Towards a Theory of the Types of Political Culture: Stakes and Empowerment

Document Type : Original Article

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Political Science Department, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Egypt.

Abstract

Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba proposed three types of political culture: the parochial, subject and participant. A fourth type, they called the civic, combines elements of the three foregoing ones. They maintained that the civic culture prevails in democratic societies. This study wonders why people differ in their types of political culture. I argue that having stakes in the political system plus feeling empowered to act, qualify a person to have a civic culture regardless of whether they live in a democratic regime or not. In terms of methodology, I apply the independent samples t-test on the World Values Survey data (2017-2022) for a sample of three democratic regimes (Chile, Germany and South Korea) and three authoritarian ones (Nicaragua, Russia and Vietnam) to test the hypotheses that follow from this theory. The study finds there is evidence that suggests that middle-aged, middle-class (stakes) males with higher education (empowerment) tend to have a civic political culture, whereas old, low-class females with low education tend to have a subject political culture. Contribution-wise, this study represents a contribution towards giving a rationale of why some people may have a civic type of political culture while others have other types of it

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