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25 Comp. Pol. Stud. 362 (1992-1993)
Political Culture: Residual Category or General Theory?

handle is hein.journals/compls25 and id is 345 raw text is: Political culture as a concept for empirical political analysis has been so promiscuously employed within the political sciences as to render it meaningless. In an effort to locate some basic structural principles that will reorient political culture studies in a more constructive direction, six case studies from a classic compendium in the field are analyzed in comparative perspective. The resulting models of the several political cultures can be integrated with formal political decision-making models to provide the foundation for a formal theory of cultural rationality. POLITICAL CULTURE Residual Category or General Theory? RUTH LANE The American University S urveying the topic of political culture over the 34 years since Gabriel Almond (1956) launched it on its course, the diligent student is chastened by the amplitude of its definitions, usages, and functions within political inquiry. Political culture has been used as a conceptual umbrella covering perceptions, beliefs, and values concerning everything political (Brown, 1984, p. 5; Pammett & Whittington, 1976, p. 1); as the amiable peculiarities that distinguish nations (Beer & Ulam, 1958, p. 12); as political values (Njaka, 1974; Paden 1973; VanderMeer 1985); as a definition of justice (Kincaid, 1982, p. 2); as ideology (Bluhm, 1974); as political psychology (Hirsch, 1971; Putnam 1973); as national character (Austin, 1975; Finer, 1956; Fitzgibbon & Fernando, 1981); as morality plays (Greer with Long, 1963); as civil religion (Liebman & Don-Yeshiya, 1983); as nationalism (Baker, 1983; Kofele-Kale, 1981; Ranum, 1975); as democratic values (Rochon & Mitchell, 1989); as political indoctrination (Fagen, 1969; Solomon, 1971); and as resistance to indoctrination (Almond, 1983; White, 1984). At a methodological level, political culture has also been used in a wide variety of ways, as a complex product of economic structures and processes COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES, Vol. 25 No. 3, October 1992 362-387 O 1992 Sage Publications, Inc. 362 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.