Political culture and democracy in developing countries / edited by Larry Diamond

This textbook edition of "Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries"" has been abridged to convey the core arguments of the book in a format appropriate for classroom use. The authors explore the complex and reciprocal interactions between a society's dominant beliefs, values, and attitudes about politics and the nature of its political system. Among the issues they address are: to what extent is political culture cause or effect; how can its causal importance for democracy be weighed; what are the most important elements of a democratic political culture; and how are these elements developed over time?

On a quick count, five books, two American Political Science Association presidential addresses, two American Political Science Review leading arti cles, and two APSR roversies," all of them dealing with political cul ture themes, have appeared in the past several years. From a simple quantitative point of view, it is evident that political culture research and the orizing has had a "return," or as Ronald Inglehart put it, a "renaissance." And the movements that have most actively polemicized against political culture as an explanatory variable (Marxism of various kinds, and rational choice theory) now seem to have run out of steam, appear to be inclined to negotiate settlements, rather than requiring unconditional surrender.

To speak of a return to political culture implies that there was an earlier time when political culture studies were here at hand and prospering, that this was followed by a time in which this approach declined, and that these studies are once again prospering. I want to comment briefly on these three phases in the history of political culture studies.

In the first several decades of the present century a "culture and person ality" school emerged out of a synthesis of psychoanalytic ideas and cultural anthropology. This school, which included such luminaries of the past gener ation as Harold Lasswell, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Erich Fromm, and many others, sought to explain recruitment to political roles, aggression and warfare, authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, fascism, and the like in terms of the socialization of children-infant nursing and toilet-training patterns, parental disciplinary pattems and family structure, and similar routines and patterns of early childhood.