The Civic Culture or The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations is a 1963 political science book by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba.^[1] The book is credited with popularizing the political culture sub-field and is considered to be the first systematic study in this field.^[2][3]

• Select / Unselect all. Front Matter. Front Matter. Table of Contents. Table of Contents. PART I The Theory and Method of the Study. CHAPTER 1 AN APPROACH TO POLITICAL CULTURE. PART II Patterns of Political Culture. PART III Social Relations and Political Culture. PART IV Profiles of Political Culture. PART V Conclusion.
• In both countries, the older generations now have these civic orientations. 2 The landmark civic culture (Almond & Verba, 1963) study made a deep imprint on the minds of a whole generation of students of political behaviour.

Prehistory, Retrospect, and Prospect. Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba: The Civic Culture. Dezember 2001 – PDF-Download einzelner Artikel m The Civic Culture or The Civic Culture.

Synopsis[edit]

In the text Almond and Verba examine the democratic systems in five countries, the United States, Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United Kingdom. They interviewed about a thousand individuals in each country on their views of government and political life. As they define it, the 'civic culture' (singular) is 'based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that [permits] change but [moderates] it' (Almond and Verba 1963, 8). They identify three political structures: participant, subject, and parochial.^[4] They consider political culture to be the element that connects individual attitudes with the overall political system structure.^[5]

Almond and Verba considered the Italian emphasis on the family as the driving main force for society as 'amoral' (in the words of Edward Banfield (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958), or 'exclusive', and believed that such a culture would impede the culture's potential for developing a 'sense of community and civic culture,' which they saw as a necessary background for 'effective democracy'.^[6]

Reception and criticisms[edit]

Seymour Lipset wrote in The Democratic Century that Almond and Verba 'did argue persuasively that the extent of civic culture could be predicted by structural and historical factors' but that there was also 'strong evidence that some aspects of the civic culture were powerfully associated with education levels, across national borders'.^[7]

What Is Civic Culture

The Civic Culture was criticized for having an 'Anglo-American bias', with the authors stating that only the United Kingdom and the United States possessed the capability for long term democratic stabilization.^[8] Critics also expressed skepticism over the accuracy of depicting a culture based upon individual interviews and that the approach was 'ethnocentric and more prescriptive than objective and empirical'.^[9]

Almond And Verba

References[edit]

1. ^Baker, Kendall (181). Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics. Harvard University Press. ISBN0674353153.
2. ^Wilson, Catherine (2008). The Politics of Latino Faith. NYU Press. pp. 17–18. ISBN0814794130.
3. ^Caramani, Daniele (2008). Comparative Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 420. ISBN0199298416.
4. ^Crothers, Lane (2000). Culture and Politics: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 51. ISBN0312233000.
5. ^Franklin, Daniel (2006). Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 4. ISBN0742538095.
6. ^Kawata, Junichi (2006). Comparing Political Corruption And Clientelism. Ashgate Pub Co. p. 145. ISBN0754643565.
7. ^Lipset, Seymour (2004). The Democratic Culture. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 201. ISBN0806136189.
8. ^Axleford, Barry (1997). Politics: An Introduction. Routledge. pp. 58–63. ISBN0415110750.
9. ^Barrington, Lowell (2009). Comparative Politics: Structures and Choices. Wadsworth Publishing. p. 108. ISBN0618493190.

Almond And Verba Civic Culture

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contribution to political science

• In political science: Political culture

  >The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963), which surveyed 1,000-person samples in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. Almond and Verba identified three types of political culture: (1) participant, in which citizens understand and take part in…

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discussed in biography

Civil Society

• In Gabriel Abraham Almond

  …and books, including the groundbreaking The Civic Culture (1963). In this work, Almond and his coauthor, Sidney Verba, differentiated between political cultures in which citizens were active or inactive in civic affairs, explored the relationship between citizen participation and attitudes toward their political system, and maintained that a country’s political…

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