Political Culture and Political Change

In the past century, Germany, for better and for worse, offered itselfas a natural laboratory for political science. Indeed, Germany’sexcesses of political violence and its dramatic regime changes largelymotivated the development of postwar American political science,much of it the work of German émigrés and German-Jewishrefugees, of course. The continuing vicissitudes of the German experiencehave, however, posed a particular challenge to the concept ofpolitical culture as elaborated in the 1950s and 1960s,1 at least inpart to explain lingering authoritarianism in formally democraticWest Germany. Generally associated with political continuity or onlyincremental change,2 the concept of political culture has been illequippedto deal with historical ruptures such as Germany’s “breakwith civilization” of 1933-1945 and the East German popular revolutionof 1989. As well, even less dramatic but still important and relativelyrapid cultural changes such as the rise of a liberal democraticVerfassungspatriotismus sometime around the late 1970s in West Germany3and the emergence of a postmodern, consumer capitalist culturein eastern Germany since 19944 do not conform to mainstreampolitical culture theory’s expectations of gradual, only generationalchange. To be sure, continuity, if not inertia, characterizes much ofpolitics, even in Germany. Still, to be of theoretical value, the conceptof political culture must be able not only to admit but toaccount for change.

The transition of power from Lenin to Stalin directly changed the destiny of the Soviet Union, amounting to much more than just a simple change in leadership. Although to a significant degree, Stalin maintained many aspects of Lenin's leadership, there were still significant political and cultural changes which took place in Russia during the shift of power and ensuing political competitions. Three key political changes stemmed from this transition: 1.) Lenin's New Economic Policy was replaced by a series of policy changes that came to be called "The Great Turn"; 2.) There were significant changes in the formation of the Russian Communist Party, leading to conflicts between old guard Bolsheviks and new members; and 3.) There were significant changes in other policies used to control the country, including the use of police, gulags, and propaganda. In concert with these political changes, there were also two significant changes in the broader Soviet culture: 1.) The earlier revolutionary emphasis on Marxist-Leninism was systematically supplanted by an emphasis on total obedience to Stalinism and Stalin's dictatorship in the "Great Purge" of the 1930s; and 2.) The relative respect for the sovereignty of neighboring communistic countries under Lenin was supplanted by a much more imperialistic and expansionary policy of "state communism" under Stalin. This essay will explore the political and cultural changes as mentioned that stemmed from the transition in power from Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Stalin from 1922-1924, starting from the three political changes before proceeding into the analysis of broader social changes.

The connection between the Late Bronze Age (LBA) Aegean costumes and social, cultural and political changes is a rather unexplored topic. Probably the only exception are kilts, the connection of which to such changes on Crete during the 15th century BCE remains a commonly discussed topic in studies focusing on the LBA Aegean iconography and other data sets. However, many questions remain open and the topic is far from exhausted. In this paper I build on the work of various scholars who have studied LBA Aegean kilts in the context of social, political and cultural changes. I diachronically study the changes in the representations of kilts since the beginning of the LBA in the Aegean until the end of the Palatial period on the Greek Mainland (ca. 1700/1600–1200 BCE). Moreover, I examine the spatial distribution of specific kilt types in different periods. In cases of several different kilt types appearing in contemporary contexts in the same region, I explore whether similar costumes might have had different social connotations within the same communities. Moreover, I examine the influence of elite power structures and socio-political changes on the perception of kilts. However, I do not observe kilts as passive reflections of specific social, cultural and political contexts, but rather as material forms actively used in the creation of social realities.

List of Tables and Figures - Introduction - PART 1: PRELIMINARIES - The Idea of a 'Third World' - Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism - PART 2: THEORIES OF POLITICAL CHANGE - Modernisation and Political Change - Development and Structural Differentiation - Neo-Colonialism and Sovereignty - Dependency, Peripherality and Development - PART 3: INSTITUTIONS - The State and Authoritarianism - Political Parties and Pluralist Politics - Bureaucracy and Political Power - Military Intervention in Politics - PART 4: CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO - Nationalism and Secession - Peasants, Workers and Revolution - Stability, Democracy and Development - Bibliography - Index

Dangerous Politics: Risk, Vulnerability, and Penal Policy (Clarendon Studies in Criminology) H. Annison. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015) 288pp. £65.00hb ISBN 9780198728603

InThe Civic Culture, perhaps the best known study of political culture, Almond and Verba say that ‘the relationship between political culture and political structure [is] one of the most significant researchable aspects of the problem of political stability and change’. I want to look at the way this relationship has been treated in one particular area, an area very relevant to questions of political stability and change in our own society; that is, in studies of political participation and apathy, especially research into the sense of political efficacy or competence. This is the area with whichThe Civic Cultureitself is largely concerned, and it is now well established that individuals low in a sense of political efficacy tend to be apathetic about politics; indeed, Almond and Verba consider the sense of efficacy or competence to be a ‘key political attitude’.

How are cultural changes put forward by so-called 'Utopias' accepted by political elites and then implemented through political decisions or international treaties ? This historical process has often been dealt with via two separate disciplines : sociology and political science. In this article, the author has chosen to use the new paradigm of global politics, i.e., the "issue paradigm", as his general framework of analysis. This article comprises two parts. First a theory of political change - culturally induced. Four concepts of change and progress are examined (Saint-Pierre, Kant, Condorcet and Bentham). This leads the author to the formulation of a new concept: " counter-decision", which can be defined as "a minor concession pulled through socially organized utopian movements from still reluctant political elites, at the very time when History is shaken by some kind of crisis such as war". The total process consists of four successive stages which are: intellectual maturation, socialisation, counter-decision, and new policy which is the final stage of political change culturally induced. The second part of the article gives a historical illustration of this four stages process, examples of which are the European unification, arbitration, collective security, disarmament, arms control, law of war and humanitarian law. These empirical illustrations reveal that Saint-Pierre, Kant, Condorcet and Bentham were all correct in their respective interpretation of progress. It also means that, in politics, cultural progress is at one and the same time rationally thought, reached through a dialectical process, cumulative or determinist in some aspects, if equally debated, and thus voluntarist.

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For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.

The narrative of good governance has become particularly relevant in understanding political and cultural change in Malaysia and Singapore. This study shows that the narrative of good governance is a double-edged sword -- that is, it can be used in rather contradictory ways. In the case of Malaysia, good governance assumes the role of a reformist discourse adopted by opposition forces to pressure the ruling regime into introducing liberal democratic reforms. In the case of Singapore, good governance plays the role of a dominant discourse employed by the ruling elite as a defence against liberal democratic reforms. Not only does this seem to suggest that the relationship between democracy and good governance is a complex one, it also puts some of the recent political and cultural developments in both these cases in a new context. Introduction Prior to the Asian financial crisis, scholars were intrigued with the question of whether Southeast Asian societies that had developed the economic requisites for liberal democratic reforms would actually follow through with these political reforms. [1] With the political changes that have swept through Southeast Asia in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, it seems less justifiable now for scholars to label this region as being recalcitrant to liberal democratic reforms. Nevertheless, two cases in this region continue to stand out as puzzles of political development -- Malaysia and Singapore. In the case of the former, while there have been some signs in the past two years of a democratic awakening, it is still too premature to conclude based on these developments that these forces for political change will lead to any sustained liberal democratic reforms. In the case of the latter, the prospects of change towards a more liberal democratic system seem even less so. Malaysia As is well known by now, the Asian financial crisis precipitated a series of fundamental changes to the Malaysian political landscape. This article will focus less on the actual sequence of events and more on the implications of some of the main political developments in this period. [2] The economic excesses and abuses that had accompanied Malaysia's rapid growth in the early 1990s have been well documented by scholars. [3] It was not until the financial crisis of 1997, however, that some of the real costs to Malaysian society of the illicit nexus between political patronage and wealth creation were realized. During the period of accelerated growth in the early 1990s, the middle class was by and large willing to go along with the trade-off between civil and political freedoms and economic goods since the overall economic pie was clearly expanding even though a small minority was benefiting disproportionately. Scholars who were studying this phenomenon at the time had concluded that as long as the middle clas s was still benefiting from the economic policies of the government, they would largely be compliant with the political structure. [4] Yet, when the opposition forces, with the help of the Internet, brought into the full glare of public scrutiny some of the exploitative practices of corruption, collusion, and nepotism at the highest levels of the political and economic elite, the public opposition to the ruling coalition began to grow. [5] Indeed, when the economy showed signs of a slowdown (and even a collapse), the excesses of the government were no longer tolerated as willingly. To make matters worse, in their desperate attempts to contain the economic fallout from the financial crisis, the ruling elite had taken some bold and reckless steps, which included moves perceived by many to be aimed at rescuing some of their closest economic beneficiaries. [6] We will perhaps not know for some time to come all the reasons behind the sudden fall from grace of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's deputy, Anwar Ibrahim. However, it does seem clear that overt attempts by some in the ruling elite to shelter failing beneficiaries from the full thrust of market forces in the wake of the financial crisis largely contributed to the friction between the two leaders, with Anwar commonly believed to have been less willing to acquiesce to the government's financial bail-outs of these cronies. …

The preceding chapters of this book have been concerned with the traditional political culture of the USSR and with its subsequent evolution over more than sixty years of Soviet government. The predominantly centralised, collectivist political culture which the Bolsheviks inherited in 1917, it was argued, has in many ways persisted up to the present day. The pre-revolutionary Russian economy was characterised by a relatively high level of state control and ownership which the Soviet government has since extended; the political system has become more effectively centralist with the improvement of transport and communications and the removal of those pockets of autonomy which were a real if subsidiary element of the pre-revolutionary system; and the predisposition of government to regulate matters of individual belief as well as behaviour has been strengthened further by the imposition of a mandatory official ideology. This is not to suggest that there have been no changes of significance in the Soviet political culture over the period we have been considering. Levels of political participation, for instance, have been rising, the exposure of the population to the means of mass communication has been increasing, and levels of religious observance have been falling,Particularly among the younger generation.

It is more than twenty years since the publication of Archie Brown and Jack Gray’s Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (Brown and Gray, 1977) and Archie Brown’s Political Culture and Communist Studies (Brown, 1984a). While Communist power has in the interim largely receded into history, the premise of this book is that the need to consider the value of the concept of political culture in the face of post-Communist realities has not.

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Theory of postmodernization (Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton/Chichester: Princeton University Press; Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2007). Modernization, cultural change, and democracy: The human development sequence. New York: Cambridge University Press) predicts that the public in socioeconomically more developed countries (e.g. established democracies) are more politically engaged and more pro-democratically oriented (e.g. higher levels of self-expression values) than citizens in less prosperous (e.g. post-communist) countries; and that individuals who are more non-democratically oriented are generally less political active. We tested these predictions by comparing three European regions: a group of twenty established European democracies, nine Central and Eastern European EU member states, and seven post-Yugoslav countries. The predictive power of postmodernization theory within the post-Yugoslav sample was also examined. Employing European Values Study (European Values Study. (2008) http://zacat.gesis.org. Accessed 27 Mar 2011) we cross-regionally and cross-nationally compared (1) the levels of three types of political participation (voter turnout, party membership, and protest participation); (2) the levels of non-democratic political culture (authoritarian political culture, lifestyle intolerance, and gender role traditionalism), and (3) the link between political participation and non-democratic political culture. The results indicated that post-communist citizens are less politically engaged and more non-democratically oriented than their Western counterparts, and that in all three regions “authoritarians” are less likely to be political active. A less straightforward pattern was observed in post-Yugoslav countries. Implications of the results and future research suggestions are discussed.

Carole Pateman's writings have been innovatory precisely for their qualities of engagement, pursued at the height of intellectual rigour. This book draws from her vast output of articles, chapters, books and speeches to provide a thematic yet integrated account of her innovations in political theory and contributions to the politics of policy-making. The editors have focused on work in three key areas: Democracy Pateman's perspective is rooted in a practical perspective, enquiring into and speculating about forms of participation over and above the 'traditional' exclusions through which representative systems have been variously constructed over time. Her work pushes hard on theorists and politicians who make easy assumptions about apathy and public opinion, who bracket off the workplace and the home, and who see politics only in partisan activity, voter behaviour and governmental policy. Women Pateman's innovatory and still-cited work on participation antedates the feminist revolution in political theory and many of the practical struggles that developed through the later 1970s. While woman-centred, her concerns were always worked through larger conceptions of social class, economic advantage, power differentials, 'liberal' individualism and contracts including marriage. Her feminism was innovative in political theory, and within feminism itself. As a feminist Pateman defies categorization, and her concepts of 'the sexual contract' and 'Wollstonecraft's dilemma' are canonical. Welfare Pateman's innovation here is an integration of welfare issues – in particular the proposals for a 'basic income' or for a 'capital stake' – into her broad but always rigorous conception of democracy. This is argued through in terms of citizenship, taken as the result of a social contract. In that way Pateman puts liberalism itself through an imminent critique, drawing in the practicalities and risks of life in late capitalist societies. Her theory as always is political, taking in neo-liberal attacks on 'welfare states' and the stark realities of international inequalities. Pateman's career achievements in democratic and feminist theory are brought productively to bear on debates that would otherwise occur in more limited, and less provocative, academic and political contexts.