Political Cultures and Gambling: Two Recent Case Studies

Abstract

THE CONCEPT OF POLITICAL CULTURE was ingrained in classical works of political philosophy. However, as an explicit concept to orient understandings of politics, political culture came to the fore in the 1960s. Several writers contributed to the development of this explanatory concept.1 Of these, this essay will highlight ideas from Almond and Verba’s five nation study, The Civic Culture, and Daniel Elazar’s American Federalism: A View from the States. Political culture is a collective mindset or patterns of thought that people have toward political objects: the political community, a people’s identity as a national group, leadership and authority, political activity, feelings of personal obligation and efficacy, and attitudes toward fellow citizens as political actors. While Almond, Verba, Elazar and the others who enunciated the concept of political culture as a tool for political analysis provided good definitions, they left much work to be done by others. The works by Elazar and Almond and Verba must be considered seminal, however they provided only the road map, they did not take the journey. Subsequent works dealing with the political culture concept have not definitively established its value as an explanatory tool for public policy analysis in a comparative framework. They have essentially treated culture as a dependent variable as they have sought to explain forces yielding one cultural style or another in a specific jurisdiction. This article has taken another direction. By focusing upon one issue area—gambling—the author has used the concept in a cross national analysis as an independent variable which is offered to provide insight regarding policy outcomes. The study suggests that the scholars did identify a useful component for policy analysis. While focusing upon cultural concepts as a unifying theme for understanding outcomes, this work is nonetheless mostly descriptive and qualitative in format. As such its data are not subject to the rigorous tests of significance which must be quantitatively oriented. Moreover, this study does not present an integrated set of hypotheses for testing. Hopefully, by showing the viability of the concept of political culture as an independent variable, such hypotheses may be formulated in subsequent studies and subject to more rigorous tests of validity. The author has treated the concept of political culture in other studies with colleagues Asher Friedberg and Carl Lutrin, as well as in an entry in a gambling encyclopedia, and the