Concepts
of
Political Science
Political
Culture
a resource for student reference prepared by
Gordon L. Bowen, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science and International Relations
Mary Baldwin College
Staunton, VA USA 24401
email: gbowen@mbc.edu
Political
Culture
Political
Culture
is a concept developed in the 1960s by the late Gabriel Almond (Stanford University,
who died in 2002). He defined it as:
“the
underlying... attitudes, beliefs, values, and skills that are current in an
entire population, as well as those ... patterns ....found within separate
parts of that population... [which] we refer to as subcultures.”
Almond
believed that in studying political systems, one needs to examine both the structures
that perform the political functions, and the political culture.
“As
we learn about the structure and culture of
a political system, our capacity to characterize its properties, and to
predict and explain its performance, is improved.”
Gabriel
Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental
Approach (Boston: Little-Brown, 1966): 23-24.
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