Lichterman The Idea of Political Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis
Robert Goodin (ed.), Charles Tilly (ed.)
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.001.0001
Published: 2006 Online ISBN: 9780191577185 Print ISBN: 9780199270439
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CHAPTER
21 The Idea of Political Culture 

Paul Lichterman, Daniel Cefaï
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.003.0021 Pages 392–414

Published: 02 September 2009
Abstract
This article describes the idea and existence of a so-called political culture, focusing on the culture of
political action in civil society. It explains that political cultures are the sets of symbols and meanings
or styles of action that organize political claims-making and opinion-forming, by individuals or
collectivities. It aims to provide a contextualist understanding of political culture through discussion
of recent cultural sociology in the U.S. and pragmatic sociology in France. It also investigates why
political culture needs to be autonomous.
Keywords: political culture, political action, civil society, claims-making, opinion-forming, cultural
sociology, pragmatic sociology
Subject: Comparative Politics, Political Behaviour, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
POLITICAL culture is no single thing waiting for researchers to nd it in the world. Social scientists construct
the category to serve our theoretical agendas and methods of investigation. But political cultures do exist.
Political action requires meaning‐making, in institutional and everyday settings alike. Those settings may
be electoral races, public policy arenas, or judicial proceedings; community service groups, social activist
groups, friendship networks, television audiences of mass or niche size, or electronic chat rooms. In all
these contexts, individuals or collective bodies communicate and act on claims to resources, opportunities,
or recognition—or opinions about what social reality is like, which issues or identities should be public, how
state agents or citizens should relate to public issues. Any of these claims or opinions can be political;
following many of the works we discuss, we do not restrict “political” to claims on or opinions about the
state. Political cultures are the sets of symbols and meanings or styles of action that organize political claims‐
making and opinion‐forming, by individuals or collectivities. By culture, we mean patterns of publicly
shared symbols, meanings, or styles of action which enable and constrain what people can say and do.
For a contextualist understanding of political culture we turn to recent cultural sociology in the US and
p. 393 pragmatic sociology in France: We de ne culture as more than a re ection of objective interests or a set
of symbolic resources that groups mobilize strategically. In our view, culture structures the way actors
create their strategies, perceive their eld of action, de ne their identities and solidarities. Culture is
relatively autonomous in relation to social structure and social or individual psychology. Throughout this
chapter, we situate work congenial to this de nition amidst select other approaches, hoping to convey some
of the breadth in ideas of political culture circulating in sociology, political science, anthropology, and
communication studies, while highlighting especially promising inquiries. Social scientists now face a
bewildering array of culture concepts. We hope our way of organizing the presentation may help readers
make deliberate choices.
We ourselves needed to make di cult choices: We discuss a relatively few, prominent lines of thinking on
political culture, rather than attempting an exhaustive review. We will restrict the chapter to the culture of
political action in civil society—the realm of relationships in which people act primarily in their capacity as
citizens or members of society, rather than subjects of state administration, or consumers, producers,
managers, or owners in the marketplace. Many though certainly not all of the prominent works on political
1
culture have focused outside the state. The bulk of our discussion treats works written by anglophone
scholars, or works translated and read widely by them. As the chapter shows, we nd that French scholars
have taken di erent paths to some of the same insights as their anglophone counterparts. Contacts between
2
the two worlds of scholarship are increasing; this is an exciting time for students of political culture to
become more familiar with parallel inquiries. Emergent research programs on both sides of the Atlantic are
showing that while political cultures work di erently in di erent social contexts, they provide enabling and
constraining contexts for democratic communication and action.
1 Inventories of Political Culture: The Civic Culture and Beyond
Many scholars of political culture have drawn insights from Alexis de Tocqueville's observations (1969) on
p. 394 Americans' civic voluntarism and their sense of “self interest properly understood.” Louis Hartz's much‐
cited thesis (1955) on political liberalism in America highlighted one of the cultural strands woven into
Tocqueville's more complex picture. Edward Ban eld's case study of a southern Italian village (1958)
a rmed Tocqueville's argument with a negative case. Civic association, Ban eld held, required the right
kind of culture; his Italian villagers failed to act together for the common good because their ethos of
“amoral familism” cultivated the pursuit of short‐term, individual or familial interest, and the distrust of
anyone claiming to do otherwise. Also in Tocqueville's spirit but with a far wider, more systematic reach,
The Civic Culture (1963) by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba stands among the rst landmark empirical
studies of political culture. A de ning statement for American scholars of political culture in the 1960s, it
remains a large if ambivalent reference point. Empirically it rested on survey data on values, attitudes,
opinions, and beliefs from the United States, England, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. Almond and Verba
conceived political culture as a set of psychological orientations—cognitive, a ective, and evaluative—
toward the political system as a whole. They categorized political cultures into parochial, subject, and
participation types: “civic culture” was at once a descriptive and normative concept denoting a system‐
sustaining mix of all of three.
The study borrowed heavily from the Talcott Parsons' social system theory (Parsons and Shils 1951) with its
trio of subjective orientations, emphasis on internalized cultural values, and allegiance to a modernization
paradigm of political development. As did its theoretical forebears, The Civic Culture imagined close‐ tting
relationships between political culture and social structure at a social‐systemic level, at least in “stable”
democracies—in spite of the authors' caution against assuming that the two are always congruent.
Theoretical and normative assumptions have made this classic study liable to powerful criticisms, some of
which Almond and Verba (1980) invited into a wide‐ranging collection of review essays. Carole Pateman
(1980) pointed out that in e ect the study a rmed political quiescence as the normal state of a airs. It took
as universal the particular, liberal democratic, dominant self‐understandings of the postwar US and UK.
“Traditionalism” and “familialism” characterized the less‐developed political cultures of Mexico or Italy; in
the case of Italy, survey research seemed to ratify Ban eld's much more local and impressionistic account.
Alasdair MacIntyre (1972) challenged Almond and Verba's science of comparative politics to accommodate
cultural and institutional di erences that complicate comparisons: Did holding an attitude of “pride” in
one's government mean the same thing in Italy and Germany? Could cross‐national generalizations about
political parties hold, when parties may occupy vastly di erent institutional positions in di erent nations?
Recent moves to reconceptualize culture brought The Civic Culture under renewed scrutiny: Margaret Somers
(1995) observed that the framework e ectively disappeared culture by making social structure and
psychological orientations do the real analytic work. We would add that scholarship gets further with
p. 395 culture concepts that help us recognize speci c symbolic forms, rather than at, textureless values,
norms, or skills.
While Almond and Verba's abstraction and holism sit uncomfortably with the contemporary tendency to
highlight multiplicity and variability in political culture, some contemporary work reinstates their search
for the cultural prerequisites of liberal democracy. The inventory spirit of Almond and Verba's work lives on,
too. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) produced an exhaustive survey of Americans' civic skills and
practices. Political scientist Ronald Inglehart organized a series of national surveys (1977; 1981; 1990) which
suggest that citizens of Western industrial democracies, and especially the highly schooled citizens,
increasingly have valorized lifestyle, self‐actualization, and a clean environment over material wealth.
Cross‐national surveys of values and opinions pose some of the same problems of context and interpretation
that MacIntyre scored in Almond and Verba's work, though the stable trends Inglehart has found probably
suggest at least a little about a great number of people. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) critiqued the
misleading abstraction and subjectivism in surveys of political opinion, pointing out that the meaning of
holding an opinion is itself di erent in di erent classes. Drawing on French polling data, he interpreted
individual survey responses only in relation to other responses by people with di erent economic and
cultural capital within a discursive eld of potential opinions. The individual responses become windows on
a eld that privileges some opinions and some ways of holding opinions over others—rather than indicators
of separate, individual, subjective realities. Bourdieu was only one of several prominent theorists whose
frameworks bring power back into the study of political culture.
2 Power Comes Back: Political Culture in Domination, Resistance, and

the Force‐field of Discourse
While dissatisfaction with the grand framework behind The Civic Culture encouraged some scholars in the
later 1960s and 1970s to jettison the culture concept altogether, others found an alternative in cultural
Marxism and other, post‐Marxist approaches to mass, o cial, and popular culture. Cultural Marxians
departed in signi cant ways from the bargain‐basement reading of Marx, which would treat political culture
as static beliefs that dupe people into accepting or misrecognizing the power of the capitalist class. Antonio
p. 396 Gramsci's (1971; 1985) theory of cultural hegemony is one of the most in uential, subtle, and misread in
the family of Western Marxism.
Gramsci emphasized the social power of articulation—the complicated act of creating a meaningful t
between words or images in some historically speci c social context. Gramsci fully understood that words
do not re ect reality in a natural or logical correspondence. From a Gramscian viewpoint, political culture is
a precipitate of a society's ceaseless articulation processes: In informal and formal settings, everyday
conversation and sacred ritual, in popular media and specialized texts, small drops of meaning take shape in
dominant currents, or counter‐currents of public opinion. And here enters the signal concept of hegemony.
“Hegemony” is a summary statement about articulation across a society; it denotes an ongoing state of play
in which the most widely circulating, easily articulated de nitions of the social world are “dominant,” the
ones that complement or else do not seriously challenge the interests of the dominant class or groups. Major
institutions of the state, and the formal and informal relations of civil society circulate these de nitions,
giving what we call political culture its main outlines.
To speak of “the hegemonic process” always is to acknowledge the existence of alternative and oppositional
articulations, too (Williams 1977). We can call them “political” in that they challenge dominant
understandings of the world, whether or not they address the state. These circulate less widely; they may
take shape only in people's reception of dominant discourses: Stuart Hall famously demonstrated (1980)
that audiences might “decode” a television show in alternative or oppositional ways even when it is
“encoded” with dominant discourses that complement the world‐views of capitalist elites. In post‐Marxist
Gramscian scholarship (Laclau and Mou e 1985), class is no longer the privileged reference point for
analyzing cultural hegemony, and a counter‐hegemonic project is one that pursues limitless
democratization on the basis of a “radical citizen” identity (Mou e 1992a and b). In this critical ideal,
radical citizens respect the democratic aspirations of women, lesbians and gay men, environmentalists,
people of color, as well as subordinate classes. Their own identities transmutate continually as claims and
counter‐claims bring new identities and yet new claims into the arena. Politics is endless.
Some scholars focus more on dominant political culture, the big engines of cultural hegemony. Studies of
news programming associated with or in uenced by the former Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in
Birmingham, UK, are a prominent case. David Morley's oft‐cited study (1980) of the British Nationwide
television program, for instance, analyzed the discourse of this widely viewed news show, pointing out that
the show worded news events such as labor strikes in terms congenial to management. Yet audience
reception of the show varied. The dominant de nitions had relatively great or little hold on focus group
members' reception of the show, depending on their social backgrounds and experiences; again, the
hegemony concept grasps the existence of non‐dominant interpretations in con ict with dominant ones. In
p. 397 the US, sociologist Todd Gitlin demonstrated (1980) that news coverage increasingly stigmatized,
trivialized, or demonized the growing new left movement against the Vietnam war. These mass‐mediated
images of amboyant protestors informed some new leftists' self‐understandings, and the nation got the
sectarian, sometimes violent left movements that its media had conjured up under a demonizing,
hegemonic lens. With the same theoretical imagination, communication scholar Justin Lewis argued (1999)
that conventions of news reportage cultivate a commonsense understanding that the US political system
hosts a wide range of viewpoints, and in so doing bolsters the power of “corporate center‐right interests”
even when their stances are not popular.
While recognizing the hegemonic power of mass‐mediated discourse and imagery, other scholars
emphasize how audiences actively piece together meanings from the media which complement their
preexisting social worlds. Conservative Christian women interpret mainstream television portraits of
abortion in ways that a rm their own cultural authorities (Press and Cole 1999); lesbians and gay men try
to validate their worth without e acing their “otherness” in the forum of TV talk shows (Gamson 1998),
even if the corporate‐organized forum ultimately undercuts their claims to dignity.
Still other scholars peer more closely into the social worlds that sustain oppositional and alternative
political culture. They investigate the local community life cultivated by a communist party (for instance,
Kertzer 1990), or the “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser 1992) of grassroots social movements (Lichterman
1996; 1999), alternative media, or urban enclaves (Melucci 1989; Castells 1983). Historical research nds
proto‐oppositional readings of everyday social life in the fragmentary, informal, “hidden transcripts” (Scott
1990) of peasants. Eyes peeled and ears to the ground, ethnographers hear signs of class resistance in the
popular religion of landless campesinos in Nicaragua (Lancaster 1988; see also Comaro 1985), the local
knowledge of coal miners in American Appalachia (Gaventa 1980), or the subcultural clothing and music
style of postwar British youth (Hall and Je erson 1976; Hebdige 1979).
Using “discourse,” “practice,” “technique,” or other terms rather than “culture,” scholars in uenced by
Foucault leave the Marxian orbit and treat culture itself as power, rather than the outer form of an
underlying, powerful interest. In one of Foucault's most important insights for students of political culture,
identities never inhere in groups. Rather, discourses wield the power to create group identities and
subjectivities. Psychiatric discourse creates “the homosexual,” for instance (1990); disciplines and
techniques of economics, statistics, or criminology call into being a managed, governable population of
citizen subjects (Hindess 1996). These disciplines and techniques of “governmentality” cultivate in subjects
the control of their own conduct.
Di erent forms of power produce di erent opportunities for resistance. Echoing Gramsci's notion of
hegemony without its class analysis, Foucault held that to speak of power, even “domination” was always
p. 398 to imply resistance. Power is a relationship in active tension, not a thing that a leader or group has. In
Foucault's world, there is no exit from the force‐ eld of discourses, disciplines, or techniques—no place
beyond “culture,” if we are using that term to translate Foucault's concerns—but di erent kinds of
power/knowledge relationships. For Foucaldian scholars, power and resistance to power are instantiated
even in the momentary gestures and interactional moves of everyday life: Subordinate groups wield quiet
“tactics of resistance” (Certeau 1984) by cutting the corners of proper etiquette. They spoof the dominant
pieties with their biting irony and jokes (Wedeen 1999).
Gramscian Marxists depart from simpler concepts of a dominant ideology used handily and self‐consciously
by class elites to manipulate social subordinates (Ewen 1976; Vanderbilt 1997; Lasch 1979). In the
Gramscian perspective, class‐based ideologies saturate everyday expression, and people carry them un‐self‐
consciously, even as they contest domination, albeit inchoately. Making a parallel move in a di erent
conceptual world, Foucault bid to “cut o the king's head”(1980)—to analyze the diverse, capillary
pathways of power relationships, beyond the static model of authoritative sovereign and consenting
subjects. But in either constellation of inquiry, much as they diverge, political culture exists only in relation
to (class or group) power, or as a discursive vector or technique of power.
3 Political Culture Comes into its Own: Culture as a Structure
Political culture became a more autonomous subject of inquiry again in the 1980s, as sociologists rethought
earlier uses of the culture concept. Borrowing from the structuralism of Lacan, Levi‐Strauss, and Barthes,
social scientists increasingly considered culture as a structure, or a set of structures with an enabling and
constraining force irreducible to individual attitudes or institutional power (Smith 1998; Alexander and
Seidman 1990). An early statement in this emerging investigation was political scientist Richard
Merelman's (1984) argument on the loosely bounded quality of American political culture.
Anthropologist Cli ord Geertz (1973) in uenced many later researchers to take political cultures as
appropriate objects of study in themselves. So we might analyze codes embodied in the drama of Bali's
theater state (Geertz 1980), or the ideology of Sukarno's Indonesia (Geertz 1973, 225). We would look not for
internalized values nor ideologies that exist only because they convey dominant interests, but “publicly
p. 399 available symbolic forms ” through which people experience meaning. Political culture results as both a
“model of” the world—a map for locating and de ning the social situations—and a “model for” action—a
template for mastering and occasionally transforming situations. Geertz's work encompasses a more
hermeneutic and a more pragmatist tendency, both of which animate our varied, current repertoire of
concepts. Yet there can be tensions between these two, as social anthropologist Adam Kuper (1999, 105)
points out: Anthropological (and sociological) participant‐observers at least sometimes claim to understand
lived action from their subjects' point of view; to “read” social action as a text to be interpreted, on the
other hand, is a di erent enterprise. Kuper argues that Geertz traveled too far towards a purely
hermeneutic, even literary project, with a hermetically if artfully sealed notion of culture as a text, divorced
from social organization.
Developments roughly parallel to but earlier than Geertz's innovations took place in France. Historians of
the Middle Ages such as Georges Duby (1978) and Jacques Le Go (1985) and of the French Revolution (Furet
1978) conceived of the “imaginaire” (Baczko 1984) and “symbolique” (Agulhon 1979) and put these cultural
structures at the center of their interpretations. Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) argued that society constitutes
itself through a “radical imaginary,” a cultural template for both alienation and creativity, ideology and
utopia. Claude Lefort (1981) combined a sophisticated analysis of political regimes with an understanding of
political culture informed by Aristotle's notion of politeia, Montesquieu's esprit des lois, and Tocqueville's
mores. Lefort argued that both democracy and totalitarianism depend on the invention of languages, rituals,
and symbols; culture does not simply re ect the regime.
4 Political Culture as Shared Representations
One family of inquiries into cultural structure borrows the “late‐Durkheimian” (Alexander 1988) notion that
political culture is a set of publicly shared representations of what makes a good citizen, or a good society.
They share the fundamental insight that words do not re ect underlying ideas or interests transparently.
Rather, communication is structured from the start by cultural forms that exist somewhat independently of
group interests; from this point of view, Gramscians underestimate the enduring power of cultural forms
themselves, while Foucault‐in uenced post‐Marxists skip crucial sociological steps by con ating culture
p. 400 and power. Important earlier examples of the “shared representations” approach include William
Sewell's (1980) study of changes in nineteenth‐century French discourse, which showed that industrial
workers had to invent new “political idioms” to leave the universe of the Old regime corporations. French
workers and citizens developed new idioms of the local community (Agulhon 1970), the voluntary
association (Agulhon 1977), and the political party (Huard 1996) as well. A recent outpouring of US work
conceives shared representations in at least two di erent ways. One is the concept of “cultural vocabulary,”
and the other, “cultural code.”
4.1 Vocabularies of Politics

One widely read example of this approach to political culture in the US is Robert Bellah and co‐authors'
Habits of the Heart, an interview study of middle‐class Americans' moral and political reasoning. Most often,
Bellah and his team heard languages of individualism, as when many of their interviewees said that their
public commitments depended on “what I can get out of it” or “what feels good to me right now”; less often
and more haltingly, Americans articulated their commitments in civic‐republican or Biblical language. The
authors proposed that an active, democratic citizenry would be hard to sustain over time if Americans'
primary cultural vocabulary was so self‐oriented; in a preface to a second edition (1996), they observed that
Robert Putnam's (2000) much‐discussed gures on declining American civic group memberships con rmed
their fears.
A society's cultural mainstream holds more than one set or “system” of representations. Rhys Williams
(1995) illustrated that social movements draw on di erent rhetorics of the public good—the good of
individual rights or environmental stewardship, for instance. Some representations are politically
subordinate or subcultural. Mark Warren (2001), Richard Wood (1994; 1999; 2002), and Stephen Hart (2001)
showed that shared religious representations such as those in Catholic social thought can work as political
culture, by helping urban social movements construct political claims that are compelling in low‐income,
minority communities and e ective against corporations and local bureaucrats. Wood's comparative
research found that the most e ective representations were religious traditions which helped activists
process ambiguity in their political environments instead of ignoring or trying to transcend it.
All of these studies have discerned vocabularies from qualitative analysis of interviews, ethnographic eld
notes, or texts. They depend on the analyst's familiarity with a larger cultural or intellectual history behind
the groups under study: The Bellah team chose historical, cultural exemplars such as Benjamin Franklin and
Walt Whitman to represent strands of American individualism alive in the late twentieth century; French
p. 401 sociologists Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) have pursued a somewhat similar strategy, identifying public
vocabularies of moral or political justi cation as descending from one of six great Western philosophical
texts. It is possible, though, to study vocabularies more inductively, and with more quantitative measures.
Employing Q‐sort methodology, Dryzek and Holmes (2002) gathered samples of statements about
democratization from focused discussion groups in each of thirteen post‐Communist countries, and then
asked a separate set of interviewees in each country to sort the statements. Treating the resulting “sorts” to
factor analysis, the researchers reconstructed vocabularies of democratization that they proposed are
typical for di erent countries, and sometimes shared across countries—“socialist authoritarianism,”
“liberal capitalism,” “reactionary anti‐liberalism,” and more. The methodology may risk atomizing cultural
structure into aggregates of individual subjectivities—Bourdieu's critique of under‐sociological
subjectivism may again apply—but the researchers' knowledge of di erent national contexts and their
commitment to interpretive validity strengthen the argument that these reconstructions plausibly re ect
shared representations, and are more than statistical artifacts.
4.2 Codes of Politics

Other researchers in this family of studies would conceive political culture in terms of codes that organize
public discourse. Sociologists Je rey Alexander (2001) and Philip Smith (Alexander and Smith 1993)
identi ed a set of binary codes in public life that have organized US political debate over the past two
centuries. Socialized to these implicit, binary codes, citizens divide up actors, relationships, and institutions
into categories of good and evil. Commonly, US legislators a rm “good” political actors by characterizing
them as “active, not passive,” and “rational, not hysterical”; they ascribe goodness to political relations
when they tag them as “open and trusting” rather than “closed and secretive” (Alexander and Smith 1993,
162–3). The codes organize acceptable, communicable speech on both sides of a debate. During the
Watergate hearings, for instance, both the adversaries and defenders of President Nixon called their own
side reasonable and cast the opposing side as irrational or secretive.
The deep cultural codes of society at large, beyond civil society, can structure political debate, too. Linguist
George Lako and philosopher Mark Johnson (1980) analyze widely shared metaphors in that light. They
argue that in everyday thinking, people translate abstract concepts into substances, persons, relationships,
or positions in space that we can understand more immediately from experience. So in a society that thinks
of argument in terms of war, large parts of political communication consist in trying to “win” an argument
p. 402 by “attacking the opposition,” “gaining ground,” and putting the “other side on the defensive.” These
are not natural or purely logical moves, but culturally coded ones. Absent these metaphors, political
communication would be organized very di erently, as anthropological research on aboriginal Australian
and other societies shows (Myers 1991; Brenneis and Myers 1984).
Parallel to students of cultural vocabularies, scholars of binary codes nd subordinate or subcultural codes
that are patterned and enduring: Ronald Jacobs' study (2000) of media discourse surrounding the Rodney
King beating by the Los Angeles Police found codes in the African‐American press somewhat di erent from
those organizing depictions of the beating and subsequent riots in mainstream forums. Di erent sets of
codes may organize political debate in other societies; “authoritarian” or “collectivist,” as well as
democratic codes may propel the terms of national debate in Brazil since the 1990s (Baiocchi 2001).
For analysts of either vocabularies or codes, the question of political culture's relation to social structure
makes sense only once the structure of political culture itself is clear. Sociologists close to the shared
representations framework have argued (Wuthnow 1989; Swidler 2001) that in the long run, institutional
relationships enable some forms of culture to survive and spread while others do not. Swidler has argued
(2001) that people may innovate new political culture during periods of great social ux, but that only those
forms that “ t” institutionally structured relationships will endure and become commonsensical, tightly
entwined with everyday action (Swidler 1986).
4.3 An Alternative from Social Movement Studies: Strategic Framing

The shared representations perspective on political culture contrasts with the notion of “frame” current in
American social movements research, and discussed at length in Polletta and Ho's contribution to this
3
volume. Sociologists William Gamson and colleagues' (1982) social‐psychological study of responses to
injustice was one of the rst to introduce Erving Go man's frame concept to politics researchers. David
Snow and his colleagues (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1988) and again Gamson (1992) borrowed and
signi cantly reinterpreted Go man's frame concept, popularizing its use in studies of collective action. By
“frames” they meant discursive packages, or ways of communicating about facts and events. In Snow and
colleagues' widely cited version, movement groups organize frames strategically, in order to build
coalitions and reach target audiences.
p. 403 This strategic framing perspective helped to make culture prominent in studies of social movements, but at
a cost. Some framing studies identi ed static frames through content analysis, ignoring the exible back‐
and‐forth of discursive acts, as Steinberg (1999) pointed out; others derived frames from interview talk,
although the same interviewees might draw on di erent vocabularies in their own, everyday settings, as
Lichterman (1996) found with environmental activists. Hank Johnston (1991; 1995) made the frame concept
more sensitive to narrative form and the texture of everyday experience. Using the frame concept to analyze
words and phrases that focus group participants borrow from personal experience, popular wisdom, and
media information, Gamson (1992) gave the concept more of a purchase on political culture's sources and
textures. Still, the focus group method would neglect moral ambiguities and social identities that are part of
the context for communication in natural settings. In some of the most popular usage of the concept,
frames are not cultural structures but cultural means for pursuing interests which exist beyond culture.
5 Political Culture as Performance
5.1 Dramas, Arguments, and Narratives
One of the limitations in studying shared codes or vocabularies in the abstract is that we may miss the
concrete shape they take in collective action. Dramas, arguments, and narratives are performances
addressed to particular publics; they put shared representations in movement. Dramaturgical perspectives
have been put forth, famously by Kenneth Burke (1945), and in a variety of social‐science veins by
sociologists Erving Go man (1959) and Joseph Gus eld (1981), political scientist Murray Edelman (1964),
anthropologist Victor Turner (1974), and very recently by sociologist and cultural theorist Je rey Alexander
(2004). From this viewpoint, dramatic conventions shape political communication. On stage in politics as in
theater, actors play roles and follow scripts as a cast of characters, perform front‐stage and backstage
actions. They represent to an audience a moral order, with o enders, victims, heroes, witnesses, and
experts. Under this analytic lens, social dramas enacted by institutional actors shape a public's perception of
social problems, such as the problem of drink‐driving (Gus eld 1981), even apart from the “objective” facts
of risk or harm. These performances inform policy, as when Yavapai Indians dramatized their opposition to
the Orme Dam project in Arizona that threatened their ancestral lands (Espeland 1998).
p. 404 Narratives, like plays, are performances: Through the conventions of storytelling, political actors
communicate claims, opinions, and the very de nitions of political issues. Narratives may circulate in mass‐
mediated discourse, informal sayings, or formal, oral traditions; national monuments and other artifacts as
well as people or institutions may communicate them. Narratives are examples of cultural structure par
excellence, with their convention‐governed plots, casts of predictable character types, and genres such as
romance or tragedy. Through these conventions, narratives can structure the way a public perceives
grievances, imputes motives, de nes which issues, characters, or situations are central or peripheral. The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, is striking in part because its narrative is not typical for a
war memorial; it does not tell a romance of heroism and it leaves the “plot” ambiguous (Wagner‐Paci ci
and Schwartz 1991).
The same events retold with di erent narrative forms can appear very di erent and elicit very di erent
senses of propriety or injustice. Ron Jacobs (1996; 2000) used narrative analysis along with attention to the
binary codes designating heroic and anti‐heroic citizens, to compare retellings of the Rodney King beating
in Los Angeles by mainstream and African‐American newspapers. Di erent heroic characters emerged in
African‐American and mainstream retellings. Narrative analysis can illuminate changes as well as
continuities in public culture: Anne Kane (1997) used narrative analysis to follow the transforming
meanings of potent symbols during the mass public meetings of the Irish Land War. Terms such as “rent,”
“land,” “landlord,” “Ireland,” and “constitutional” formed a system of meaning, a coherent discourse, but
as the impassioned meetings unfolded, the terms developed new relations to one another, such that
landlord actions became “unconstitutional” and Irish land reform a constitutional right. Francesca Polletta
(1998a and b) investigated the narratives that civil rights activists told to new recruits and journalists. She
argues that a familiar storyline helped activists make sense of their risky activism: A “force” took over
them, they said, compelling them to act spontaneously.
5.2 An Alternative from Social Movement Studies: Collective Identity
The collective identity concept from social movement studies works parallel to these concepts, but with
di erent analytic assumptions. Social movements construct and perform “collective identities,” many
scholars emphasize, since those identities do not emerge naturally from grievances. Some movement
scholars study collective identity in order to understand how activists interpret their social position, given
the multiple possibilities (Taylor and Whittier 1992); others want to explain why activists mount more or
p. 405 less radical identities in di erent arenas (Bernstein 1997). Activists perform identity and invite publics
to identify with them, in die‐ins and sit‐ins (Lo and 1985), in solemn rituals of protest and arrest (Epstein
1991), or in theatrical disruptions of everyday routine (J. Gamson 1991).
In these studies, movements perform collective identities in response to their social or political
subordination, or—in a postmodern scenario—a proliferation of power sources. In scholarship informed by
political process or resource mobilization models of social movements, collective identity does not enable
and constrain; it crystallizes other social forces and powers that do, or else does strategic work for
movement entrepreneurs (Benford 1993). Scholarship indebted to a notion of culture's relative autonomy
shows, in contrast, that narratives themselves and not only the forces “behind” them have consequences
for action: “Activists' very understandings of ‘strategy,’ ‘interest,’ ‘opportunity,’ and ‘obstacle,’ may be
structured by the oppositions and hierarchies that come from familiar stories” (Polletta 1998b, 424).
6 Emergent Perspectives: Political Culture in Everyday

Communication and Action
Studies of political culture as code, vocabulary, drama, or narrative often focus on formal, ceremonial, or
mass‐mediated contexts, during crisis moments—or else interview situations. Increasingly, studies are
examining political culture in ordinary interaction, in the quotidian settings of civil society: local citizens'
hearings on environmental issues, volunteer group meetings, social clubs. US students of everyday political
culture trace their interest to a larger, linguistic turn in social theory throughout the twentieth century that
encouraged sociologists to conceive culture as communication rather than abstract values. For some, the
work of Jürgen Habermas (1989; see Cohen and Arato 1992) sparked curiosity about the role that ordinary
civic communication plays in sustaining democracy.
A parallel focus on everyday public activities emerged in French sociology in the 1980s. Supplanting the
models of Boudon, Bourdieu, Touraine, and Crozier, new perspectives highlighted actor networks (Callon
1989), the ecology of public spaces (Joseph 1984), and the hermeneutics of communication and action
(Quéré 1982). These studies bene ted from qualitative investigations of interactions and historical events
up close; they helped to enlarge anthropological and historical understandings of political cultures (Cefaï
2001), situating them in the contexts of institutional policies, sociability networks, political geography, and
p. 406 collective memory. In this nal section we discuss two complementary lines of research on everyday
political culture.
6.1 Political Culture as the Implicit Customs of Civic Life

With an imagination for context, we see that vocabularies, codes, dramas, or narratives are themselves
always embedded in social settings. Civil society creates and recreates itself as people continue enacting
di erent customary forms of membership in those settings. Di erent customs of citizenship are themselves
meaningful and have their own histories (Schudson 1998); they are not simply derivatives of a group's
formally stated purpose or beliefs.
In her study of American civic groups, for instance, Nina Eliasoph (1998; 1996) showed that being a member
of a volunteer group meant being an upbeat, “can‐do” person who carried out tasks e ciently instead of
fretting about big social issues. Lichterman found (1995b; 1996) that being a member of an environmental
activist group could mean being someone willing to make a deeply personalized contribution to the cause,
or someone who upholds a communal will and brackets individuality. Groups with di erent customs had
di culties working together, even when they all a rmed the same “environmental justice” discourse.
Researchers have conceptualized customs of group membership within di erent theoretical traditions,
calling them “cultures of commitment” (Lichterman 1996), “civic practices” (Eliasoph 1996; 1998),
“cultural models” in the case of Becker's (1999) study of church congregations, or “constitutive rules” in
Armstrong's study of lesbian and gay organizations (2002). Each is getting at something like the “group
style” (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) that a group sustains as it goes about ordinary business. Group styles
powerfully shape the meanings and uses of the vocabularies or codes discussed above (Lichterman 1996;
Eliasoph 1998; Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003).
Studying group style and representations together illuminates how civic groups measure up to the
potentials imputed to them by many theorists of democracy. The volunteer group style shuts down open‐
ended conversation that ideally characterizes the public sphere; in groups, volunteers avoid discussing what
they may worry about in private interviews—that skinheads at the local high school threaten race relations,
for instance (Eliasoph 1998). The personalized, self‐expressive style of some environmental and queer
activist groups (Lichterman 1995a; 1996; 1999) encourages public‐spirited deliberation—despite social
scientists' claims that expressive individualism makes people un‐civic‐minded or apolitical (Bellah et al.
1985; see also Bennett 1998). In theory, civic participation also teaches citizens how to mobilize
p. 407 relationships and resources for a greater public good (Putnam 1993; 2000; Skocpol 1999). Yet di erent
group styles promote di erent ways of shepherding resources and de ning ties, and di erent ways of
working with state institutions, apart from group members' religious or political beliefs or social
backgrounds (Lichterman 2005). Tallying up “social capital” (Putnam 2000) misses the impact of group
style.
6.2 Political Culture as Criticizing, Denouncing, and Claims‐making in Public

Arenas
Older French scholarship, like its American counterparts, studied static, symbolic codes and legal or
political institutions in the abstract, without asking how issues or people become public, political, contested
in everyday life. Some French scholars have been studying how ordinary citizens and elites create the res
publica itself, in informal as well as institutional arenas. How do groups and institutions actively de ne
private troubles as public problems? How do they carve out new arenas for dramatizing problems and
refocusing law‐makers' attention (Cefaï and Joseph 2002)?
To address these questions, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot (1991) have analyzed “regimes” of public
justi cation with a typology of the logics of rationality and legitimacy—those of domesticity, market
relations, technology, civic responsibility, inspiration, or popular opinion. Drawing on these practical
logics, actors perform di erent sorts of “worlds,” set up di erent kinds of relationships, and promote
di erent species of “moral goods.” Daniel Cefaï and Claudette Lafaye (2001; 2002) studied a civic
association in Paris which opposed the destruction of a neighborhood. They followed the process through
which the “destruction” became a public problem, and heard participants in the process invoke di erent
logics and moral goods along the way: Actors interpreted the issue in order to mobilize personal networks of
friends; they assessed the economic costs of alternative solutions; they proposed technical means of
guaranteeing the public good; they organized citizen forums to create and mobilize popular opinion.
In this action‐focused approach to public‐making, political cultures structure the ways people launch claims
about what should be public rather than private, what publics should consider unjust rather than
unremarkable. Researchers also aim to grasp the emotions intertwined with claims to freedom, dignity,
equality, justice, or recognition. They focus on ordinary conversation at the supermarket or school gate, in
municipal hearings or activist group meetings, and in more formal and less open settings of state agencies
or experts' o ces, too. Unlike scholarship on “frames” or “ideologies,” these researchers are paying
attention to the forms in which claims circulate and evolve—public rituals, local rumors, legislative debates,
p. 408 for instance—and attention to the public stages where they take place. Claims‐making follows “grammars
of public talk” (Boltanski 1990; Cardon, Heurtin, and Lemieux 1995), sometimes leading to new public
4
issues. In this way recent French scholarship has applied a “pragmatic” approach (see Silber 2003) to
understanding the public sphere.
7 Conclusion: Why Does it Matter if Political Culture is Autonomous?
Studies of political culture address enduring theoretical questions about the res publica while advancing
current debates about civic life. A focus on active meaning‐making illuminates the ways people de ne,
challenge, or rede ne what will count as “politics” itself. We bid theorists to keep thinking about how
political culture shapes and is shaped by social contexts without falling into the traps of functionalism or
class‐determination‐in‐the‐last‐instance, nor lurching the other way toward hermetically sealed cultural
systems or analyses that collapse culture and institutional power. We invite more research that can grasp
innovation in political culture—strategic or otherwise—without losing the insight that culture itself is
structured, and in turn, structures action.
We have taken a stand for concepts that grant the relative autonomy of culture because we think that
political culture is one of the conditions of possibility for a democratic society. Almond and Verba were not
entirely wrong. Studies of contingent culture can illuminate actors' strategic choices, but cannot tell us why
actors perceived those choices to begin with. While political culture is indeed an “idea,” it is an idea we need
if we want to understand what makes civic groups empowering or disempowering, crucial or irrelevant, as
many societies around the globe rewrite their social contracts. Further research on everyday political culture
can tell us much more about potentials and predicaments in fast‐changing civic arenas.
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Notes
1 We hasten to add that sociologists increasingly have appreciated that the state is culturally conditioned (for instance:
Jasper 1987; Steinmetz 1999), and that it sponsors its own arenas—literally and figuratively—for cultural expression that
legitimates its aims and constructs its citizen‐subject. For an exemplar, see Berezin's (1997) work on how the Italian
Fascist regime used public ritual in hopes of creating an emotional, national community of allegiance to the state. See also
Edles (1998).
2 See, e.g., Lamont and Thévenot (2000).
3 “Frames and their Consequences” (Ch. 10, this volume) discusses the varied uses of “frame” in social movements research
and cites prominent critical reviews of the concept.
4 In France, see the historical genesis of political and judiciary “a aires” (Claverie 1998), the invention of “landscape” or
“unemployment” as categories of policy (Trom and Zimmermann 2001).

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Robert Goodin (ed.), Charles Tilly (ed.)

21 The Idea of Political Culture 

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.003.0021 Pages 392–414

1 Inventories of Political Culture: The Civic Culture and Beyond

2 Power Comes Back: Political Culture in Domination, Resistance, and

3 Political Culture Comes into its Own: Culture as a Structure

4 Political Culture as Shared Representations

4.1 Vocabularies of Politics

4.2 Codes of Politics

4.3 An Alternative from Social Movement Studies: Strategic Framing

5.1 Dramas, Arguments, and Narratives

6 Emergent Perspectives: Political Culture in Everyday

6.1 Political Culture as the Implicit Customs of Civic Life

6.2 Political Culture as Criticizing, Denouncing, and Claims‐making in Public

7 Conclusion: Why Does it Matter if Political Culture is Autonomous?

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