Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Stephen Fisher
stephen.fisher@sociology.ox.ac.uk
http://malroy.econ.ox.ac.uk/fisher/polsoc
• General Argument
• Political Culture: The Civic Culture
• American Exceptionalism
• Social Capital
• Causal models 1: Making Democracy Work
• Causal models 2: Values driving both growth and democracy?
• Contemporary evidence on regime support
• Conclusion
- Not the same as ideology, but more diffuse and less goal directed.
- Relatively stable over time and reproduced by political socialization.
General Hypothesis: Culture influences political and social outcomes, especially the quality of democ-
racy, governance, or economic performance.
Those who believe in the importance of culture do not all agree on what aspects of culture are relevant
and what outcomes they influence and how.
• is defined as “The features of social life—networks, norms, and trust—that enable participants to act
together more effectively to pursue shared objectives.”
• is an important factor influencing the quality of democracy, economic performance, health, etc.
• comes in different varieties
– Bonding: within groups
– Bridging: between groups
• is not always a good thing
e.g. power elites have high levels of social capital
• is measured by a mixture of
– public engagement (e.g. voting, political action)
– inter-personal association (e.g. socializing, volunteering)
– inter-personal trust
• Aim: To explain why performance of regional government in Italy is better in the North than the
South
• Explanation: Not the wealth of the North, but it’s civic-community characterized by,
– Horizontal, rather than heirarchical, networks.
– Values of solidarity, civic-engagement, cooperation and honesty.
– Strong conception of citizenship and feeling of efficacy.
• Demonstrates the causal influence of civic values by measuring them circa 1900 and showing they
influence current culture and governance. (Fig 5.6)
Jackman and Miller (APSR, 1996) uses the Putnam data to show that . . .
– The components of the measure are not sufficiently collinear (correlated with each other)
• When the indicators of institutional performance are taken one-by-one, few of them are significantly
correlated with either current or past levels of civic values (Table 3)
• confusing policy performance with democratic performance (his measure is of the former)
• cherry picking: Finding confirmatory evidence in history and ignoring problematic evidence such as
...
– variation within North and South
– the fact that city states were not so civic or republican
– early measures of civic values are correlated with progressive politics
• However post-materialism improves civic culture which is associated with democratic stability. (APSR,
Fig 6)
• Years of continuous democracy conflates political stability with the quality of democracy
• The indicators of culture when taken individually do not predict growth after controlling for wealth
(Table 6).
• Support for gradual reform (as opposed to the status-quo or revolution) is correlated with the level
of democracy
• Otherwise no evidence for association between culture and democracy in either direction. (Fig 4).
The nature of the relationship between either culture or social capital and the quality of democracy is
difficult to establish.