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Political culture refers to the values and political conduct of individual or collective agents. As a concept it is as old as the analysis of politics itself. Aristotle wrote about a "state of mind" that could inspire either political change or stability; Machiavelli stressed the role of the values and feelings of identity and commitment; Burke praised the "cake of custom" that enabled political institutions to fulfil their aims; Tocqueville emphasized moeurs as the key determinants of the character of a particular society. But the contemporary understanding of political culture has been uniquely influenced by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's classic behaviorist formulation in the Civic Culture (1963), leading up to today's multicausal, relational, and mixed methods approaches to the study of the concept (Thompson, Ellis, & Wildavsky, 1990). As a result of this methodological diversity, political culture has ceased to be narrowly identified with the attitudes toward government of political agents, to be measured in the aggregate and then compared across political systems, or even more broadly conceived as a process in which political meaning is constructed in the interplay between the attitudes of individual citizens and the language and symbolic systems in which they are embedded. Contemporary analysis of political culture is a broad church, taking in everything from data collection on political opinions, attitudes, and values conducted by means of structured interviews with representative samples of citizens (e.g., Inglehart, 1997), to interpretive approaches that use a range of qualitative methods to clarify how political identities are generated, or how symbols and rhetoric can generate compliance or conflict, to discussions of why some ethnic identities become radicalized and others do not. The field has become so broad, that it is hard to pinpoint what is political culture and what is not.

Reconciling the diversity of political cultures, values and national identities with the European integration project is one of the most fundamental challenges contemporary Europe is facing. This challenge is readily apparent in the Baltic Sea region with its mosaic of peoples, cultures and identities. The impact of the ongoing process of European integration on the post-Communist societies on the Eastern rim of the Baltic Sea is indisputable. The negotiations between the European Union and the East European candidate countries were in fact accompanied by a large scale transfer of organization

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von Almond, G. A.: The civic culture : political attitudes and democracy in five nations / G. A. Almond and S. Verba. - Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1963. + Almond, G. A.: The civic culture revisited / G. A. Almond and S. Verba. - London : Sage, 1989

POLITICAL SCIENCE HAS IGNORED MANY CRITICAL ASPECTS OF THE 'LEISURE CULTURE'. TO REMEDY THIS, A NEW PERSPECTIVE IN POLITICAL STUDIES SHOULD BE DEVELOPED. THE LEISURE CULTURE HAS A POWERFUL EFFECT ON THE POLITICAL CULTURE THROUGH THE SUPPORT OFFERED FOR POLITICAL AIMS, WHILE GOVERNMENT POLICIES GREATLY AFFECT THE LEISURE CULTURE. THE MAJOR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS & CULTURE INCLUDE: (1) RECIPROCAL INTERACTION BETWEEN POLITICS & CULTURE, (2) CULTURAL POLICY, CLASS, & DISSENT, & (3) AN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT. TO DEVELOP A POLITICAL SCIENCE THAT ENCOMPASSES BOTH POLITICS & CULTURE, THE DISCIPLINE SHOULD BE STUDIED LESS & THE CULTURE MORE. 1 FIGURE. MODIFIED AUTHOR'S SUMMARY.

It is argued that the pursuit of an autonomous & excellent culture must be central to a revitalized democratic project. The revitalization of democracy & culture requires a free public life; also, in mass society the politics & culture of a free public domain are naturally supportive. The institutional context of cultural life in mass society is examined, with attention to the historical development of mass politics in the US. It is maintained that the apparently necessary opposition between cultural excellence & democracy may be overcome when the defense of public freedom is taken up as a first principle of political action. AA

This essay makes a case for an anthropological conceptualization of culture as "semiotic practices" and demonstrates how it adds value to political analyses. "Semiotic practices" refers to the processes of meaning-making in which agents' practices (e.g., their work habits, self-policing strategies, and leisure patterns) interact with their language and other symbolic systems. This version of culture can be employed on two levels. First, it refers to what symbols do—how symbols are inscribed in practices that operate to produce observable political effects. Second, "culture" is an abstract theoretical category, a lens that focuses on meaning, rather than on, say, prices or votes. By thinking of meaning construction in terms that emphasize intelligibility, as opposed to deep-seated psychological orientations, a practice-oriented approach avoids unacknowledged ambiguities that have bedeviled scholarly thinking and generated incommensurable understandings of what culture is. Through a brief exploration of two concerns central to political science—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—this paper ends by showing how culture as semiotic practices can be applied as a causal variable.

Chinese political culture is education in the character of Chinese civilization. Education in Chinese civilization is the cultivation of those Chinese characteristics unique to Chinese political life. Chinese education is therefore cultivation in the uniqueness of Chinese culture. The unity of Chinese political culture and the education characteristic of the Chinese cultivation of political life is its character. Chinese education in political life aims at the preservation of the unity of its character throughout its life, and it achieves the preservation of this unity through an education that cultivates political change that aims to preserve its life as the highest good. Here, Williams steps outside the West itself to look at Chinese political culture. Adapted from the source document.

This book offers readers a number of ways to link cultural experience to political economyto become aware of the ways in which political and economic realities and decisions determine the outlines of spaces and activities in everyday life. Unsettling and provocative, Culture Works shows how particular economies and power relations work in familiar and central cultural experiences: art, beer, advertising, dance, sport, shopping, the Web, and media.

AbstractOne way to understand the context of evaluation is in terms of its interaction with political culture. That culture includes citizens' views of the role of government and of evaluation and the history of the polity. This chapter illustrates the relationship of political culture and evaluation by means of two accounts of Danish political culture. The chapter also draws on this analysis to stimulate our thinking on the very idea of how context can be studied. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.