The Civic Culture
| File:The Civic Culture 1963 cover Almond Verba.jpg
Cover of the 1963 edition
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| Author | Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba |
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| Publisher | Sage Publications, Inc |
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Published in English
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December 1963 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 574 ppg (1963 release) |
| ISBN | 0691075034 (1963 release) ISBN 0803935587 (1989 release) |
The Civic Culture or The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations is a 1963 non-fiction political science book by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba.[1] The book is credited with popularizing the political culture sub-field and is considered to be the first systematic study in this field.[2][3]
Synopsis
In the text Almond and Verba examine the democratic systems in five countries, the United States, Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the United Kingdom. They interviewed several individuals about how they viewed the government as it pertained to that person. Through the book Almond and Verba identify three political structures, participant, subject, and parochial.[4] They considered political culture to be the element that connects individual attitudes with the overall political system structure.[5]
Almond and Verba considered the Italian emphasis on the family as the driving main force for society as "amoral" or "exclusive", and believed that it would impede the culture's potential for developing a "sense of community and civic culture". They saw this as something that could potentially suppress "effective democracy".[6]
Reception and criticisms
Seymour Lipset wrote in The Democratic Century that Almond and Verba "did argue persuasively that the extent of civic culture could be predicted by structural and historical factors" but that there was also "strong evidence that some aspects of the civic culture were powerfully associated with education levels, across national borders".[7]
The Civic Culture was also criticized for having an "Anglo-American bias", with the authors stating that only the United Kingdom and the United States possessed the capability for long term democratic stabilization.[8] Critics also expressed skepticism over the accuracy of depicting a culture based upon individual interviews and that the approach was "ethnocentric and more prescriptive than objective and empirical".[9]
References
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