The political culture approach in political sociology is based on the premise that civil society rests not only on the formal legal and political structures of the state but also on the orientations, attitudes, and goals of citizens. While there have been a number of critiques of political culture theory and of research done under its auspices, this perspective influenced a number of “theories of crisis” that have emerged since the 1970’s. Political culture also seems to be the basis for several theories concerned with the “new anomie” and the current state of society’s moral order: neo-conservativism, underclass theories, and theories of contentment

The political culture school is based on the idea that there is a relationship between the behavior of individuals and the behavior of systems. Researchers from this school reject the notion that political behavior is best explained by the rational choices of individual actors. Rather, shared core values and “social trust” are what matters. How people feel about their political institutions is important. Citizens need to see a political system as legitimate in order for it to survive. The classic example of political culture work comes from Almond and Verba (1963). They performed a study to explore whether the stability of liberal democracies depends on shared value systems. The study included the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Italy, and Britain. Almond and Verba found that the political culture of Britain and the U.S. were most conducive to stable democracy.

There have been a number of critiques of the political culture approach and of Almond and Verba in particular. Welch (1993) notes that this work contains a tension between two notions of political culture and, more importantly, is unclear about causal dynamics. We are never sure whether the value system leads to a successful system of governance or if the culture is a product of the system.

Pateman (1989) criticizes Almond and Verba’s definition of democracy as well as their lack of emphasis on social cleavages based on class, gender, and race. Though they mention the Greeks, their conception of deference and limited participation is actually more akin to that of Schumpeter and Weber. They treat deference to elites as essential to sustaining the democratic “myth.” Almond and Verba deemphasize social cleavages because citizens are abstracted from the social and cultural structures that influence political participation. Thus, they ignore the fact that political culture may be much more fragmented than they propose. For example, Mann (1970) argues that a lack of value consensus among the working class in countries like the U.S. explains the absence of revolutionary consciousness.

This abstraction of citizens from social and cultural structures also leads Almond and Verba to divorce political culture from the power dynamics that give it shape. They never address how the political cultures develop. For example, Gramsci contends that a set of political orientations may not be an historical accident but, instead, may reflect conscious effort on the part of those in power to legitimize themselves to those they rule.

Despite its faults or the faults in its implementation, the political culture approach has influenced a number of other researchers. Topf (1989) sees political culture to be “the core problem of cultural renewal and change.” In particular, political culture undergirds many theories of crisis developed since the 1970’s. Fore example, Daniel Bell (1976) makes a critique of the cultural contradictions of capitalism where he sees a schism between the values of modern society and the economic and political values of the liberal democracy. He sees that modernity has produced an hedonistic, individualistic, and instrumentalist culture that is at odds with the requirements of the polity and the economy. “The real problem of modernity is the problem of belief.” The decline of tradition and particularly religious belief leads societies to a “spiritual crisis” which undermines the foundations of economic and political stability. He follows Weber in tying the success of Western society to the Protestant work ethic which emphasized work, saving, and investment. In contrast, Bell sees modern culture emphasizing leisure, conspicuous consumption, and instant gratification. In a similar vein, Jurgen Habermas (1976) proposes the existence of a “legitimation crisis.” This is essentially a crisis of motivation. The political system can no longer reproduce itself through the promotion of supportive values because the citizenry is increasingly disillusioned.

Related to these theories of crisis or perhaps in response to the crises they describe, two theories have emerged to address the “New Anomie” or the perceived normlessness and degeneration of modern society. These are neo-conservativism and underclass theories. Neo-conservativism, perhaps best represented by Himmelfarb (1995), blames the permissiveness of liberal society for doing away with Victorian values and ushering in rise in divorce, illegitimate births, and welfare dependency. Of course, neo-conservatives often ignore the fact that Victorian “morality” was undergirded by colonialism, slavery, and empire.

Underclass theories claim that the degeneration of values is concentrated in a particular segment of society, the underclass. Some of these theories focus on material and cultural factors that create or sustain the underclass (Charles Murray, W. J. Wilson). Many of these theorists blame the state for creating a culture of dependency. Others even attempt to make a case for the necessity of an underclass to maintain a “contented majority” (Galbraith).

To summarize, the political culture approach stresses the importance of shared value systems when trying to understand social and political reality. It is clear that governance depends on a set of political arrangements as well as a conception of the social order and each individual’s place in that order. Thus, political culture is an important corrective to studies that perhaps overemphasize political economics and institutional structures. However, political culture researchers have tended to ignore the material and social structures that influence the creation and maintenance of political value systems. They treat individual morality as an independent variable. Political scholars need to acknowledge the mutually constitutive nature of the material and cultural spheres.

Strange though it may sound to an academic outsider, until recently the study of social movements was not considered part of political sociology. Political sociology has historically focused either on the state/society relationship (macro-level) or political behavior (micro). Political behavior studies have focused on things like orientations, attitudes and goals or on the behavior of elites. Though many theorists have relied heavily on the idea that people do mobilize to pursue their interests, they seldom focus on this process, especially its mechanisms. Looking through the political soc. literature you see a real “black box” mentality concerning political mobilization. It is simple enough then to see the basic contribution of the social movements literature. Social movements research attempts to open the black box and specifically address the process by which groups mobilize for political action. There are three Big Ideas that have come out of these attempts: 1) mobilizing structures, 2) political opportunities, and 3) framing processes (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996).

Mobilizing structures are the organizational forms (formal and informal) that are available to insurgent groups. This Big Idea is based on work from two traditions. First, resource mobilzation theory (McCarthy and Zald 1977) is basically an organizational analysis of social movements that was an attempt to move away from a focus on ideosyncratic grievances to something more generalizable. Thus, it is less a study of the emergence of social movements and more a description of movement forms, particularly one new movement form—professional social movements. The second school of research on mobilizing structures is the political process model (Tilly 1975). This focuses on the importance of various grassroots structures such as neighborhood and workplace. Work from this approach influenced McAdam and Morris to look at the importance of local institutions. These two schools were originally treated as distinct but have now been synthesized.

Political opportunities (and constraints) is all about the factors that affect a group’s ability to influence the political agenda. Put another way, it is about the resources available (or not available) to insurgent groups. This approach is a fairly recent development in the literature. Tilly (1978), McAdam (1982), and Tarrow (1983) firmly established the links between institutionalized politics on the one hand and social movements and revolutions on the other. Early work focused on explaining the emergence of PARTICULAR social movements in terms of changes in the institutional structure or informal power relations of a PARTICULAR national political system. More recent work focuses on cross-national differences in the structure, extent, and success of comparable social movments on the basis of differences in the nations in which they are embedded. Earlier work tended to produce in-depth case studies (McAdam, Tarrow) while later work produces cross-national comparisons of the same movement in different countries. Political opportunities research has shown the importance of: 1) the openness of the state to changes that arise from civil society, 2) the stability of alignments between elites, 3) the presence of elites that are sympathetic to the proposed social change, and 4) the state’s capacity and propensity for repression.

Framing process theory is where we begin to address the cultural aspects of social movements. David Snow et al (1986) took Goffman’s concept of framing and applied it to social movements thereby reasserting the importance of ideas and sentiments. Thus, this approach concerns the processes of interpretation, attribution, and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action. Given an opportunity for mobilization, people need to feel both that they have a grievance and that they have an opportunity to make a change. The presence of these perceptions depends on social psychological processes of collective attribution and social construction. Work in this vein has focused on sources and functions of meaning within social movments (Inglehart 1979; Melucci 1988) and the importance of shared and socially constructed ideas (Gamson, Tarrow, Tilly, McAdam).

On top of these three Big Ideas, the other key concept from social movement research is New Social Movements (NSM). Researchers in this sub-sub-field contend that new kinds of social movements emerged over the course of the last century, especially since the 1960’s, that are distinct from the movements of classical industrial society such as workers movements. Their novelty stems from their disillusionment with statist politics of the socialist left and the neo-liberal right and their explicit rejection of the state as a tool for creating social change and ensuring democratic accountability. Their most defining characteristic is their distrust of centralized and hierarchical control structures. Examples of these kinds of movements are the black power movement, the anit-Vietnam war movement, women’s movements, and movements focused on sexuality or animal rights.

If these are, in fact, a new kind of movement, little of the standard theory in political sociology is applicable. Political sociology tends to be very state-focused and thus does a poor job of explaining the dynamics of these movements that explicitly circumvent the state. However, some theorists are unwilling to treat these movements as quite so distinct. While the avenues of political action may be somewhat different, the motivating forces as well as the resources necessary for successful action are common to most social movements. Though NSM researchers seldom take class as a central theme, it is difficult to argue that class relations play no part. For this reason, NSM research has recently been incorporated into social movement research as a whole. In particular, work from this tradition, primarily by European scholars, has contributed to our understanding of political opportunities and constraints.

Based on the above discussion, I think it is clear how research on social movements has much to offer to the standard literature on political sociology. Consider Marx’s work or the political class struggle work of Korpi or the democratization work of Barrington Moore. All these analyses rely heavily on the concept of class struggle and political mobilization yet none offer an explanation of the process of that mobilization. Now with the analytical tools of mobilizing structures, political opportunities, framing processes, and New Social Movements, sociologists can shed new light on old work as well as forge new theoretical ground.

This weekend I attended the Triangle Bloggers Conference. The theme was “community building” and there definitely was a good deal of that going on. Unfortunately, aside from all the back patting and blogging rah-rah, there really wasn’t a lot of good formal discussion of community building. I think the main problem is that no one ever really bothered discussing what was meant by “community.” During the “community” segment of the conference, we heard talk about two general topics: 1) how to get more hits/links/etc. and 2) hits/links/etc. don’t matter unless they’re the “right kind”. But then, “right kind” was never defined. Academic as it may sound, I think some definitional discussion could have been really helplful.

Though blogging can be defined to be more encompassing than “people who use blog software”, that remains the common denominator for most of the people in the blogging community. Thus, much of the discussion is technology-focused or, at least, focused on problem solving.

I was also a little put off by the self-congratulatory and arrogant tone adopted many of the attendees (especially the really vocal ones). There was a decided lack of humility.

All of this is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the conference. It definitely got my mind going, though generally because I disagreed with or saw serious flaws in what was being said.

On Feb. 25 and Mar. 4, I will be taking my comprehensive exams. The first of these is on the subfield of political sociology and the second is on the sociology of culture. Each exam is 8 hours. You are given six questions of which you have to answer four. Notes and references are not allowed. If it’s not in your head, it’s off limits. Luckily, many of the previous comp questions are publicly available and the prompts are usually general enough that you can direct the answers toward your areas of expertise.

Needless to say, I’ve been reading a lot. A LOT. Now that I’ve covered much of the material from the reading lists, I’m getting to the synthesis phase. I plan to use MoreSmarter as a place to organize my thoughts and practice writing out proto-responses. Expect to see a good number of very long posts on various topics in political sociology and culture.