nations (520).
This shift in perspective entailed another important change: the abandonment of the claims for the universal desirability of a civic culture. Given the set of circumstances 'new nations' faced, Verba argued in his case study of Germany that the German case might be the crucial one for the new states, rather than those of Britain and the United States, as in 1945 Germany faced the simultaneous problems of creating new basic political attitudes, and rebuilding an economy and a nation (Verba 1965a: 132). He argued that as the case of Germany was one of 'the conscious manipulative change of fundamental political attitudes, in particular of change in the direction of more democratic attitudes', the question arose or whether there was 'a set of political attitudes that is requisite for a democratic political system or, if not requisite, at least conducive to the maintenance of democracy'. In particular, 'is the civic culture the standard one should use in assessing the democratic potential of German political attitudes? (133). His conclusion was that it is not, as the extended quotation highlighted in Box 4.2 makes clear.
Box 4.2 Verba's critique of the 'civic culture'
Though the civic culture is conducive to the maintenance of democracy where it is found, there have been just too few cases studied to allow one to assume that it is the only feasible pattern for democratic politics. Other patterns of political attitudes may work as well. And the appropriate set of attitudes for the United States or Britain may be a less appropriate basis for democracy in a nation which has undergone the political shocks of German political history. Furthermore the types of political attitudes that developed within the older democracies maybe neither feasible nor the most useful to late-comers to the democratic scene. The pattern of relatively free economic development pursued by the nations that industrialized in the nineteenth century worked well for those nations but may not be the pattern most conducive to rapid growth in the twentieth. And the same maybe be true of political development as well. What led to stay with democracy in an earlier age, maybe less relevant today.
Source: Verba 1965a: 134.
Though the civic culture is conducive to the maintenance of democracy where it is found, there have been just too few cases studied to allow one to assume that it is the only feasible pattern for democratic politics. Other patterns of political attitudes may work as well. And the appropriate set of attitudes for the United States or Britain may be a less appropriate basis for democracy in a nation which has undergone the political shocks of German political history. Furthermore the types of political attitudes that developed within the older democracies maybe neither feasible nor the most useful to late-comers to the democratic scene. The pattern of relatively free economic development pursued by the nations that industrialized in the nineteenth century worked well for those nations but may not be the pattern most conducive to rapid growth in the twentieth. And the same maybe be true of political development as well. What led to stay with democracy in an earlier age, maybe less relevant today.
Source: Verba 1965a: 134.
As a result of these shifts, the central arguments of the political development literature as a whole were reaffirmed and brought directly into line with the assumptions of the revisionist theory of democracy, as emphasis was squarely placed on the dangers of too rigid a distinction between tradition and modernity, the pattern of gradual adaptation and assimilation of traditional elements in successful cases, the virtues of the elite-mass model of participation and the need for elite control. At the same time, the idea of a single most appropriate model of political culture which had informed The Civic Culture and the analysis of psychological obstacles to the definition of an appropriate national identity which informed Politics, Personality and Nation Building were both dropped. In their place, the emphasis switched directly to consideration of the means by which elites could act upon the political orientations of the masses in ways favourable to the promotion of political stability. To put it another way, whereas Politics, Personality and Nation Building had focused on elite psychology, and The Civic Culture had focused on mass orientations towards politics, Political Culture and Political Development focused on elite management of mass orientations. At the same time, in a second shift which stretched the concept of political culture to include broad patterns of historical, social and economic change, the conclusion shifted the focus from the comparison of political cultures to the identification of the sequence of challenges faced over time in the process of political development. Here too the issue of the conscious management of mass participation by elites again came strongly to the fore, and it was this theme, considered in substantive terms in the following chapter, which gave the collection its unity.
In a further negative reflection on the political culture approach, the dropping of the civic culture model in Political Culture and Political Development was followed 15 years later by a wide-ranging critique of The Civic Culture itself. Among the many issues raised, those relevant to the argument here concerned first, the alleged relationship between the 'civic culture', political structure and democratic stability, and second, the treatment of the one developing society, Mexico.
Lijphart, the most sympathetic of the assembled critics, defended Almond and Verba against previous charges (Scheuch 1969; Barry 1970; Pateman 1971) that subjective opinions were used as evidence of objective facts, and that a unidirectional causation from political structure to political culture was assumed (Lijphart 1980: 45-9). However, he endorsed the view that Almond and Verba's reading of causality was varied without explanation as suited their case, and that without detailed analysis of actual political structures, which was not provided, it was arbitrary to treat subjective opinions as reflections of personal psychology rather than realistic perceptions of existing structures. Barry's caustic suggestion that the responses of individuals asked about their expectations of treatment from civil servants or of their chances of changing unjust regulations might 'add up to a fairly realistic assessment of the actual state of affairs, rather than, say, projections onto political life of childhood conclaves about the best place for a picnic' (Barry 1970: 51, in Lijphart 1980: 47) was a powerful criticism.
Finally, Lijphart was not alone in pointing out that crucial aspects of the arguments relating to political stability were not explained by the data collected. He noted that the key argument regarding the need for a balance between the responsiveness and power of elites was not supported by any attempt 'to measure elite political culture and behaviour either by a systematic survey or by an impressionistic ranking or classification of the five national governmental elites' (Lijphart 1980:50), and he did not dispute Pateman's claim that elite responsiveness in Britain and the United States was assumed rather than proven, as was the view that levels of participation in Britain and the United States were optimal. Finally, he questioned the logic of Almond and Verba's argument that low levels of civic culture led to democratic instability. Following the logic of the British and US cases, 'passive orientations would make the governmental elites powerful and effective but not very responsive'. Germany and Italy tilted further towards passive attitudes, so their governments should therefore be high on effectiveness and low on democratic responsiveness. In other words, this line of reasoning links an inadequate civic culture to the poor quality of democracy instead of to democratic instability' (52: emphasis mine).
In similar vein, Kavanagh noted that the arguments in the concluding chapter concerning the need for a balance between consensus and cleavage and instrumental and diffuse types of support were not addressed in the survey questions, and were provided with only fragmentary support (Kavanagh 1980:129). In sum, the link between the 'civic culture' and political stability, a crucial claim made by Almond and Verba and one on which the success of the enterprise depended, was assumed rather than demonstrated.
In addition to these fundamental criticisms of the general framework within which the studies were placed, the treatment of Mexico, as the one 'developing society' among the case studies, was heavily criticised. Lijphart found it to be a weak case, because it is doubtful that this country can be regarded as fully democratic' (Lijphart 1980: 44). He also noted that it had been omitted from secondary analysis of the data, and suggested that its belated inclusion had been a mistake. Craig and Cornelius listed a number of methodological weaknesses in the study, notably the fact, on which Lijphart also commented, that the survey had been drawn from urban areas only (Craig and Cornelius 1980: 326-8). In addition, misinterpretations resulting from deficiencies of phrasing and translation in the survey cast doubt upon the validity of the alleged strong aspirational component in Mexican political culture, and symbolic attachment to the values of the revolution. These were the two central features of the picture of Mexican political culture which Almond and Verba presented, and they were crucial to the overall analysis of its character. Craig and Cornelius were prompted to note, in measured terms, a 'strong possibility' that many of the questions employed 'may have tapped rather different dimensions from those Almond and Verba intended to measure' (334).
More broadly, they argued that the analysis fundamentally misinterpreted the nature of the Mexican political system. It had missed crucial arenas of political participation, such as local communities, and overlooked the relative insignificance of voting in comparison to such activities as petitioning, patron-client relationships, orchestrated regime support, and protest and anti-system activity. On this basis, they joined Lijphart in questioning Almond and Verba's assumption that Mexico could be treated as a democracy directly comparable with the others included in the study. Their own interpretation stressed the highly controlled nature of the political system, the success with which citizen input was limited, channelled and manipulated, the accuracy of the understanding individual citizens had of their relative impotence, and the functionality of a low sense of political competence for the stability of the system. This analysis complemented and reinforced the argument that Almond and Verba had confused the issues of the quality and the stability of democracy. In broad terms, then, these criticisms pointed out that the central theme of the 'civic culture' approach was not after all the civic culture as such, but the relationship between between elites and masses and its implications for democracy. And they suggested that political stability required congruence between elite and mass behaviour and expectations at some level, but by no means necessarily of the level suggested by the 'civic culture' as it had been initially defined. In other other words, the critique reinforced the shift of attention to elite-mass relations which was the core of the doctrine for political development.
Conclusion
Despite a preoccupation with issues of political culture in the political development literature throughout its lifespan, no significant attempts were made within it after the early 1960s to produce an approach to political development based exclusively or centrally upon a theory of political culture. Our examination of the different efforts of Pye and Almond and Verba to produce such approaches suggest why this is so.
Although it was representative of a broader literature similarly concerned with the impact of individual psychology upon political culture, Pye's study of Burma was exceptional within the political development literature. Its limited impact can in part be attributed to the fact that it was a case study of a little-known society, but it was also a consequence of the reductionist nature of the argument, and the apparent intractability of the problems it identified. Pye not only dismissed 'objective' problems of development with his insistence that the obstacles to development in Burma were entirely subjective, but also located those subjective obstacles so firmly in childhood and early generational experience but no ready solution to their omnipresent influence was evident. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that the only long-term solution he could envisage was the training of a new corps of rational administrators, to be placed as a bridgehead in Burmese society. The Civic Culture, which was far more influential within the political development literature and in comparative politics generally, rejected Pye's focus on individual psychology and childhood experience, and placed much greater emphasis on social and institutional issues, but still made a reductionist argument and concluded with an apparently insoluble problem. It argued that a 'civic culture' was a necessary prerequisite for stable democracy, but at the same time it was led to conclude that such a culture was unattainable in the great majority of new states.
On closer inspection, though, these arguments proved to be muddled and misleading. Indeed, there was an unresolved paradox at the heart of its attempt to develop a theory of political culture and democratic stability. As Pateman noted, the book was typical of the period in its 'celebration of the role of political apathy and disinterest' (Pateman 1980: 58), yet in terms of the comparisons which were central to the analysis, the apathetic and disinterested citizens of Britain and the United States had to be held up as models of ideally participatory citizens, while their governing elites had to be depicted as ideally responsive. In this respect, the model of the 'civic culture' was not derived directly from the empirical data produced by the systematic survey research, but was an interpretation of the data which distorted it and went beyond it in a number of respects. In fact, virtually the only firm conclusion to be drawn directly from the data was that participation in politics was extremely limited everywhere, but on this point Almond and Verba failed to present the most telling evidence. For example, evidence regarding the overall level of political activity was drawn from reports of attempts to influence the behaviour of government exclusively from the sphere of local government. Respondents were asked whether they had ever done anything to try to influence an act of the national legislature (Almond and Verba 1963: 529, app B, q. 29), but no room was found in 562 pages, 129 accompanying tables, and 11 figures to report the answers given. It is possible to infer that if they had been reported, the data would have shown very low levels of activity. Just under 64 per cent of all respondents declared themselves able to do something about an unjust local regulation, while only 48 per cent felt able to do something about an unjust national regulation (185, table 1; my calculation, based on size of total national samples), so it can be assumed that fewer attempts were made to influence national than local politics. And even when Almond and Verba reported actual attempts to influence local government, they still gave no overall figures. Instead, they compared 'competents' and 'non-competents' (188, table 3). The overall levels, if one cared to calculate them, were as follows: United States 27.7 per cent; Great Britain 14.6 per cent; Germany 13.7 per cent; Italy 8.5 per cent; and Mexico 5.8 per cent. In other words, even in the United States barely over one in four citizens had ever attempted to influence local government in any way, while in Britain, also upheld as a model political democracy, only one in six had done so. Again, actual attempts to influence national government must be assumed to have been significantly lower. And later, when Almond and Verba constructed a 'subjective competence' scale, it was based on five answers concerning local government only (including actual attempts to influence). Here they reported that 'if a scale of national competence had been used, too many respondents would have fallen into the lower category of subjective competence, and the scale would not have been useful to discriminate among various types of citizens' (232; emphasis mine). In what purported to be a study of political participation, then, readers were not told how many individuals had attempted to influence national government, but were simply informed that there was no presentable evidence of 'subject competence' at this level.
The paradox of low levels of participation in the 'civic cultures' was formally resolved by the endorsement of the 'mixed' civic culture, between traditional and modernity, but this did not alter the fact that Almond and Verba were advancing a case for a particular balance between mass participation and elite responsiveness, when their argument logically supported the case only for a balance of some level between participation and responsiveness, whether high, moderate or low. As Lijphart shrewdly noted, their argument linked levels of participation and responsiveness to the quality rather than the stability of democracy. On close inspection the arguments relating to stability proved to bear no relationship to the question of the civic culture, but rather to depend directly upon the issue of elite-mass relations, and in particular the ability of elite to limit and control the political arena. To the extent that political stability could be achieved by the elite management of popular attitudes and hence behaviour, the whole question of the 'civic culture' was irrelevant, and it made very little difference that the prospects for creating such cultures in the developing world were bleak. Indeed, the analysis of Mexico by Craig and Cornelius made it clear that the issues of stability and democracy were quite separate. Had Almond and Verba recognized this, of course, they might have noticed that the Mexican political system was both the least democratic and by far the most stable of the five countries studied.
Despite first appearances, then, The Civic Culture had much more to say about stability than about democracy, and its principal arguments revolved not around the question of the 'civic culture', but around the character of elite-mass relations. It was this realization, on Verba's part at least, which prompted the abandonment of concern with theories of political culture, and informed the direct focus on a elite-mass relations in Political Culture and Political Development. Considered in this light, the volume marked a break with the effort to theorize political development on the basis of political culture, and a significant 'rationalization' of the project to produce a theory of political development. In the end, if there was more continuity between the two volumes than at first seemed apparent, it was more because the central arguments in The Civic Culture were drawn from elite theory than because those of Political Culture and Political Development were about political culture.
In sum, the functional and cultural approaches described in this chapter and the last reflected many of the core ideas and assumptions which prompted the effort to produce a theory of political development, but they represented false starts rather than central contributions to the project. In part this was a consequence of an excessive fascination with abstract theory. It was thought essential to perfect grand theoretical frameworks before addressing the specific issue of transitional societies and the policies appropriate to them, yet the most sustained attempts to develop such theoretical frameworks – in Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach and The Civic Culture – were regarded as no more than preliminary efforts. As a result, the effort of theory-building did not reach a stage at which detailed consideration of the politics and public policies of the new states themselves became possible. The functional approach began as an exercise in comparative politics, and when it did take on a developmental dimension, it found that it could not address the developing areas which were the intended focus of policy. Equally, the theoretical efforts represented by the two early attempts to adopt a cultural approach came to a dead end where the specific topic of political development was concerned, as they appeared, for different reasons, to cast doubt upon the possibility of the purposive development of democratic political institutions in the developing world.
In part this was a consequence of the indirect way in which these analyses approached political institutions. Within the functional approach familiar 'Western' political institutions with transmuted into abstract theoretical categories in a bid for universal significance, and within the cultural approach their functioning was addressed in terms of either individual psychology or the orientation of individuals to the political system. In different ways, the functional and cultural approaches saw political development as a social process heavily conditioned by variables which lay largely beyond the control of either governments or political scientists. As a consequence, while explicit public policy goals were constantly to the fore, little progress was made towards their realization. In the meantime, however, a systematic programme of research into political development was under way in t series of seminars and publications in the Studies in Political Development series funded by the Ford Foundation. These volumes turned aside from the search for a 'theory of political development' in order to identify a more pragmatic 'doctrine for political development', and conceptualized political development not as a complex social process, but as an outcome of state policy. As a consequence of the adoption of this perspective, they addressed directly the issue of public policy and the contribution which a wide range of governmental and social institutions could make to the securing of political stability. It was in these studies, and the political project they embodied, that the model of appropriate political development which had lain beneath the surface of the studies examined so far emerged into the light. They should therefore be considered as the true core of the political development literature.