Distinct Political Cultures Research Articles

Tribal government today: politics on Montana Indian reservations

An account of Fourth World peoples within a First World nation, TRIBAL GOVERNMENT TODAY is a critical analysis of the contemporary progress of Indian tribes toward self-government and economic sufficiency. Focusing on seven reservations in Montana representing the diverse opportunities and problems facing Indian tribes in the West, this book approaches tribal government from the twin perspectives of reservation politics and the legal context within which reservation conflicts must be solved. Unlike previous studies of Indian politics, Tribal Government Today is neither a critique of American Indian policy over the years nor an analysis of federal, state, and tribal jurisdictional ambiguities. The authors -- a political scientist, a lawyer, and a historian -- focus instead on the distinctive political culture that has evolved on each reservation in terms of the reservation settings, governmental structures and procedures, and a particular brand of politics.

Political participation in Swiss referenda at federal and cantonal levels: 1879?1981

Political participation in the process of semidirect democracy differs in several important respects from political participation in elections in representative democracies. This study discusses patterns of participation in 300 referenda at the cantonal and federal level in Switzerland during the 1879–1981 period. The purpose of this survey is to account for cross-temporal and cross-cantonal variations in terms of: (a) referenda type, (b) competition intensity, and (c) the influence of a multiple political culture. The findings suggest that distinctive political cultures and life styles, and other collective factors account for turn-out percentages and competition intensity. Voters tend to mobilize essentially to reject constitutional revisions and laws rather than accept them. The significance of cross-temporal differences was found to diminish during the 1952–1981 period. This tendency toward increasing standardization of Swiss political participation does not, however, completely blur the specificity of participation within cantons, suggesting that the multicultural nature of Swiss society is still prevalent.

American liberalism and jewish response

American Jewry contributed notably to restoring "republican vir tue" to American liberalism. It did so by giving a strong emphasis to the communal dimension of public policy which it drew from its own distinctive political culture. That Jewish wrinkle ultimately became the heart of the controversy which marks the development of that much misunderstood mind-set. In the final decades of the 19th century American liberalism had tipped to its libertarian extreme making plain that on the ideological level the three elements of the venerated slogan of the French revolution, on which liberalism is based, are incompatible. Allowed full rein 'liberty" will make a shambles of "equality," and erode "fraternity" as well. The American forefathers were aware that an "excess" of liberty posed a threat to the polity.2 They optimistically assumed that "republican virtue," such as practiced by the citizen of the Greek city state, combined with a dose of what John Adams called the "principles of political architecture," would hold bucca neering individualism in check. There is ample evidence from before the Civil War that these assumptions were unrealistic. Today they lie in ashes. One look at the inchoate graffiti on the New York City subway or at the pricing of a two-dollar screwdriver in a Lockheed defense contract tells at a glance how weak a defense "republican virtue" is against rapaciousness. The political culture of the eastern Jewish immigrants contained an antidote. Liberty, they understood, needs to be contained by the laws of necessity or else it would result in chaos and injustice. Throughout their Diaspora they were compelled to match their limited freedom with a sense of responsibility. They assigned the discharging of communal responsibility to their governors, and to the

Spinoza and Harrington. An exercise in comparison

In this lecture I shall offer a comparison between two assemblages of texts which figure in the history of political theory. The two were written by authors who can be identified as inhabiting distinct political systems and non-identical religious cultures; there is no evidence that they were aware of one another, and certainly they were not participating directly in any common debate. But they lived not far apart in time or space; they drew upon shared texts as diverse as the Bible and Machiavelli; they may be viewed as connected by some of the tissues binding western Christian culture in the later seventeenth century, and among these tissues figure certain concepts and procedures used in the construction of political and theologico-political theory. We are entitled, therefore, to ask how and why they made divergent uses of shared cultural resources. We may wish also to ask whether they, and the political and religious cultures to which they belonged, shared common. practical and theoretical problems, and whether these in turn arose from a shared history, political or social, cultural or material, in the common experience of what it is now fashionable to term 'Europe'. Pressures upon historians, on the one hand to treat 'Europe' as a given, on the other to connect the theoretical with the material life, are now so strong that they may be called hegemonic, and all hegemonies ought as a matter of course to be challenged. I shall confine myself to saying that the tracing of such connections must be subject to the rules of evidence and interpretation; when they can be found it is of greatest value to find them, but when they do not emerge we have not necessarily failed in the historian's endeavour. Our mission is to find what we are capable of finding, and to enlarge our capacities as we are capable of enlarging them. Professor Kossmann has done much — and the same may be said of other participants in this conference — to make the vocabulary and theory of politics in the Dutch Republic known to scholars who work in the language I am myself employing; and I am about to juxtapose — let me not numb you with reiteration of the word 'compare' — political treatises written by an author resident in London and Westminster with others written by one resident in Amsterdam and The Hague. Now it could have happened — as perhaps it did with John Selden and Hugo Grotius — that authors resident at these points shared in a medium of communication and in the languages transmitted along it; that they were writing to or about one another and engaging in a common discourse. But this does not seem to have been the case with James Harrington and Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza. Though they died in the same year (1677) I do not think they knew of each other, and

Working Class Culture, Occupational Recruitment, and Union Politics

Variations in working class political consciousness and behavior are normally ascribed to structural differences between industries. This study, focusing on a single industry, employs a more historical and culturally sensitive approach to explain the emergence of radical and conservative longshore unions on opposite coasts of the United States. Drawing on original oral histories, government and union documents, archival sources and secondary materials, we locate the source of these distinctive political cultures in the differing ideological communities out of which longshoremen on both coasts were recruited prior to World War L. The implications of this finding are briefly discussed.

Urban Policy Analysis

Four overlapping subfields of urban policy analysis are reviewed. The political leadership analyses include elite theories, group theory, neo-Marxist work, and network analyses. Consideration of citizen preferences involves populist spatial theories, budget pies, and policy responsiveness. Bureaucratic theories include incrementalism, the dynamic bureau head, and professionalism. Population and economic location analyses increasingly stress small firms, simultaneity of job and residential choice, and impacts of public policy. These alternative approaches were often advanced as one-factor interpretations. But a contextual relativism approach seeks to reconcile their ostensibly conflicting results. Results differ by context. Current work specifies how rules of the game, identified by distinct political cultures, shift processes across contexts.

Urban Policy Analysis

Four overlapping subfields of urban policy analysis are reviewed. The political leadership analyses include elite theories, group theory, neo-Marxist work, and network analyses. Consideration of citizen preferences involves populist spatial theories, budget pies, and policy responsiveness. Bureaucratic theories include incrementalism, the dynamic bureau head, and professionalism. Population and economic location analyses increasingly stress small firms, simultaneity of job and residential choice, and impacts of public policy. These alternative approaches were often advanced as one-factor interpretations. But a contextual relativism approach seeks to reconcile their ostensibly conflicting results. Results differ by context. Current work specifies how rules of the game, identified by distinct political cultures, shift processes across contexts.

Operationalizing Political Culture: The Illinois Case

The theory which Daniel Elazar has propounded that there are three basic streams of migration and settlement in the U.S. and that each of these streams carries with it a distinctive political culture,1 has generated a number of attempts to use his classification of states to explain various political phenomena. These attempts have generally followed Sharkansky's approach which uses a ten point scale ranging from most Moralistic to most Traditionalistic.2 Results of these studies have shown that cultural variations in the U.S. have a

A Transactional Theory of Political Integration and Arms Control

Nominally, the English became a nation in the eighth century but did not achieve political integration until the seventeenth century, a thousand years later. During the millennium, the English “nation” was the scene of recurring internal wars, the last ending with the acceptance of the Bill of Rights by William III and Mary in 1688. What was the process leading to cessation in the use of armed conflict as a technique of domestic politics in England?Nominally, Mexico was an independent nation in 1821 but did not see the end of its internal wars until the 1940's. What political process led to domestic “arms control” in Mexico?Although taking place in different centuries and in nations with distinct political cultures, were there common elements in the two transitions to internal arms control? What were critical factors in the integrative process? May the same factors, or analogous ones, be identified and controlled in contemporary efforts related to regional and international arms control? What may be learned from the English, the Mexican, and other national cases that is generalizable to the problem of international political integration and arms control?The present theory sketch views arms control as an aspect of the integration of political organizations. Political integration, in turn, is the consequence of a process of political transactions among principal political actors over time.

A Transactional Theory of Political Integration and Arms Control

Nominally, the English became a nation in the eighth century but did not achieve political integration until the seventeenth century, a thousand years later. During the millennium, the English “nation” was the scene of recurring internal wars, the last ending with the acceptance of the Bill of Rights by William III and Mary in 1688. What was the process leading to cessation in the use of armed conflict as a technique of domestic politics in England?Nominally, Mexico was an independent nation in 1821 but did not see the end of its internal wars until the 1940's. What political process led to domestic “arms control” in Mexico?Although taking place in different centuries and in nations with distinct political cultures, were there common elements in the two transitions to internal arms control? What were critical factors in the integrative process? May the same factors, or analogous ones, be identified and controlled in contemporary efforts related to regional and international arms control? What may be learned from the English, the Mexican, and other national cases that is generalizable to the problem of international political integration and arms control?The present theory sketch views arms control as an aspect of the integration of political organizations. Political integration, in turn, is the consequence of a process of political transactions among principal political actors over time.