Authors: Kuper & Kuper
Summary: This entry defines the concept and discusses the major works exploring political culture. Political culture has been defined in a variety of different ways. These can be grouped into two broad categories: those definitions which confine the scope of political culture to the subjective orientation on the part of nations, social groups, or individuals to politics; and those which broaden the concept to include patterns of political behavior as well as attitudes.
The term appears to have been first used by Herder; its elaboration and development as a concept of modern political science dates from the 1950s. Substantive empirical research organized around the concept began to appear in the 1960s (Almond and Verba 1963; Pye and Verba 1965). While the concept of political culture had a generally lower salience in the 1970s than in the 1960s, it began to attract in that decade greater attention from students of Communist systems. Such scholars were particularly interested in the degree of consonance or dissonance between, on the one hand, the values and political doctrines being promulgated by the Communist power-holders through the official agencies of political socialization, and, on the other hand, the values and political beliefs to be found among the populace. In the 1970s, at least, Communist states seemed to represent particularly successful cases of political socialization from above.