The Civic Culture Transformed is an interesting and important volume on political culture, focusing on postmaterialist values and beliefs, their origin, evolution, and relation to functioning democracy. It goes beyond the values associated with postmaterialism to cover the emergence of new methods of comparative research: cross-national surveys in a globalized world and methodological challenges associated with measurement of values and behaviors across nations and across time. It chronicles the development of an organizational structure for comparing survey results across nations and over time; it contributes to substantive political science research, especially comparative research, and, perhaps even more, to the processes of studying comparative politics.
The Civic Culture Transformed is a collection of 12 chapters, by 16 authors from nine countries. The authors are scholars with long records of distinguished and varied research. Many symposia consist of essays on the author’s individual agenda. This is a symposium centered around the issues just mentioned. Ronald Inglehart—to whom the volume is dedicated—deserves credit for creating its cohesive intellectual base. Editors Russell Dalton and Christian Welzel deserve praise for putting a cohesive volume together.
As the title suggests, this is a reevaluation of the original political culture model presented in The Civic Culture, in the light of recent analyses and empirical evidence, and presents a “transformation” of the earlier book. I thus begin with an unusually personal statement for a book review. I am the coauthor (with Gabriel Almond) of The Civic Culture, now asked to review a volume on the transformation of its substance 50 years after its publication. I wondered if I should take on the task. If I did, how would I go about it? Would I find that I have to criticize the current work in order to defend a book I coauthored a half century earlier?
Happily, this “Transformation” appears to require no defense of its predecessor, The Civic Culture. The new volume opens with a comment on it (as well as on Verba and Pye’s Political Culture and Political Development [1965], a book that extended the arguments made in the first book): “The importance of these two classic books cannot be overemphasized. They widened the political culture approach into a global framework for the comparative analysis of political regime change and regime legitimacy in developed as well as developing countries” (p. 1). I have little reason to quarrel with that! In addition, the 50-year gap brings special gratification. That The Civic Culture is remembered after half a century is gratifying.
More central is the fact that, as in all fields, social science is a continuing process in which research builds upon prior research and goes beyond it. Transformation is to be expected and welcomed. As Vilfredo Pareto commented: “Give me fertile error, bursting with the seeds of its own correction, and you can keep your sterile truth” (Quoted by Triska and Cocks,Reference Triska and Cocks1977, p. vii).
The Civic Culture focused on political culture. Almond and I stressed the role of beliefs and values associated with stable and effective democracy: democracy, in turn, based on active citizens who are allegiant to and supportive of the governmental system; and the role of materialist values that prioritize economic stability and job security. The book distinguished among three kinds of political cultures:
A Parochial cultures where citizens are essentially apolitical, passive, and inactive in political matters;
B Subject cultures where citizens are uninvolved in politics but are supportive of the government; and
C Allegiant-participant cultures where citizens are active and allegiant to government.
The citizens who are allegiant and supportive are more likely to be young, more educated, and come from more affluent segments of society, who probably appreciate the benefits of the regimes and economies in which they live. A functioning democracy, we argued, rests on a combination of participant and parochial citizens, allegiantly active citizens, and allegiantly passive citizens. We backed up our model by a survey study of the belief systems in five nations—a rare use in those days of systematic survey techniques in a cross-national setting. For its substance and its method, The Civic Culture shortly became a classic—a fact clearly noted by the author of this review whose career was built on it.
The Civic Culture, being an early book in a new field, had various weaknesses. It fit neatly into Pareto’s category of desirable research; it had fertile errors. One fertile error was in our research method: the attempt to use a too literal set of criteria to create cross-national questions that had the same meaning and connotations in different languages. Seeds of correction produced many cross-national surveys with more sophisticated methods and translation approaches. Another fertile error was that the book is based on too few cases—five nations, of which Britain and the United States fit most closely into the category of nations with allegiant citizens. Perhaps the biggest error was the prediction (shared by other books at the time) that future modernization would lead to a more educated and rational public, coupled with a decline in the role of such “primordial” commitments as religion and ethnicity in social and political life. This, of course, is not what has happened. Yet the errors were, in a way, also fruitful truths. The Civic Culture put culture on the political science agenda, and helped transform the study of comparative politics.
As for The Civic Culture Transformed, the transformation in question was begun by Ingelhart. While the point of departure of the volume under review is The Civic Culture, it goes well beyond the concept of political culture contained in its predecessor. Transformed deals with a newly emerging political culture—postmaterialism—quite different from that described in its predecessor, as well as with the changes in the political, economic, and social world that fostered the new culture. It also describes and analyzes the changing measurement of relevant variables and their statistical analysis, and it documents the new international structures.
Inglehart focused on political culture, but the beliefs and values he found were different from the ones that we found decades before. Early in the 1970s, Inglehart found a pattern of political engagement in France during what one might characterize—looking back from today—as the French Spring. Students were in the forefront of the activists. They were, however, not allegiant and deferential in their orientation but assertively opposed to the political system. Their goals were not focused around the material benefits that a functioning government might bring, but on more personal values; these young citizens did not favor allegiance but, rather, independence and autonomy. A cultural lack of deference was seen in their behavior. They were in the streets, fiercely protesting the French government and the underlying system. Inglehart labeled the protesters postmaterialists. They had already appeared in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the United States. They were young college students or graduates: non-allegiants whose values were freedom and limited government. The participants in the later Occupy movement in the United States and parallel movements elsewhere were similar. The new generation turned the civic culture world upside down.
Inglehart not only transformed the analysis of political culture by documenting the emergence of a new form of political culture1. He went beyond that to foster new methods of studying it. He, and the many colleagues who joined him, expanded and refined the measurement of political values and beliefs2. More importantly, he led in the globalization of political research, expanding cross-national surveys from the more developed nations of Europe and elsewhere into other continents and developing nations. And perhaps most important of all, he was a leader in the establishment of an international structure for such research: World Values Surveys. These have been joined by other cross-national surveys, including the Eurobarometer, many regional surveys, and nation-based ones. Data are now available from more than 90 nations. This allows comparison of the frequency of postmaterialist values across nations and the rise and fall of these values. In some sense, these efforts have created a veritable United Nations of research—enabling research coordinated across nations and, as important, replicable over time. Comparative politics was once a political science subject taught on a country-to-country basis, with close attention to a few nations and often with little systematic comparison among them. The survey research pioneered by Inglehart and his colleagues makes possible a new and improved version of comparative politics.
The Civic Culture Transformed is a major example of a new data-rich approach to comparative politics covering many areas of concern. The cross-national survey data presented here allow systematic comparison across the nations studied. These comparisons include commitment to postmaterialist attitudes as well as measures of confidence in regimes, trust in others, law obedience, voting intentions, and more. Preferences can be compared across nations, or sets of nations (European compared with non-European, new compared with older democracies, etc.). Given that many of the comparisons are across data gathered at more than one point in time, one can track changes in these variables over time. The correlations among variables can also be compared from nation to nation. The fact that the units of comparative analysis are aggregations of survey results as well as national-level variables allows for comparisons across nations in terms of the citizen values and national-level characteristics, such as public policies in a nation or governmental. Examples of such descriptions and analyses can be seen in the various chapters of the volume.
Many scholars have followed the lead of Inglehart and his colleagues; they have enriched the meaning of the concept as is illustrated in the expanded categories and questions discussed in Transformed, and they have enhanced the analysis and interpretation of its form of political culture—and of political culture more generally.
This is not to say that there are no problems and uncertainties with postmaterialism. There is also a large literature critical of the approach. Some scholars argue that what matters in fostering and maintaining democracy are economic factors or the nature of governmental systems, and that cultural factors are less important. Some are critical of relating values—materialist or postmaterialist—and democracy, because democracy may not mean the same thing in a nation that has had a stable democratic government for many years and in one that has just adopted a democratic form. They argue that historical factors are more important. One specific concern has to do with the complexity and uncertainty of methods of measurement across nations and languages; postmaterialism or allegiance to other values have to be measured using words with different connotations in different languages. The meaning of concepts may change with the context of the concept. This problem is made more severe by the range of nations. The price of the scope of the data is the uncertain comparability across nations. Many of these reservations are cited in Transformed. In any case, they are part of the process of systematic research. If there are errors, their fertility will be enhanced by the open methods used and their potentiality for improvement.
The Civic Culture Transformed is also an example of the progress of comparative politics in the new world researched in this volume. If some of the research contains fertile errors, the seeds of the errors will fall on ground ready with the capacity to produce verdant plants. The legacy of the work of Inglehart and his colleagues, among others, will be the tools—systematic surveys, powerful statistical models, and research across many nations—for new research. In the field of political culture, these tools will provide systematic data on political and other values and beliefs, their frequency, their distribution within a population, and their variation across nations and over time; they will also provide systematic information about economic conditions, as well as regimes that may help explain the origins of the cultures. And these things will contribute to further progress in comparative research.
Where political culture will go in the future is uncertain, especially for the young. Political, social, and economic contexts are crucial to the formation of public values and beliefs. The materialist and allegiant values and beliefs highlighted in The Civic Culture were fostered in societies in which economic survival and public security were reliable. The postmaterialist and individualistic values and beliefs highlighted in The Civic Culture Transformed emerged in societies with less well functioning economies and governments. The new research methods and organizations will provide better and more comparable information about the contexts within which values and beliefs are formed.
What does this mean for future political cultures and the scholars studying such matters? Values and beliefs are not created by political scientists. We merely see and name them, report their characteristics and histories, and do our best to explain their rise, change over time, and fall. Neither materialistic nor postmaterialistic political culture appeared because Almond and Verba or Inglehart and his colleagues began to think about such matters; they emerged because of changes in economies and social structures and political contexts. These contexts are changing, as citizens in many countries and at all ages are faced with societies that do not produce secure economies and sturdy polities that foster allegiant and materialistic values, but neither do they produce regimes where citizens’ postmodernization values and beliefs thrive.
Much research lies before us. The work in The Civic Culture Transformed will further that research. In the decades to come, I hope we can look forward to analyses of the post-post-materialistic political cultures that will be harvested from the fertile seeds, and fertile oversights, planted by The Civic Cultures – both the original and transformed. Such further transformations, after all, are what political science is all about.
