German Perspectives

Abstract

Since the 1970s the analysis of political culture in Germany has experienced an impressive upswing. Starting out from a critical adoption of the Almond and Verba approach (Krippendorff 1966; Dias 1971; Berg-Schlosser 1972) the analysis of political culture has been established at the universities of the old FRG as a distinct field of political-scientific research (Iwand 1985). In 1982 a group of political scientists set up a research committee for the analysis of political culture within the German Association for Political Science. Since then this committee has organized annual meetings and symposia which frequently meet with a good public response. The students of political and social sciences, too, soon appreciated the subject of political culture and paid regular attention to it during their university training. The political change which occurred in the GDR in 1989 and the fact that, in 1990, the newly founded states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg/ Near Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony/Anhalt, Thuringia and East Berlin joined the FRG have given an extremely strong impetus to the analysis of political culture. For example, the public opinion research institutes which had established themselves in the old Federal Republic extended their samples and topics immediately to the newly gained territory. Now, at last, the survey methods of empirical social research can be applied in the territory of the former GDR (see Chapter 17 in this volume; and Roth 1990; Kaase 1991; Gibowski and Feist 1991; Klingemann 1990).KeywordsPolitical ParticipationPolitical InstitutionPolitical CultureGerman SocietyDemarcation LineThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.