Political Parties as Transmitters of Political Culture: Competitive Party Dynamics and Political Sub-cultures in Pakistan

Abstract

The political culture literature is afflicted with an orientational and attitudinal bias in which cultural dynamics reign supreme, while political values and beliefs are relegated as an epiphenomenon. The present article arrogates the ‘political’ as the superior analytical variable in estimating political culture in Pakistan. While political culture studies attend to the behavioural methodology focused on individual cultural attitudes and orientations towards the political system, analysis of Pakistan’s political culture is attempted at the meso-level, that is, political parties and is in this sense a top–bottom approach. A seminal focus on political parties attends to a major gap in the political culture literature: the non-attention to agency. That is, while the literature thrives on cultural attitudes and orientations that feed into the political system, it is largely silent on the much thornier question of how such attitudes and orientations are engendered in the public sphere in the first place. In this sense, the article attributes agency to political parties as shaping and influencing political culture, that is, how do people view and think about politics in the country. Finally, in conformity with the political culture literature, the fact that political culture is never uniform and homogenous rather stratified into various competing political sub-cultures is brought out with respect to three mainstream political parties in Pakistan as manifested in their 2018 election manifestoes. Because political parties are ideational agents that shape beliefs and values in the public sphere, it makes sense to deep dive into competitive political sub-cultures placing ‘politics’ at the core of political culture analysis.