Political Culture makes a Comeback

“Heaven is where the police are English, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and everything is organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Countries have become ultra sensitive these days - attributing such national characteristics has become unacceptable, politically incorrect. But regular readers will know that my experience since 1990 of living and working in a dozen different countries has given me a fascination with national traits and their effects on institutional behaviour. I’ve spent most of my life trying to improve the way government bodies interact with citizens from which I’ve tried to draw the lessons analysed in Change for the Better? a Life in reform

All this has given me a certain fatalism about the prospects for real democracy in central and eastern Europe - where I presently live. The transitologists (and sociologists) made frequent use of the term “path-dependency” by which they meant that institutions tended to be stuck in historical and cultural behaviour – viz it wasn’t just the experience of communism which governs Bulgarian and Romanian mentalities, it was the centuries of Ottoman influence.

My thoughts about all that are gathered in a short piece - Puzzling Cultural Values -which I published last year but which will need updating in the light of material I have just come across. The article tried to analyse some 50 books and concluded with a quotation from one of the most accessible Howard Wiarda’s Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance in 2014

1. Political-cultural explanations often have a number of weaknesses: vagueness, imprecision, stereotyping, and lack of clear definition or methodology. They also tend to ignore both class/structural factors and outside, international, or globalization factors.

2. But political culture also has its strengths. It gets you at first causes, the essence of things, the basics. And in Almond and Verba’s or Inglehart’s work, it gets you closer to an empirical, scientific explanation.

3. Studying political culture is both hard work and fun to do. It enables you to travel, go abroad, and learn about other countries and cultures.

4. While political culture is important, it is not, in my view, the only explanation. Other factors, as above, are also important. So political culture should not be reified or elevated into an exclusive or single-causal explanation. Political culture explains a lot but not everything. My own preference is for a more complex, multi-causal explanation. Culture should thus be used in combination with other explanations: geography, social structure, resources, and institutions. These factors can now best be weighed and evaluated through correlations and multi-variate analysis. Such analysis can give us the explanatory weight of each factor or variable.

5. At the same time, we must recognize that cultures do change. They are not deterministic or fixed for all time. They adjust, adapt, get altered, even undergo at times revolutionary transformations. Societies change; modernization and globalization go forward; and culture change both drives and is a product of these other changes. After all, culture is mainly a human and a societal construct; it has not yet been proven that it is genetic, inherited, and organic. As cultures change, so also will societies and political systems.

The new material includes stuff from highly respected Daron Acemoglu, Paul Collier, Ben Fine, Joseph Stiglitz and Sydney Tarrow and has me questioning my erstwhile fatalism. Perhaps there is indeed still hope for central Europe and the Balkans!

But, first, I have to read and absorb that new material – the table below lists the material and indicates my feelings after a quick scan

Article	Initial response
Sydney Tarrow on Robert Putnam 1996	A superb eample of a truly honest and professional review – of Putman’s analysis in “Making Democracy Work” of the reasons for the huge differences in institutional strengths of south and north Italian Regions
social capital and civic culture (Fukuyama IMF 2000)	A cool assessment by one of the world’s foremost political thinkers of the explanatory power of the concept which has grabbed the attention of the World Bank
Theories of Social Capital – researchers behaving badly; Ben Fine 2010	An excoriating analysis – as you might expect from the subtitle. A Click on the title will give you the full book
Culture, Politics and economic development Paul Collier 2010	Paul Collier is one of the best developmental conomists and explores in this article the role of culture in explaining economic development
Italian Political Culture at 50 2010	Edward Banfield’s use of “amoral familiasm” in his 1950s book has profoundly affected our perception of Italy. An Italian sociologist assese the damage
Italy’s Divide 2017	A rather academic treatment of the issue
Particularism thro the looking glass 2019	This is one of the terms used for “alien” cultures
A comment on Banfield 2020	One historian’s view
The Wicked problems of Social Capital 2021	A useful overview of the literature
The Long Shadow of History Stiglitz 2022	A chapter of a book called “The Other Invisible Hand: The Power of Culture to Promote or Stymie Progress” he and some others will produce next year. Not very original
Culture and Institutions Daron Acemoglu 2023	Acemoglu is a developmental economist who has published “Why Nations Fail” (2012) “The Narrow Corridor” (2019) and “Power and Pogress – our struggle over technology and prosperity” (2023) This long article looks to be a definitive piece on the subject – although it is a bit academic