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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

La finalidad de este artículo es revisitar el complejo concepto de cultura política, reflexionando sobre el origen, la existencia de diferentes culturas políticas, los debates suscitados, la dificultad metodológica de su aplicación y la utilidad que su uso reporta a la Ciencia Política. Para ello se repasan las teorías clásicas de la cultura política y las críticas que han recibido teniendo en cuenta factores territoriales, históricos, psicológicos, institucionales y metodológicos que culminan en la propuesta de un nuevo esquema interpretativo. ; The purpose of this article is to revisit the complex concept of political culture. This work reflects on its origin, the existence of different political cultures, the debates raised, the methodological difficulty of its application and the benefits that its use adds to Political Science. To this end, the classical theories of political culture and the criticisms they have received are reviewed, taking into account territorial, historical, psychological, institutional and methodological factors that culminate in the proposal of a new interpretative scheme.