Political Culture in Communist States: Some Problems of Theory and Method

Abstract

The concept of political culture is not a particularly new one in the social sciences. Defined-one of several possibilities-as the historically formed patterns of political belief and behavior of the members of a political system, whether a state or a smaller group, it has informed approaches to the study of politics since the time of Montesquieu and Rousseau, if not the Greeks, and has been applied to the politics of a wide variety of states as a means of pointing to the existence of long-term continuities as well as changes in the beliefs and behavior patterns of their members.' In recent years the use of the concept has been extended still further to the political experience of the Communist states, in which the issue of continuity versus change is raised in a particularly sharp form. These, after all, are states in which the ruling authorities claim to have broken decisively with the political beliefs and behavior-not just the institutions--of the pre-revolutionary past and in which it is asserted that new political cultures, characterized by collectivist, Marxist-Leninist values, and high levels of political knowledge and activism, have come into being in place of those of the pre-revolutionary period. The nature and extent of these changes have frequently been queried in the western academic literature. What is not, I think, in doubt is that the Communist states, precisely because of their claim to have broken so decisively with the patterns of political belief and behavior of their pre-revolutionary past, provide a particularly promising though admittedly difficult context in which to test for the explanatory utility of a political-cultural approach.2 It is to this task that the present paper is directed. At least two main reasons may be suggested for the increasing use that has been made of the concept of political culture in recent years. In the first place, it has stemmed from a renewed interest in the stability and instability of regimes and in the relationship between regimes and societies more generally, prompted by the overthrow of liberal-democratic by Nazi and later Communist regimes in Europe and more particularly by the failure of western-style political institutions in many newly independent countries in Africa and Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. In most cases the adequacy of the constitutional framework itself was not in doubt; rather, it appeared, an underlying pattern of attitudes towards and expectations of government, often of historical origin, was involved, which appeared to require more direct and explicit consideration if the performance of these political systems was properly to be understood. In the case of the Communist states more particularly, the greater degree of attention paid to the notion of political culture sprang from the