Political Culture at Crossroads: Resistance to Change vs. Pressure for Change

Editorial for the Launching Issue of the European Journal of Political Culture

Abstract

Political Culture Theory has been founded in the mid-1960s when Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba published their seminal work “The Civic Culture”. The theory proved the strength of its arguments on impressive empirical data sets collected from five countries:  measuring the quality and stability of democracy by measuring the citizens’ attitudes towards public policy and governance, and quantifying the performances of governance, state institutions and political leadership with a new concept, the “open polity”.

The precious idea of their study, namely the relationship between the citizens and the state, represents until today a most powerful approach to the study of any political system, in particular a democracy.

The notion of “political culture” has fueled ever since new theoretical works aimed at explaining it (Pye and Verba, 1969), and hot debates over the nature of this theory. The classic approach of its founders, which combined behaviorism and methodological individualism, has been followed by several other approaches on both theoretical and methodological dimensions, including Weberian, Marxist, neo-Tocquevillian, or neo-Durkeheiminian readings of the term (DaSilva, Clark and Vieira, 2015). Though resistant to change, the classic door remained opened to new theory.

The challenge of new theory development as well as the challenge of the technological development underlying the dynamics of communication and interaction at the societal and political levels has increasingly deepened the pressure for appropriately define the philosophical and methodological status of the classic political culture theory (Voinea, 2020).

Somehow at crossroads between the past and the future, political culture theory seems to teach us another lesson beside that of endurance: the lesson of resisting to a change in argument in order to make the big change toward a new science of participation. In a world globally threatened by as small, invisible, and lethal enemy as the coronavirus, there is no greater release than the idea of a world able to escape the threat by making the individual actors participating in its own re-making. It is this idea of participating in the making of the world that has kept the political culture theory in the lights of the global arena.

It is from here that we start our new endeavor: a new academic journal about political culture theory and research.