Political Culture: Residual Category or General Theory?

In: Comparative political studies: CPS, Band 25, Heft 3, S. 362-387

Abstract

Political culture as a concept for empirical political analysis has been so promiscuously employed within the political sciences as to render it meaningless. In an effort to locate some basic structural principles that will reorient political culture studies in a more constructive direction, six case studies from a classic compendium in the field are analyzed in comparative perspective. The resulting models of the several political cultures can be integrated with formal political decision-making models to provide the foundation for a formal theory of cultural rationality.