Chapter 4. Political Culture and Identity
Chapter Overview
This chapter examines political culture and political identity and why some countries can sustain
stable democracies and improve the capabilities of their citizens, whereas others cannot. The
chapter is divided into five sections.
The first defines political culture and cautions about traps to avoid in studying it. The second
examines the civic culture and self-expression approaches to political culture, how they explain
stable and effective democracies. The third section considers the concept of social capital and
how it helps explain why some countries do a better job than others of promoting citizens’
capabilities. The fourth explores how ethnic, national, and religious identities can divide
countries, how these divisions can give rise to violent conflicts, and how such outbreaks of
violence can be explained. The final section of the chapter assesses how political culture and
identity affect citizens’ capabilities.
The first defines political culture as a society’s shared values, beliefs, and norms, and
orientations toward politics. A society’s political culture shapes how people think about their
country’s political system as a whole, the decision-making process, and their own role in that
process. Before examining the specific ways political scientists use political culture, cautions
about two traps are offered: relying on stereotypes rather than empirical evidence about what
people believe and assuming that people of a certain ethnic or religious background all have
similar political beliefs.
The second section examines two approaches to political culture and the strengths and limits of
each. First is the civic culture approach, which argues that a lack of congruence, or match,
between a country’s political culture and its institutions is likely to create political instability.
Democratic institutions need a democratic political culture, and authoritarian institutions need an
authoritarian political culture. Second is the self-expression approach, which argues that
economic development and the social changes that accompany it lead to changes in people’s
values supportive of democracy. This approach explains why people rise up to protest
authoritarian rule and make demands of democratic leaders to be more responsive to their needs.
The third section defines social capital and how it is related to capabilities. High levels of social
trust and dense social networks enable citizens to collaborate to attain shared goals. Where they
are in short supply, citizens find it extraordinarily difficult to achieve shared goals.
The fourth section turns to the politics of identity, focusing on three main identities that can play
especially important roles in politics: ethnic, national, and religious. They have not waned in
importance as some political scientists believed they would. In many countries, they are the
sources of intense political struggle and even violence. There are three main ways of explaining
why these ethnic conflicts lead to violence. First, primordialism assumes that intergroup conflict
is inherent in human nature. People need enemies to help define who “we” are and who “they”
are, and once groups are defined in this way, conflict between them becomes inevitable. Second,
instrumentalism hypothesizes that violence is provoked by political leaders who manipulate
symbols and beliefs to set groups against each other for political benefit. Finally, constructivism
proposes that identities are not simply given, but are socially constructed. It suggests that
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cultures change more than primordialism assumes and are less easily manipulated than
instrumentalism believes.
The final section assesses how political culture and identity promote or frustrate citizens’
capabilities by investigating the hypothesis that citizens living in countries with high levels of
social trust are more likely to be willing to help those with fewer resources achieve their full
potential as humans. It finds modest support for the hypothesis with regard to infant mortality,
literacy, and safety, and generally strong support for democracy.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
4.1 Explain how Malala Yousafzai’s experience exemplifies the ways in which identity and
political culture can affect individuals’ capabilities.
4.2 Define political culture and state the basic assumption of those using the concept to study
politics.
4.3 Compare and contrast the civic culture and self-expression approaches to political culture.
4.4 Apply the concept of social capital to explain why some democracies do a better job than
others of promoting citizens’ capabilities.
4.5 Describe three identities that can become the basis of identity politics.
4.6 Apply primordial, instrumental, and constructivist approaches to explain how identity can
lead to violent conflict.
4.7 Explain the advantages of scatter diagrams, identify the independent and dependent variables
in a scatter diagram, and summarize the findings.
Chapter Outline
I. INTRODUCTION
A. This chapter examines the issues of identity and political culture and why some
countries can sustain stable democracies, whereas others cannot.
B. The chapter is divided into five sections:
4. Exploring how ethnic, national, and religious identities can divide countries,
how these divisions can give rise to violent conflicts, and how such outbreaks
5. Assessing how political culture and identity promote or frustrate citizens’
capabilities
II. POLITICAL CULTURE
A. Culture denotes a society’s widely shared values, beliefs, norms, symbols, and
orientations toward the world.
1. A society’s political culture shapes how citizens regard their government and
its decision-making process.
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2. Political culture determines whether citizens feel:
a. Proud or ashamed of their country
b. Hopeful or cynical about its politics
c. Politically influential or impotent
3. The basic assumption to this approach to the study of politics is that political
culture is a “crucial determinant of the type of political system by which a
population is governed.”
4. How to avoid common traps in the study political culture
a. Rely on evidence about what people believe rather than stereotypes
b. Do not assume that people of a certain ethnic or religious background all
have similar political beliefs
III. TWO APPROACHES TO POLITICAL CULTURE
1. The basic assumption of the civic culture approach is that congruence, or a
match, between a country’s political culture and its political institutions is
necessary for political stability.
2. Some political scientists using this approach have focused on the kind of
political culture necessary to maintain democracies. The pioneering study
related to this is Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture
(1963).
a. The goal of this study was to discover what kind of political culture was
needed to sustain stable democracies.
b. To answer this question, a team of researchers surveyed citizens’ political
attitudes in five democracies: Great Britain, the United States, Germany,
Italy, and Mexico.
c. They concluded that the United States and Britain most closely
exemplified the kind of political culture most likely to sustain democracy.
d. Almond and Verba called this pattern the “civic culture.”
politics, was actually preferable to the “ideal” political culture of civics
3. Essential components of a civic culture
a. Coexistence of citizens with different levels of political participation and
interest helped maintain a healthy balance between maintaining
government responsiveness to citizens’ concerns and allowing it to govern
without undue disruption.
4. These social changes occur along two dimensions.
a. From traditional to secular values
i. In very poor societies, many people hold traditional values, which
include strong religious beliefs and respect for the authority of
political and religious leaders.
ii. Those holding secular values put less importance on religion as a
guiding force and are less willing to respect authority based on
religious validation.
iii. Proponents of secular values become more likely to challenge the
authority of religious and non-elected political leaders.
b. From preoccupation with survival to an emphasis on self-expression
values
i. Survival values concern the requirements of staying alive.
ii. In very poor societies, many people struggle just to feed themselves
and their families, relying extensively on relatives and, sometimes,
powerful patrons for assistance.
iii. However, economic development causes the incomes of many
people to rise, thereby enhancing their feelings of security.
iv. They tend to become more self-reliant and to adopt self-expression
values, which emphasize personal satisfaction, freedom of speech,
freedom to choose one’s own path in life, tolerance toward people
with different lifestyles, political liberty, and willingness to challenge
authorities.
v. Such people are also more inclined to value liberty for others,
including those of different religions, races, ethnic groups, and
sexual orientations.
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c. Measurable changes in societal values are reflected in survey data such as
the World Values Survey conducted by a research team led by Ronald
Inglehart.
i. That study examined dozens of countries over a period of decades
and made it possible to locate individuals’ attitudes along the two
dimensions of value change.
D. Scholars using the social capital approach have focused on two particular factors
that facilitate collaboration: social networks and social trust.
E. Social networks are beneficial relationships among individuals rooted in
reciprocity.
1. Social networks can also enable individuals to work collectively to bring
about political change.
2. Online social networks have dramatically increased both the numbers of
people who can be organized for collective action and the speed with which
they can be mobilized.
3. For example, in China, when the drunken son of a deputy police chief ran over
two men in his car in 2010, and killed one of them, he yelled at onlookers,
“Sue me if you dare. My father is Li Gang.”
4. In the past, he might have gotten away with such behavior. Sons of powerful
5. This time, however, networks of online activists all over the country picked up
the story quickly and put so much pressure on the government that the son
was sentenced to six years in prison.
6. One caution is that there is a dark side to social networks: They can be used
for destructive purposes as well as beneficial ones.
a. High-school cliques are social networks used to bully and humiliate
students who are not part of the network.
b. The Nazis used networks of sympathetic organizations to orchestrate their
rise to power.
c. Social networks can be used to organize riots that kill hundreds of people.
d. Al-Qaeda uses online social networks to recruit followers.
F. Social trust is trust that extends beyond one’s own group or social network to
include most people in a society.
1. Because social trust leads people to take an interest in the well-being of
others, the concept helps explain why some countries do a better job than
others of providing nearly universal access to high-quality health care and
education.
2. Citizens living in countries with high levels of social trust tend to “believe that
various groups in society have a shared fate, and that there is a responsibility
to provide for those with fewer resources.”
3. Higher levels of social trust help make it possible to design public policies in
ways to provide these resources and ensure that individuals have “their
chances to reach their full potential as humans.”
4. Classic examples of countries with high levels of social trust are Denmark,
Norway, and Sweden.
a. Characterized by relatively low levels of income inequality, public policies
that promote equality of opportunity for citizens to develop their potential,
and extremely low levels of government corruption.
b. Income equality matters because when citizens are not divided by large
income differentials, they are more likely to sympathize with one
another’s plight.
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c. Equality of opportunity matters because lower-income citizens can be
optimistic about the future for themselves and their children.
d. Honest governments matter because officials who treat citizens impartially
reinforce social trust.
e. Impartiality conveys the message that all are treated equally before the law
E. Nationalism
1. Unlike ethnicity, nationalism is inherently political.
2. A nation is a group of people sharing a collective identity that derives from
either having a state of their own or desiring one.
a. Their sense of identity is usually based on a combination of cultural
values, ethnicity, language, and living together in a geographical area that
they consider their own.
3. Nationalism is a sense of pride in one’s nation and a desire to control a state
representing that nation.
4. Nationalism has three main components:
a. Members of a nation think of themselves as equals united by their
common nationality.
b. Members of a nation see their nation as one among many in a world
divided into sovereign nation-states.
c. In each nation-state, legitimate authority is derived from the people.
5. Nationalism is constructed by political elites.
6. How the French nation was constructed
a. In the mid-1800s, the lives of most people in France centered on local
communities with few connections to the rest of the country.
b. French was a foreign language for many of them, and they had no
conception of being part of a French nation.
c. French political elites set out to create a French identity among all people
living within the country’s borders.
d. To accomplish this task, the state built roads and railways that linked
villages and people.
e. The state funded a national educational system and required every child to
attend school.
f. There they were taught the French language, French history, French
literature, and respect for national symbols such as the flag.
g. The goal was to create emotional ties to other citizens and loyalty to the
state.
F. Religion
1. A third form of identity that plays an important role in politics is a sense of
affiliation with others based on religion.
2. Religion is not just about individuals’ beliefs in a deity or an afterlife.
3. Religion also provides them with a way to separate “us” from “them.”
4. In some countries, there are two or more religions, such as Hindus and
Muslims in India, but even where one religion predominates, citizens can be
divided into separate sects or denominations that can be in conflict.
5. Religious issues tend to be more salient in politics when a large percentage of
a country’s population regards religion as an important force in their lives.
7. Nor do religious differences necessarily lead to political conflict.
VI. CONTENTIOUS IDENTITY POLITICS
A. Identity has been the source of contentious politics in many countries.
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1. Often, political conflict based on identity is contained within the bounds of
normal politics.
a. For example, this has been the case for immigration of Muslims from the
Middle East and North Africa into European countries.
b. Their presence has led to increasing tensions between the immigrants and
parts of the native-born majority in several countries.
c. Some natives fear that immigrants threaten their jobs and national identity
and believe that they are a drain on public finances.
d. Immigrants typically respond by saying that natives have no appreciation
of how hard it is to integrate in European societies or how much
discrimination they face.
d. One scholar is Samuel Huntington, who argued in The Clash of
Civilizations that “for self-definition and motivation people need
enemies…They naturally distrust and see as threats those who are
different and have the capability to harm them.”
e. Once groups are defined in this way, conflict between them becomes
inevitable.
f. One weakness in the primordial approach is that it does not explain fully
how groups with different identities are able to live alongside each other
peacefully for decades.
g. A second weakness is that does not explain fully why violent conflict
breaks out in certain regions of a country or certain cities rather than in
others.
2. Instrumentalism
a. Violence is provoked by political leaders who manipulate symbols and
beliefs to set groups against each other for political gain.
b. This approach has been used to explain cases of violence between ethnic
groups in Rwanda.
c. This approach has proved useful for explaining why ethnic and religious
violence breaks out in some areas of a country or city and not in others,
but it has its limits.
d. One limitation is that political leaders cannot manipulate people’s
identities in any way they desire at any time.
e. Another limitation is that leaders cannot construct entirely new identities
to suit their purposes. They must work within the framework of identities
that already exist.
3. Constructivism
a. It points out that the criteria we employ to draw boundaries between ethnic
and racial groups are not obvious or inherent. They are socially
constructed and can differ considerably from one society, or one historical
period to another.
b. Identities do not derive back to time immemorial and remain eternally
fixed as some primordialists argue, but change over time in a continuing
process of refinement and redefinition.
c. Societies tend to have one socially constructed master cleavage, such as
that between whites and blacks in the U.S., Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda,
and Muslims and Hindus in India.
d. Extremists can use an incident that happens spontaneously, or manufacture
one, to start violence by placing the incident into the larger context of that
master cleavage.
e. The social constructivist approach suggests both that cultures change more
than primordialists assume and that cultures are less easily manipulated
than instrumentalists believe.
f. Although the social constructivist approach does a better job than the other
two of explaining identity formation, it does not explain why ethnic,
national, or religious conflict occurs at specific times in specific locations.
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