Political culture

thumb|Inglehart-Welzel values map

Political culture describes how culture impacts politics. Every political system is embedded in a particular political culture.

Political culture is what the people, the voters, the electorates believe and do based on their understanding of the political system in which they have found themselves. These may be regarded as good or bad when compared with global best practices or norms.

Definition

Gabriel Almond defines it as "the particular pattern of orientations toward political actions in which every political system is embedded".

Analysis

The limits of a particular political culture are based on subjective identity. However, the recurrent post-elections clashes in largely protestant Sub-Saharan countries, such as Kenya or Uganda, shows that religious affiliations seem to affect the political behaviour of populations poorly.

National political cultures

Russia

Russia is a low-trust society, with even the highest trusted institutions of church and the military having more distrustful than trusting citizens, and with low participation in civil society. This means that Russia has a weak civic political culture. Furthermore, the authoritarian traditions of Russia mean that there is little support for democratic norms such as tolerance of dissent and pluralism. Russia has a history of authoritarian rulers from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin, who have engaged in massive repression of all potential political competitors, from the oprichnina to the Great Purge. The resulting political systems of Tsarist autocracy and Soviet communism had no space for independent institutions.

United States

The background of its early immigrants heavily influenced the political culture of the United States, as it is a settler society. Samuel P. Huntington identified American politics as having a "Tudor" character, with elements of English political culture of that period, such as common law, strong courts, local self-rule, decentralized sovereignty across institutions, and reliance on popular militias instead of a standing army, having been imported by early settlers. Another source of political culture was the arrival of Scotch-Irish Americans, who came from a violent region of Britain, and brought with them a strong sense of individualism and support for the right to bear arms. These settlers provided the support for Jacksonian democracy, which was a revolution of its time against the established elites, and remnants of which can still be seen in modern American populism. Chinese political culture perceives the relationship between government and individuals to be a hierarchy. Because of this, there is little pushback from individuals during policy and regulation changes. The political culture also shows a trend against confrontationality, which decreases the quantity and frequency of social conflict. Both of these qualities stem from traditional Chinese values embedded during the age of Confucianism. When the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1948, Mao Zedong unsuccessfully attempted to remove these traits from the culture, instead prioritizing revolutionary values.

India

Due to India's colonization by the British Empire, the contemporary political culture has been influenced by Western ideas that were not present before, so we also follow Western political culture. These influences include democracy and parliamentary systems, two institutions that stood ideologically opposed to the caste system that had previously dictated society. Because of India's multicultural demography, the political culture varies by group and region. India's successful democratization lead to power being given to both the urbanized and well-educated class who focused on national appeal, as well as more traditional, rural, and lower class political actors. In the modern era, the class system of India has begun to break down, and members of lower classes are now entering higher political and economic positions. This is especially true for lower-class women, who historically have been excluded from such activities.