Political Culture–From Civic Culture to Mass Culture

Review Article: Political Culture - from Civic Culture to Mass Culture

JOHN STREET*

There is a tendency within political science to treat political culture like a familiar piece of furniture. Everyone is vaguely aware of its existence, but only rarely do they comment upon it (usually when they bump into it acciden- tally); and few bother to ask how it came to be there in the first place. Textbooks on British politics typically regard political culture as part of the backdrop, against which the main dramatic activity takes place. Political culture appears as secondary, something which, while enriching our understanding of political life, is not deemed essential to our comprehension of it. The intellectual roots of this attitude can be found in Marxism and functionalism. Both treat culture as subservient to material forces or systemic require- ments. Such positions do not necessarily deny all relevance to the ideas and values which constitute political culture, but they do limit severely its role in explaining political activity. And even those who, like Brian Barry, belong to neither methodological camp believe that, compared to political culture, there are usually more parsimonious explanations for political action.' Other thinkers, however, make political culture a core idea. Early in the second volume of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes: In order that society should exist and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is necessary that the mind of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas; and this cannot be the case unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the common source and consents to accept certain matters of belief already formed.2

This broad suggestion, that society is forged in the interaction of beliefs, inspires those who place political culture at the centre of their analysis. Thus, Aaron

* School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia. The author thanks Keith Dowding, Martin Hollis, David Marsh, Steve Smith, Albert Weale and an anonymous referee for their comments on the first version of this review. They were justly sceptical and generously constructive. 1 B. Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 51. 2 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II (New York: Knopf, 1945), p. 8. It is a view whose origins are most frequently ascribed to J. G. Herder, see Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; originally published in 1791). 96 JOHN STREET

Wildavsky argues that it is culture which generates people's preferences, and that these, in turn, drive the political process.3 In 1963, the argument over the explanatory usefulness of political culture was galvanized by the publication of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture* Its focus on culture meshed with challenges to Marxist material- ism and mechanical structural-functionalism, while its empirical methodology clashed with an emerging doubt about positivism and individualism. Thirty years later, there are signs that culture is again becoming an important concern of political scientists. The collapse of Marxist regimes and the rise of nationalism have drawn attention to the way regimes legitimate themselves and the way citizens identify themselves, both processes which suggest an important mediating role for culture. Political culture is also implicated in the debate over the effect of mass communications on political behaviour.5 At the same time, there has been a theoretical turn within the social sciences towards postmodernism, which, in its disdain for grand narratives and first causes, has placed increasing weight on cultural accounts of human action.6 To observe these events and trends does not, of course, make an incontrovertible case for the reinstatement of political culture, but they do suggest that this is a good moment to re-examine its usefulness to political science. Thus, this review asks whether political culture provides more than background colour to an account of political action.7 If political culture has a useful role, then we need, first, to know what the term means; we then need to be able to say what role - if any - it plays in explaining behaviour. For political culture to have any explanatory force it must do more than simply fill out the details of political action; it must actually shape (or even determine) the character and intention of that action. A cultural theory must account for action more persuasively than do, say, materialist or rational choice theories. Or more weakly, it must demonstrate

3 A. Wildavsky, 'Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Prefer- ence Formation', American Political Science Review, 81 (1987), 4-21. 4 G. A. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). 5 R. Negrine, Politics and the Mass Media in Britain (London: Routledge, 1989), chap. 1; also W. Miller, Media and Voters: The Audience, Content and Influence of Press and Television at the 1987 General Election (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 6 See, for example, R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1989). 7 The books which relate more or less directly to The Civic Culture are: G. A. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture Revisited (London: Sage, 1989); J. R. Gibbins, ed., Contemporary Political Culture (London: Sage, 1989); and S. Welch, The Concept of Political Culture (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1993). These last two also suggest alternative approaches, as do: J. B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); D. Bell, Acts of Union: Youth Culture and Sectarianism in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1990); E. Hughes, ed., Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland 1960-1990 (Milton Keynes, Bucks: Open University Press, 1991); C. Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); and R. M. Merelman, Partial Visions: Culture and Politics in Britain, Canada, and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 97 that political culture is an indispensable and decisive factor in such accounts. If either is the case, and political culture plays an important explanatory role, then there is a further question to be asked: how and why does political culture itself take one form rather than another? This review is, therefore, organized around three central issues: what is political culture? what can it explain? and how do we explain it? These questions are posed at each of three stages in the history of 'political culture'. The first is marked by the publication of The Civic Culture; the second by its subsequent re-assessment; and the third by the rediscovery of political culture in the last decade. In doing this, I will not consider elite political culture, nor will I examine the character of British (or any other) political culture in any detail. This is not to deny their importance. There are, after all, lively debates about the character of contemporary political culture8 - one, for instance, about the penetration of 'postmaterialist' values,9 another about the spread of cynicism within British political life.10 My concern here, though, is not so much with particular case studies as with the theories that underpin them. We begin with the text which focused upon this topic in the 1960s, The Civic Culture.

THE CIVIC CULTURE While The Civic Culture did much to revive a notion that had fallen into abeyance, it also provoked the sort of criticism, itself part of the reaction to positivism and functionalism, which seemed to deny its full acceptance. Almond and Verba, however, set an agenda for much subsequent debate. A brief reminder of their central theoretical claims and the resulting questions will suffice. Political culture is defined by Almond and Verba as the psychological dispositions of individuals: 'attitudes towards the political system and its various parts, and attitudes towards the role of the self in the system.'" These attitudes yield three orientations: (i) cognitive, (ii) affective, and (iii) evaluative. These refer, respectively, to individuals' knowledge of the system, their feelings towards it and their judgement of it.12 For Almond and Verba, political culture is to be regarded as a set of individual psychological states which can be revealed through survey questionnaires. From their definition of political culture, Almond and Verba move on to consider its role within the political process. Here the analysis becomes less

8 See Welch, The Concept of Political Culture, for insightful discussions of particular case studies. 9 R. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Chal- lenges to the Inglehart thesis appear in, among other places, Gibbins, ed., Contemporary Political Culture - especially the chapter by B. Reimer, pp. 110-26. 10 See, for example, G. Parry, G. Moyser and N. Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 179-88, and R. Topf 'Political Change and Political Culture in Britain, 1959-87', in Gibbins ed., Contemporary Political Culture, pp. 52-80. " Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 13. 12 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 15. 98 JOHN STREET precise, and as a result has been the main focus of criticism. At a minimum, Almond and Verba take the view that a country's political system includes its political culture, and that the maintenance of, or change in, that system is linked in some way to its culture. 'One must assume', they write, 'that the attitudes we report have some significant relationship to the way the political system operates - to its stability, effectiveness and so forth.'13 This thought lies behind, for example, their claim that Britain's balance of 'diversity and consensualism, rationalism and traditionalism' made possible the development of British democracy.14 Political culture is viewed as a cross between a catalyst and a fertilizer, providing the conditions for change and sustaining the product of that change. More prosaically, political culture forms the context or environment for political action. But Almond and Verba are not happy to give political culture this rather passive role. They want to separate 'political culture' from the 'political system', so that they can argue that 'political cultures may or may not be congruent with the structure of the political system'.15 Both key terms are, as Barry points out,16 very vague, but we can detect two underlying ideas. They want, first, to establish whether there is in any particular case a compatibility between people's attitudes and their political institutions. The second idea is that only a certain type of culture - civic culture - is appropriate to democracy; or put another way, different cultures fit different regimes. In the ideal democracy, there is compatibility between system and culture: 'the civic culture is a partici- pant political culture in which the political culture and political structure are congruent.'17 But it is important for Almond and Verba that compatibility cannot be assumed, because they want to claim that political culture is an independent variable which can account for the way people react to their polity.18 Sometimes the people's orientations and the system's needs will not mesh. This leads to Almond and Verba's final concern: how the political culture achieves its functional or dysfunctional effect. Why or when does a particular set of individual attitudes have consequences for the operation of politics? For Almond and Verba, the answer lies in the way that political culture links 'micropolitics and macropolitics', and thereby forges a bridge 'between the behaviour of individuals and the behaviour of systems'.19 The attitudes that matter may not be explicitly political, but can be found in the 'nonpolitical attitudes and nonpolitical affiliations' of civil society.20 These thoughts ground the empirical material, the five-nation comparative survey, that forms the bulk

13 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 74. 14 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 8. 15 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 21. 16 Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy, pp. 49-50. " Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 31. 18 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 50. " Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 32. 20 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 300. Review Article: Political Culture —from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 99 of The Civic Culture. By studying 'the concepts of political culture', they aim to reveal 'the relationship between the attitudes and motivations of the discrete individuals who make up political systems and the character and performance of political systems'.21 Whether they succeed is, of course, the substance of much argument, with critics claiming that, for all the detailed information that is recorded, the results are more impressionistic than systematic.22 They are accused of paying too little attention to the issue of how a 'democracy' should be defined, and how the values people espouse affect the system they inhabit.23 As Barry commented: 'although it provides a wealth of fascinating survey data on political attitudes, there is very little attempt made to provide evidence about the relation between these attitudes and the working of a country's actual political system'.24 For Welch, this problem stems from a fundamental tension within The Civic Culture. It wants both to provide a comparative analysis of political cultures across countries, for which some level of generalization is necessary, and to provide a sociological account of political cultures within each country, for which specific local detail is required. Welch argues convincingly that the two cannot be reconciled and further that the explanatory power of political culture is under constant threat: 'The more fully cultural differences are specified, the less easy it is to separate them from their putative effect. '25 These problems are compounded by Almond and Verba's reluctance to address questions of the origins, form and dissemination of political culture. The notion of 'political socialization' has to do more work than can be reasonably expected of it. Almond and Verba's work raises, therefore, three major issues: the definition of political culture, its explanatory power, and its formation and propagation. The subsequent literature suggests three general responses - to embrace the framework established by Almond and Verba; to argue for a completely revised version; or to reject political culture altogether.

REVISITING CIVIC CULTURE The collection, The Civic Culture Revisited, contains representatives of all three schools of thought, although it is noticeable that those offering evidence of particular political cultures tend to remain within the framework established by Almond and Verba. The theoretical chapters are, by contrast, much more critical.

21 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 33. 22 A. Lijphart, 'The Structure of Inference', in Almond and Verba, eds, The Civic Culture Revisited, pp. 37-56, especially p. 41. 23 C. Pateman, 'The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique', in Almond and Verba, eds, The Civic Culture Revisited, pp. 57-102, especially pp. 67-8. 24 Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy, p. 48. 25 Welch, The Concept of Political Culture, p. 71; see chap. 1 for his critique of The Civic Culture. 100 JOHN STREET

Defining Political Culture Lijphart, who is a friendly critic, chastises Almond and Verba for stretching the concept of political culture too far, taking it beyond orientations towards political objects to include 'general social and interpersonal relations'.26 He argues that it introduces an unnecessary vagueness which could be avoided by confining the notion of political culture to the explicitly political. Given the debate initiated by feminists, among others, over the boundaries of 'the political', such criticisms cannot easily be accommodated.27 Indeed, as we shall see, a broad definition of political culture is now largely accepted by contemporary commentators. A more telling criticism, though, lurks in Carole Pateman's claim that Almond and Verba make political orientations an integral part of the political system - attitudes exist only in relation to a specific set of institutions.28 If this is true, then it is impossible for Almond and Verba to retain the view that political culture constitutes an independent variable. This problem is endemic, according to the critics, to the way political culture is conceived, and it is particularly apparent when attempting to identify its explanatory power.

The Explanatory Power of Political Culture Critics like Pateman and Barry argue that political culture can best be seen as the effect, not the cause, of political processes. Barry suggests that 'political culture' is merely composed of 'reasonable expectations founded on common experience' of the existing system. 'Obviously, if this interpretation is correct,' he argues, 'there are no grounds for saying that the correlation arises from the conduciveness of the "civic culture" to "democracy", but rather for the unexciting conclusion that "democracy" produces the "civic culture" \29 A similar scepticism is evinced by materialists for whom culture is little more than the outward sign of an inner reality. Thus, Jerzy Wiatr's Marxist critique argues that Almond and Verba neglect to analyse 'the relationship between socio-economic reality and political institutions, on the one hand, and the impact this relationship has on political culture on the other'.30 Or as Pateman puts it, their 'argument completely neglects the association between class and participation and implies that social status is irrelevant to which side of the balance a citizen occupies, or to the citizen's view of the rationality of action or inaction.'31 There are, in short, two linked lines of attack on political culture's explanatory usefulness. First, it may be an effect rather than a cause

26 Lipjhart, 'The Structure of Inference', p. 38. 27 A. Phillips, Engendering Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 28 Pateman, 'The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique', pp. 66-7. 29 Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy, pp. 51-2. 30 J. J. Wiatr, 'The Civic Culture from a Marxist-Sociological Perspective', in Almond and Verba, eds, The Civic Culture Revisited, pp. 103-23, especially p. 114. 31 Pateman, 'The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique', p. 84. Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 101 of political processes; and secondly, insofar as it has a significant role, it is to serve pre-existing social and political interests. Lijphart attempts to defend Almond and Verba from these criticisms by clarifying the role attributed to culture. He argues that the question of political culture's explanatory power has been wrongly posed. For Lijphart, it is a mis- take to think in terms of either/or - either structure or culture. They are in fact interlinked so that 'the performance of political structures is therefore both a cause and an effect of the political culture'.32 Lijphart's defence wants to retain a place for political culture, but it raises the question as to how we should regard its precise contribution. To see what is at stake here, it helps, in essence, to imagine three distinct ways in which political culture's explanatory role might be conceived. A historical materialist will have little truck with political culture, saving it only to ice the class-structured cake. An idealist, by contrast, will allocate a key role to political culture, arguing that the patterns of thought within the culture will determine political action. There is, though, a third approach, which straddles the previous two. This we might allocate, with Welch, to the inter- pretivist.33 Within this approach, political culture supplies a set of 'resources' - images, symbols, myths, traditions - which enables people to make sense of their predicament, a predicament which generates certain needs that influence the selection and interpretation of the available cultural resources. To choose between these three positions is to take a position, first, on the way in which culture shapes or constitutes political action, and second, on how political culture is itself constructed.

Explaining Political Culture The Civic Culture prompts reflection without offering solutions. It offers intriguing correlations between attitudes and educational attainment,34 which suggest the possibility that political culture is 'produced' by the combined action of individuals and institutions. But it does not explain how this happens, beyond a reference to 'political socialization', which, as Pateman notes, serves as little more than a neutral conduit between the culture and the system.35 Political socialization only takes an active role if there are tensions between the (indepen- dently generated) orientations of people and the way the system actually works. It also assumes a relationship in which there is a formal separation between the culture and the system. Without this divide there can be no talk of the congruence or incongruence of their relationship. If, though, this separation is impossible to make, then political culture ceases to be composed of'psychological dispositions', and becomes instead a constitutive, rather than instrumental, part of political action and the political process. This move marks a shift away

32 Lijphart, 'The Structure of Inference', p. 49. 33 Welch, The Concept of Political Culture, chap. 6. 34 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, pp. 380-1, 386, 395, 399. 35 Pateman, 'The Civic Culture: A Philosophic Critique', pp. 69-70. 102 JOHN STREET from a behaviouralism that sees attitudes as brute data about individuals, and towards an interpretivism based upon inter-subjective understandings. It also suggests a closer link between political science and cultural studies.

REDISCOVERING POLITICAL CULTURE While The Civic Culture generated much discussion, it stimulated little emula- tion.36 This was partly a result of the daunting empirical task which such study required, but it was also a reflection of changes in the paradigms of political science and social science generally. Archie Brown argues that the rise of a Marxist and Marxist-influenced agenda marginalized political culture." This effect was reinforced by the rise of rational choice theory.38 It was only in the 1980s, with a growing disillusionment with purely materialist or individualist accounts of politics, that political culture re-emerged as an important topic in political science. When it did so, the notion of culture had assumed a new significance and sophistication, thanks largely to developments in other disciplines — notably sociology, literary criticism and history — in which culture was treated as a powerful active agent.

Defining Culture This rediscovered version of political culture is much more comprehensive than its predecessor, taking in a wider range of human responses and a broader portrait of the 'political'. David Robertson, for example, describes it as 'the totality of ideas and attitudes towards authority, discipline, governmental responsibilities and entitlements'.39 In a similar vein, Richard Rose writes of the 'values, beliefs and emotions', which, while being 'taken for granted', 'constitute' the culture and 'give meaning to politics'.40 But despite their new, broad scope, many of these extended definitions retained elements of the old behaviouralism. Thus, Dennis Kavanagh, while acknowledging that a political system is 'embedded in a political culture', goes on to say that the culture 'disposes its members to regard certain forms of political behaviour and institutions as "normal" and others as "abnormal"'.41 The lurking suggestion is that culture acts only as an instrumental device for allying citizens and system. It is only in Richard Topfs characterization of political culture as 'the form

36 Exceptions include A. Marsh, Protest and Political Consciousness (London: Sage, 1977) and Inglehart, The Silent Revolution. 37 A. Brown, 'Introduction', in A. Brown and J. Gray, eds, Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 3-7. 38 See, for example, Jon Elster's fleeting reference to culture in The Cement of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 248-9. 39 D. Robertson, The Penguin Dictionary of Politics (Harmondsworth, Midx: Penguin, 1985), p. 263. 40 R. Rose, Politics in England: An Interpretation for the 1980s (London: Faber, 1980), pp. 116-17. 41 D. Kavanagh, British Politics: Continuities and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 46, emphasis added. Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 103 of the moral order' that we see a fully revised version of the concept.42 Here political culture consists of attitudes or stances which citizens adopt and interpret in order to make sense of politics. Political culture becomes something lived and not just held. For Topf, Almond and Verba's 'pattern of orientations' inevitably gives rise to an instrumentalist account of action in which political attitudes are exclusively concerned with attempts to change government policy. Topf proposes instead that political attitudes are viewed as 'expressions of "values", or better, of positions in the moral order, constitutive of the political culture'.43 This version of political culture can also be detected in Brian Girvin's pro- posal that political culture works at three levels: the macro, meso and micro.44 Such distinctions explicitly acknowledge the capacity of culture both to enable and to shape political action. The macro level of political culture refers to those symbols and values which define the collective enterprise, typically the nation state, and which are normally unchallenged. The rules about how this collectivity organizes itself inhabit the meso level. Here there is more room for argument, and meso-level values and assumptions may be the object of political struggle. Below this, at the micro level, is to be found 'normal polities'. Each level of political culture is seen as constituting forms of identity and sets of values. Political culture does not describe a pre-given set of psychological states, but supplies a language of politics. In Partial Visions, Richard Merelman deploys this notion of political culture in his comparative study of the United States, Canada and Britain. Culture is treated as a set of ideas which are used to think about the political world. It involves more than the sum total of private opinions and it encompasses work and leisure, as well as formal political activity. The result is a collective vision of what is meant by 'liberty' and 'individuality'.45 These, in turn, shape political activity, determining people's views about whether the system delivers their understanding of 'individual freedom'. Or as Merelman writes: 'culture consists of collective representations which eventually influence people's subjective dispositions towards conflictive democratic participation'.46 This still leaves the question of how the culture exerts its influence and shapes popular visions of politics. For writers like Merelman, the answer lies in the motivating power of symbols. While this is an insight shared with more conventional accounts of political culture, these tend to treat symbols as illustrative rather than causal.47 By contrast, John Thompson, like Merelman, places the symbolic realm at the

42 Topf, 'Political Change and Political Culture in Britain, 1959-87', p. 53. 41 Topf, 'Political Change and Political Culture', p. 67. 44 B. Girvin, 'Change and Continuity in Liberal Democratic Political Culture', in Gibbins, ed., Contemporary Political Culture, pp. 31-51. 45 Merelman, Partial Visions, pp. 45-56. 46 Merelman, Partial Visions, p. 55. 47 See, for example, Kavanagh's claim that if 'symbols arouse emotions and have a meaning for people they have political consequences', British Politics, p. 51. 104 JOHN STREET centre of his account of culture and its role in reproducing ideology. Thompson views symbols as constitutive of social relations: 'Symbolic forms are not merely representations which serve to articulate or obscure social relations or interests which are constituted fundamentally and essentially at a pre-symbolic level: rather, symbolic forms are continuously and creatively implicated in the constitution of social relations as such.'48 This approach, which treats culture as an integral component of social action, marks a shift from a narrowly defined political culture to a more general cultural theory of political action, itself derived from cultural studies. Cultural studies emerged from the work of, among others, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, writers who sought to meld the worlds of social science and literature. Borrowing from Gramsci and from the Frankfurt school, cultural studies came to view 'culture' as a place in which imagination and lived experience coalesced. In his essay 'Culture is Ordinary', Williams wrote: Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land.49 Such an approach automatically placed considerable weight upon the role of symbols and upon the dynamic part played by them in human thought and action. The cultural studies' view of culture sees it as being both actively created out of the available resources and as constitutive of political relations; it is neither the product of a behavioural disposition nor a functional necessity.50 If the 'culture' in political culture is of this kind, then the latter becomes a forum in which people forge their account of the political system and their place within it. Paul Willis describes this as a process of 'symbolic creativity', which he defines as people's ability to use existing cultural resources to engage in 'the formation and reproduction of collective and individual identities'.51 These identities are then subject to the workings of political institutions which may either recognize or disown them. The process is not a simple one. It entails a recognition that culture is constantly being forged by the activities of individuals and groups; that the culture has not a single cohesive form, but is ambi- guous; and that part of the reason for this ambiguity is the competing interpretations and meanings which can be derived from the available cultural resources. Applied to politics, this approach portrays political culture as in a constant state of flux. It accords with Kavanagh's view that people's orientations 'are

48 Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, p. 58. 49 R. Williams, 'Culture is Ordinary', in Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 1989), p. 4; see also, R. Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981). 50 Welch, The Concept of Political Culture, reaches a similar position by a different route, drawing on the anthropological insights of Clifford Geertz. 51 Paul Willis, Common Culture (Milton Keynes, Bucks: Open University Press, 1990), p. 6. Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 105 largely formed by their actual experiences with the authorities, even though these attitudes interact in turn with subsequent actions by voters'.52 Taken to its full extreme, this perspective suggests a general cultural theory of politics, in which preferences are learned rather than assumed. It is the position adopted by Wildavsky, who sees culture as the means by which preferences are created. The nature of their culture determines the character of the political choices.53 These new definitions of political culture inevitably blur any neat line between political culture and the political system. By defining political culture as a 'moral order', by seeing it as expressive and constitutive rather than instrumental, and by treating it as interpreted or created, the suggestion is of a much more complex relationship between political culture and political action, in which to talk of 'congruence' or 'fit' is to miss the point. On the one hand, political culture consists of the judgements citizens pass on political behaviour. On the other hand, those attitudes are also constitutive of politics, in the sense that they help to create the language through which politics is conducted. We are still left wondering, however, whether this enriched notion of political culture actually provides a good basis for explaining what happens in the political process. Nationalism provides a test.

The Explanatory Power of Political Culture On the surface, nationalism appears to entail the sharing of a particular political identity which is represented and expressed culturally. This cultural identity then forms the basis of decisions to protest, fight, secede or whatever. But can such political activity be attributed to the playing out of a particular culture? Do the symbols of nationhood provide reasons for taking up arms? We can certainly find writers who make the first move in this argument, who see national identity as a cultural phenomenon. Anthony Smith argues that the idea of the nation, of the boundaries of a political identity, is culturally formed: 'More than a style and doctrine of politics, nationalism is a. form of culture - an ideology, a language, mythology, symbolism and consciousness - that has achieved global resonance, and the nation is a type of identity whose meaning and priority is presupposed by this form of culture.'54 In a similar vein, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as an 'imagined political community ... It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image

52 D. Kavanagh, 'Political Culture in Britain', in Almond and Verba, eds, The Civic Culture Revisited, pp. 124-76, especially p. 133. 53 Wildavsky, 'Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions'; it is worth noting that Wil- davsky is himself drawing on the work of Mary Douglas; see, for example, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992). 54 A. D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth, Midx: Penguin, 1991), pp. 91-2, his emphasis. 106 JOHN STREET of their communion.'55 Such an approach to the concept of nationhood automatically places the emphasis on culture in the construction of the imagined world. But while we can get agreement on the importance of culture to ideas of the nation, it is less clear how it explains action for or against a particular political order. The case of Northern Ireland supplies a test for such claims. The divisions which fuel the political conflict are often ascribed to the competing sets of identities (and hence loyalties) at play. As Kevin Boyle observes: 'It is difficult not to express the Northern Ireland problem in terms of identity and allegiance.'56 It is an idea that can also be found amongst the contestants themselves. The Ulster Young Unionist Council, for instance, announced:

The political relevance of culture today can be clearly seen when one examines the way our enemies especially in Sinn Fein have hijacked the so-called 'Gaelic culture' of Ireland. They have made street names and schools into political issues which they exploit and by reason of the fact that we reject this so-called Irish culture, they claim that we are not Irishmen; and therefore have no right to claim this country as our own."

Such statements, however, still cause us to ask how cultural symbols might actually drive political action; that is, provide a reason for acting, rather than provide a post hoc rationalization. This question lies behind Desmond Bell's Acts of Union, an attempt to map the construction of sectarian identity in Northern Ireland and to establish its place in political action. Drawing on both interviews with, and observations of Loyalist youth, Bell tries to explain how, through rituals and symbols, a sense of political identity is created and fuelled. Working with the extended notion of political culture, Bell traces the construction of ethnic division, the process by which 'ethnic identities emerge and become denned in response to political developments'.58 His approach draws directly on Anderson's notion of the 'imagined community', and he argues that Loyalist identity is 'dependent on the rehearsed myths, ritualized practices, and confrontations of the marching season'. These 'symbolic practices are the specific means by which an exclusive Protestant identity is represented and renewed in the Loyalist mind.'59 In other words, what it is to be a Loyalist can only be understood by reference to an individual's active engagement with a range of special rituals and symbols

5S B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15, his emphasis. * K. Boyle, 'Northern Ireland: Allegiances and Identities', in B. Crick, ed., National Identities: The Constitution of the United Kingdom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 68-78, especially at p. 68. " Quoted in J. McAuley, 'Cuchullain and an RPG-7: The Ideology and Politics of the Ulster Defence Association', in Hughes, ed., Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, pp. 45-68, especially p. 60. "BeW, Acts of Union, p. U. 59 Bell, Acts of Union, p. 20. Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 107 which in turn give form to her or his preferences. But forming preferences is not the same as determining interests. While Acts of Union dwells on the rituals of Orange parades and other aspects of Protestant culture, Bell treats these as secondary to the material factors which ultimately drive action. Protestant youth tries to resolve, 'at the level of the imaginary, the real material contradictions confronting the Protestant working-class in contemporary Northern Ireland'.60 Thus, although Acts of Union gives a rich picture of the world of Loyalist youth, it remains wedded to the view that material interests play the key role, even when some place is allowed for interpretation and 'symbolic creativity'. But the danger with this position is that, though the myths and symbols of the actors' lives are held to inform their identity, the cultural realm only provides the oil which lubricates the material machine. It is not clear how the imaginary life of partici- pants actually affects their actions. Faced with this question, other writers on Northern Ireland have downplayed culture altogether, making it a mere appendage to underlying interests or structures. Ruane and Todd, for example, refuse to see the Irish conflict as the result of incompatible values and expectations.61 They argue that the cultural divide is a direct consequence of underlying political conditions: 'The overt signs of conflict - bigotry and intransigence - arise because the communities' fundamental interests are incompatible within Northern Ireland as it is presently structured.'62 Thus, for them, 'community relations within Northern Ireland developed according to the logic of the situation'.63 The 'logic' is a result of the pre-existing interests and is not contained in the culture. Political culture is a mirror or prism, but not a source of light. There are two problems with treating culture as this type of derivative phenomenon. Firstly, even if the underlying material or political conditions are deter- minant, the culture to which they give rise cannot, in fact, simply 'mirror' those conditions. They cannot be represented directly, they have to be mediated through metaphors and myths, and these automatically loosen the determinist link between the conditions and the culture. Furthermore, the representation of the conditions is then dependent upon the process of comprehending the images and metaphors that describe those conditions. The symbols have to mean something. This does not just require them to be 'understood'; they have to be part of the thoughts that inform action. The suggestion is not that symbols determine action, any more than material or other objective conditions do, but rather that there is a constant process of interpretation and reinterpretation which is important to the way actors view their predicament and formulate

60 Bell, Acts of Union, p. 23, emphasis added. 61J. Ruane and J. Todd, ' "Why Can't You Get Along with Each Other?" Culture, Structure and the Northern Ireland Conflict', in Hughes, ed., Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, pp. 27-44. 62 Ruane and Todd,' "Why Can't You Get Along...?" ', p. 28. 63 Ruane and Todd,' "Why Can't You Get Along...?" ', p. 34. 108 JOHN STREET their intentions. As David Beetham observes in his study of legitimation: 'people are never merely the passive recipients of ideas or messages to which they are exposed. They are more like a sieve than a sponge. That is to say, they tend to be selective, assessing ideas and information in the light of their existing assumptions, and against their lived experience.'64 This point is echoed by Welch in his discussion of national identity, which, he writes, while emerging 'as a response to social conditions', also changes those circumstances.65 There can be no straightforward mechanical link between conditions and culture; accounts of the political order have to take cognizance of the making and interpreting of political culture. Secondly, the view that culture is subservient assumes that it is possible to draw a clear dividing line between what is cultural and what is 'fundamental'. This is true whether we are talking about underlying material or structural conditions. It might be contended, though, that structure is cultural, and culture structural, and that there is no discernible division of labour. I cannot pursue this issue here, although it does, of course, represent an important line of argument, one most closely associated with Anthony Giddens.66 My concern is that it raises the spectre of an idealist world in which everything is mediated by everything else.67 Neither individual understanding nor material conditions play any significant part in social action because culture and social structure are united, and no explanatory advantage accrues to either side. One possible way out of this predicament is to study the interaction of culture and political action in particular historical circumstances. Martin Wiener's Eng- lish Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 is one example. It contends that 'English culture', and the values it represented, thwarted the advance of industrialism. 'The dominant collective self-image in English culture', writes Wiener, 'became less and less that of the world's workshop. Instead, this image was challenged by the counterimage of an ancient, little disturbed "green and pleasant land".'68 A similar approach is taken by Robert Currie in Industrial Politics,69 where he argues that British trade unions became imbued with a culture of 'utilitarian liberal-democratic individualism' which disposed them to pursue individualistic and economistic goals, and to reject collectivist politics. The Irish case too has received equivalent treatment. Boyce

64 D. Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1991), p. 106. 65 Welch, The Concept of Political Culture, pp. 131 and 135; also Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, p. 268. M See, for example, A. Giddens, Centra! Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1979). "See M. Hollis and S. Smith, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and J. C. Alexander, 'Analytic Debates: Understanding the Relative Auto- nomy of Culture', in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, eds, Culture and Society: Contempor- ary Debates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1-27. 68 M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 158. Welch considers historical approaches to political culture and draws more positive conclusions: The Concept of Political Culture, pp. 147-58. 69 R. Currie, Industrial Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 109 observes that 'patterns of behaviour emerged and were followed to enable neighbours to live as neighbours for some purposes, and as "strangers" for other purposes'.70 These historical approaches use culture to explain systemic behaviour. Their weakness lies in the absence of any convincing account of how background culture becomes part of political practice. Too often they offer interesting parallels rather than causal links. We need to know more about how, for example, rural, anti-industrial culture became part of action, and why it seemed attractive to those who adopted it. Answers to such questions need a fuller account of how culture is integrated into action, and particularly how it affects people's interests and their perception of them. This problem is raised by Lawrence Grossberg who asks how popular conservatism took hold in the United States in the 1980s. His answer, drawing on cultural studies, points to the 'affective' power of popular culture; that is, the ability of symbols and myths to generate the feelings, emotions and reasons without which action would not occur. Why, he asks, do people adopt particular political ideologies? An answer which refers only to people's interests does not work. The idea of 'having an interest' depends on both a sense of identity, to which the interest can be attributed, and a passion about what is at stake. Terms like 'passion' are typically missing from political explanations, but, says Grossberg, they are essential to accounting for the drives behind action: 'In fact, affect is the missing term in an adequate understanding of ideology, for it offers the possibility of a "psychology of belief which would explain how and why ideologies are sometimes, and only sometimes effective, and always to varying degrees.'7' Grossberg's contention is that political action derives from the ideas people have, and these ideas are not simply ways of describing their interests, but of expressing them as sources of passionate concern. This, he argues, is achieved through engagement in a culture which shapes and articulates people's interests.72 Grossberg's intention is to avoid the idealism of pure interpretation, whilst also arguing that it is equally wrong to posit the existence of an objective reality through which, or against which, interpretations may be judged. He offers a theory of'articulation' as an alternative.73 According to this, people construct their lives in the context of many intersecting 'cultural practices' which form their identities and interests. It is a very difficult argument to unravel, if only because it is very abstract. Despite his ambition to explain a very real political phenomenon - the rise of the

70 G. Boyce, 'Northern Ireland: A Place Apart?', in Hughes, ed., Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, pp. 13-26, especially p. 16. " L. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 82-3. 72 This sort of claim is most boldly stated by two other cultural analysts, Simon Frith and Howard Home, who write: 'People's sense of themselves has always come from the use of images and symbols (signs of nation, class and sexuality)', Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 16. 73 Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, pp. 48-52. 110 JOHN STREET

New Right - his theory reconstructs it only as populist ideology, with little apparent connection to institutions and economics. Nevertheless, Grossberg does make intriguing suggestions about the cultural constitution of identity and ideology, and the role of'affect' in motivating both. In a more politically focused book, Merelman also emphasizes the importance of popular culture to the shaping of political discourse and identity. Popular culture, he suggests, 'predisposes political narratives towards certain forms of language, or collective figures of speech'.74 It does this by providing 'many of the socially validated cultural images by which we live, including the narrative of liberal democratic politics in everyday life'.75 Like Grossberg, Merelman wants to account for the creation of the meaning and significance that attaches to all political acts.76 He argues that 'certain qualities of a society's popular culture subtly prepare people either to seek out political participation and welcome group conflict or to resist political participation and to reject group conflict.'77 Much of Partial Visions is taken up with showing how forms of political practice are paralleled by dominant popular cultural values or codes. But again, as with the historical approach of Wiener and others, to see that popular culture can map on to political practice is only to hint at possible correlations, and not to establish causal (or some other) connections. Merelman is himself aware of this limitation, acknowledging that the relationship is hypothesized, not proved. In summary, both Grossberg and Merelman deploy the broader concept of culture (making much of its connection to popular culture) to their account of politics. They both, however, fall short of their ambitions. In doing justice to cultural complexity, Grossberg is rendered relatively speechless on key aspects of politics, while in dwelling on the political context, Merelman is unable to offer any conclusive connection between popular culture and politics. Ironically, this is the problem that, as we have seen, befalls less subtle accounts of political culture and its relationship to political action. If we are to take seriously attempts to link popular culture, political culture and political practice, then more attention needs to be paid to the process by which the culture itself is created and sustained. If culture provides a set of resources or collective representations, and if these help to shape action, then surely we need to know how people get access to this culture and why one set of symbols rather than another is available. Only then can we use culture to account for action. Instead of talking of the explanatory power of political culture, we need first to explain political culture. This means shifting the focus away from political action or the content of political culture, and looking instead at the ways by which that culture is sustained and disseminated.

74 Merelman, Partial Visions, p. 193; see also p. 213. 75 Merelman, Partial Visions, pp. 36-7. 76 Merelman, Partial Visions, pp. 8-10. 77 Merelman, Partial Visions, p. 8. Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 111

Explaining Political Culture The current literature on political culture suggests two elements to such an endeavour. The first is to look at the process by which culture is institutionalized; secondly, how it is mediated by, among other agents, intellectuals and the mass media. Culture does not simply exist in some ethereal space. It has to be produced and consumed. Chris Waters' study of British socialists and popular culture can be read as a commentary on the political organization of culture. At the beginning of this century, British socialists tried to establish an alternative culture which recognized the working class's 'complex system of associational ties and cultural rituals', while also providing a bulwark against the emerging commercialized culture.78 To see the socialists' project like this is to make a close connection between theory and practice. It is to argue that ideas about the nature of culture are tied to arrangements for promoting a particular version of it. Socialists in Halifax campaigned to open 'a newsroom and museums on Sundays as a counter-inducement to the temptation of intemperance'. A mem- ber of the Independent Labour party claimed that 'municipal pleasures were as valuable as municipal utilities' because of their beneficial effects upon the 'social qualities' and behaviour of the people. Municipally provided music would 'enliven and elevate the moody masses from the dull apathy created by their dismal environment'.79 Such endeavours were rarely a complete suc- cess. They did not appreciate that sending the right message was not a guarantee of it being correctly received. Waters points out that socialist culture was not automatically embraced by those who encountered it.80 The intentions which socialists harboured for their culture could not be translated directly into action by fiat. Much depended on the mediating institutions and their effectiveness in modelling a culture for which there were willing consumers. An important figure in this process is the intellectual. Writing about national identity, Smith argues that it is intellectuals, a broad category which includes poets, historians, philologists and folklorists, 'who have proposed and elabor- ated the concepts and language of the nation and nationalism and have ... given voice to wider aspirations that they have conveyed in appropriate images, myths and symbols'.81 In his study of politics and culture in Ireland, O'Dowd echoes this thought: 'In mediating between the rulers and the ruled, intellectuals help to shape political culture by generating a political discourse.'82 O'Dowd adds the important rider that the role of intellectual is not fixed, and that different societies use them differently. None the less, the point remains that if political culture is seen as a form of moral discourse conducted through

78 Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, p. 3. "All quotations are from Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, pp. 135-7. 80 Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, p. 163. 81 Smith, National Identity, p. 93. 82 L. O'Dowd, 'Intellectuals and Political Culture: A Unionist Nationalist Comparison', in Hughes, ed., Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, pp. 151-73, especially p. 156. 112 JOHN STREET symbols, myths and images, then understanding the form of the discourse requires reference to those who coin its terms. Intellectuals are, of course, not the sole agents in the process of defining and disseminating a culture. The business of handling and shaping images is clearly the preserve, albeit not exclusively, of the mass media. Kyosti Pekonen notes that 'the mass media has a very important role as the means whereby modern politics tries to bind people's political imaginations'. In particular, the media furnishes an 'image discourse'.83 They supply, in other words, the resources out of which political culture is fashioned. Thompson's Ideology and Modern Culture is a systematic attempt to flesh out this relationship between mass communications and political culture. Thompson defines mass communication as the process by which symbolic goods are produced and distributed.84 Like Grossberg, he wants to show that ideology does not exist in a hermetically sealed compartment, but is intimately bound up with the more diffuse, pervasive culture of ordinary daily life. But unlike Grossberg, Thompson wants to link his account to the institutions which pro- duce and reproduce that culture. He writes, in an ugly phrase, of the 'mediaza- tion of modern culture', by which he means the ways in which media technology and media corporations shape the images and symbols of modern culture, and in doing so mould political knowledge and political participation.85 This effect is most apparent in the representation of the boundary between the public and the private, and in the definition of the 'political'. Mass communication makes private events public and transforms public events in the process of transmitting them to the home. Pekonen writes of'politics as personal adver- tisement'.86 For Thompson, this effect on the public-private divide 'has implications for the ways in which political power, at the level of state institutions, is acquired, exercised and sustained in modern societies'.87 One particular implication is that the content and character of political ideology is not the exclusive province of organized political groupings. Their manifestos or other public pronouncements cannot be treated as self-contained sources of data. Rather, they have to be examined as part of a much wider process of symbolic exchange and interpretation, itself bounded by institutional and material conditions: 'the analysis of ideology should be orientated primarily towards the multiple and complex ways in which symbolic phenomena circulate in the social world and intersect with relations of power.'88 Thompson's argument places culture at the centre of political action, without at the same time cutting it free of material and other interests. Culture is neither the whole story (as the

83 K. Pekonen, 'Symbols and Politics as Culture in the Modern Situation: The Problem and Prospects of the "New", in Gibbins, ed., Contemporary Political Culture, pp. 127-43, especially pp. 137-40. "Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, pp. 219. 85 Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, pp. 3-4 and 216. 86 Pekonen, 'Symbols and Politics as Culture', p. 140. 87 Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, p. 238. 88 Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, p. 265. Review Article: Political Culture -from Civic Culture to Mass Culture 113

idealists would have it), nor is it a footnote to deeper forces (as the materialists prefer). Instead, it is something which both shapes and is shaped by political interests. The question we are left with, therefore, is whether this is a plausible approach. Does it make sense to both broaden the notion of political culture so that it becomes an expressive, constitutive element in political life and to see it as something whose character and form must themselves be explained by reference to other interests? This certainly seems to be the position adopted in current accounts of political culture.89 What is less clear is how successful such endeavours will prove.

CONCLUSION It is evident, though, that there is no return to the old approach. The behavioural view of political culture used by Almond and Verba is inadequate both as an account of how culture works and of how it might explain political action. Later writers have, therefore, developed a fuller notion of political culture, which encompasses a wider range of spheres of social life and of states of mind, and which sees culture as a discourse that people have to interpret and use. Culture refers to more than the attitudes people hold to politicians and political institutions. Rather it is made up of a complex of feelings and images, deriving from the home and work, from manifestos and popular culture. The meaning of terms like 'liberty' is created through the active, passionate engagement with the resources that culture provides, as are the notions of 'identity' and 'interest' that liberty is to satisfy. Linked to this version of culture, and people's engagement with it, is the idea that it is constitutive of political activity; this, in turn, has implications for the explanatory power and role of political culture. Firstly, it suggests that material conditions do not themselves pre-empt or account for culture. Culture plays a crucial role in the way in which interests are identified and then acted upon. This move, though, creates the tempting possibility that only culture explains human action. But this idealism begs the question of what accounts for the different forms and interpretations of culture. Without endors- ing such idealism, it does sensitize us to the need to think more about how political interests are conceived and interpreted. To do this, however, it is important to pay closer attention to the ways in which culture is itself formed. Only when we have an understanding of the making of culture, and of the organization of access to it, can we talk coherently about the interpretations put upon it and the actions derived from it. The immediate problem is, therefore, not just one of developing a cultural theory of political interests, but a political theory of culture.

' Welch's excellent The Concept of Political Culture is the best representative.