How Convincing Are the Arguments of Robert Putnam And/Or Ronald Inglehart That Political

Schneider PO 830

Frederick Comparative Political Institutions

First Essay, 2192 words

How convincing are the arguments of Robert Putnam and/or Ronald Inglehart that political culture is an important determinant of policy outcomes?

2007/2008 University of Kent

The idea of political culture emerged in the 60’s with the publication of Civic Culture by Almond and Verba. It has then been criticized and forgotten and it revived one more time in the late 80’s and in the 90’s with the works of Inglehart and Putnam.

Before we start to analyse whether or not this return to political culture is legitimate, whether or nor Inglehart and Putnam are right arguing that political culture is essential in explaining policy outcomes, we should first define the central term of this question. A culture in general is a “set of beliefs and assumptions to cope with the problems of external adaptation and internal integration”[1]. So, political culture specifically is “a mind set which has the effect of limiting attention to less than the full range of alternative behaviors, problems, and solutions which are logically possible”[2]. In other words, political culture gives a collective framework to individuals in their political conceptions.

A lot of critics have been levelled to the political culture and to the use of this as an explanation factor. The debate is important because it is not only an academic problem, it can also solve practical policy-making problems. The question is not only “To what extent can we say that Putnam and Inglehart are convincing saying that political culture is an important determinant of policy outcome?” but also “How can the government influence social capital to improve policy outcomes?”.

Before we start to discuss the arguments of Inglehart and Putnam, we should add some general elements about political culture. First, one must know what is the framework of analysis. It is important to stress that it can concern a whole country but also different regions of a national state.[3] The general idea is that there is a geographic variation. Second, the assumptions contained in political culture concern matters like the principle goals of political life, the “positiveness” or “negativeness” of the political domain, trust, spiritedness, and whether gains should be maximised or losses minimized in the reflection about policy issues. Third, political culture explanation is seen as the opposite of structural problems/assets explanation. Structural is related to institutions, social classes…

We will argue generally that Inglehart and Putnam share a common view of political culture. They pursue the same goal in their writings and use similar arguments. The first thing they do is to prove that there are some general trends, that there are cross-cultural differences in both: potential explanations and “results”. Inglehart tries to show that there are general trends about satisfaction with its own life. He uses eurobarometer survey data to show that some nations (like Danes for example) were always very satisfied with their own lives on a fifteen-year long period while others were characterized by low satisfaction rates on the same period (Italians for example).[4] This is supposed to show that some peoples have a more positive approach to life, which makes them inclined to civic-ness, political participation and to understand and to accept difficult reforms.

In the “results”, there are also huge differences. The “results” concern as well the way political institutions work as socio-economic development and the level of welfare state. Putnam takes different “results” variables in his book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. He takes twelve different indicators including policy processes indicators and policy effectiveness indicators and calls the whole “institutional performance”. He shows that Southern regions and Northern regions have very different performances in this area in Italy.[5]

So, then, of course, the most difficult thing is to show that there is a direct link between the hypothetic causes and the hypothetic consequences. Inglehart tries to show for example that religion and as well the emergence of market economy as strong participation and interest in politics are related. He uses the argument of Max Weber that the early emergence of capitalism in protestant countries is due to the protestant ethic. He adds that this early emergence of capitalism led faster to modern democratic regimes, which explains that democratic culture is now stronger in these countries.[6]

Civic-ness plays a major role in political culture according to Putnam and Inglehart. According to Putnam, civic engagement is “interest in public issues and devotion to public causes”.[7] He stresses that this should not be mistaken with altruism. In the civic community citizens simply pursue self interest properly understood. The ideas of tolerance, trust and solidarity are essential in a civic community.[8] Trust is automatically linked with honesty: if one is honest, he can be trusted. If a nation is honest, all its citizens can trust countrymen. This is the idea of diffuse norms of reciprocity: I don’t help you because I want you to help me next but because I know that you will help someone else and that this person will help someone else and that at the end someone will help me.[9] Putnam shows that these kinds of virtuous circles exist in Northern Italy and that they are lacking in Southern Italy. In the contrary, there is a vicious circle in the South: I know that no one respects public services, so I don’t respect it neither.

According to Putnam, this difference in social capital is the only one reason of the development gap between the North and the South in Italy. He says that alternative explanations for institutional success/failure such as data concerning economic conflicts, the distinction between conflictual and consensual regions or the polarization of party system don’t show any evidence which could explain this gap.[10]

Generally, Inglehart and Putnam criticize the idea according to which modernity and welfare are the enemies of civic-ness. They even emphasize that there is a positive correlation between social capital and economic development. Civic-ness influences socio-economic development and institutional performance but not vice versa.[11]

So, we see an idyllic vision of political culture. All of these arguments are partly true but the importance of political culture is exaggerated. Sidney Tarrow addresses some crucial critics to Putnam’s Making Democracy Work. He claims that it is totally untrue that social capital is the only one explanation of differentiated development in Italy. He explains that there are many structural causes explaining why South Italy is less developed. He argues that the South is dominated by the North since unification. In the first years of unified Italy, the South was governed by North governors. The fragility of some Southern economic sectors has not been taken into account during unification, the immediate custom union has destroyed them very quickly.[12]

Generally, the reproach levelled to political culture theorists is that they underestimate structural factors. Even before Putnam and Inglehart, some critics were directed to political culture because it was obvious that you have to find out first whether or not there is an institutional explanation before you start to look for cultural explanation. Moreover, political culture seldom operates alone and is seldom direct. You cannot really say that institutional explanations and cultural explanations are competing, they are rather complementing themselves. We must add that political culture doesn’t explain everything. It can provide an explanation to stability, democracy and socio-economic development but can hardly explain individual attitudes and behaviours. It can have an influence on policy issues but it depends on the area of the issue.[13]

So, we have seen that Putnam and Inglehart are right arguing that political culture can influence policy outcomes even if they exaggerate. However, they don’t claim that political culture is immutable and that it can’t change. Therefore, it would be interesting to see what are these changes and how they explain it.

First of all, it should be stressed that political culture is a matter of long time, it is gradual. This concerns as well the consequences of political culture as its own shift. Long-term economic development depends on political culture whereas it has no influence on short term economic policies. Moreover, social capital can be the link leading from economic development to democracy but only in the long term.[14] Concerning the political culture itself, we can emphasize the fact that while institutional change has been immediate after the Second World War in Germany, it has taken some time to German political culture to change radically.[15]

Putnam even goes back to middle age to explain the clash in political culture between North and South in Italy. He explains that the failure of the Byzantine model in the South led to the emergence of an absolutist Norman Kingdom while the failure of the German model in the North led to local forces power. This diffusion of power in the North led to the development of civic-ness, which is still present now.[16]

There were different common or similar tendencies in the shift of social capital in Western countries in the past. Civic political culture emerged in the 19th century and this had common causes in many Western countries: the apparition of bourgeoisie, the emergence of preconditions which facilitated interest and participation in politics and general support for democracy and increasing trust towards politicians.[17] Then, in the 1960’s what is called the “post-materialist phenomenon” occurred.[18] The middle class changed and became a pro-active social class, age cleavage became as important as social cleavage and non-economic issues emerged. Students protests in May 1968 in France can be considered as a symbol of that: young people protested against the dehumanising way of life, which has nothing to do with economic policies. In the last decades, a decline of social capital is observed with decreasing electoral turnout, public engagement, union membership and church attendance.[19] Inglehart and Putnam speak about intergenerational shift.

However, does it mean that Inglehart and Putnam think that there is determinism and that political cultures tend to be similar? Certainly not. All countries are not concerned to the same extent with the changes, some are not even concerned at all. If we take Sweden for example, it is true that the “organized” social capital has eroded which means that trust between labour and business is not as before but some other elements of social capital have developed. Social organizations and study circles developed and union membership rate didn’t decrease. Putnam says that the fact that people there don’t watch TV as much as in other countries and the deep roots of Swedish social capital belong to the main factors explaining that.[20]

And this is very important because it means that social capital can be influenced according to Putnam. After his strong critic of the decline of civic-ness in America in Bowling Alone[21], he proposes a set of tools that the government can use to face this problem in Better Together. He explains that different policies can have spill-over effects. He encourages the public sector to cooperate with charities in creating social capital. It should enable them to communicate with people, to encourage them to join it. Promoting education is also an important element of social capital building: well-educated people are more likely to be civic. To create bridging social capital consisting on bringing together people from different social backgrounds is essential in fighting segregation in the society. Putnam incites to create common spaces through developing urban planning, local media and technology.[22]

Putnam and Inglehart seem to be more convincing on the evolution of political culture than on the influence of political culture on outcomes. It is perfectly true that political cultures evolve but that they evolve parallel. This means for example that there is a general tendency to increase social expenditure, including in the Unites States and in Sweden, but also that social expenditure is still much higher in Sweden than in the United States. There is also a general tendency to pay more attention to postmaterialist issues such as ecology but this issue is more important in Germany than in France, as it was the case thirty years ago. We also agree with Putnam saying that the government can play a crucial role in improving social capital because it has some basic tools like its budget and legislation implementation, which means that it can educate people, not only at school but in different modern ways, and influence social norms and rules.

To conclude, we can say that bringing back political culture to political science was a great achievement of Putnam and Inglehart. It is true that political culture is one of the factors explaining policy outcomes. However, they seem to be too ambitious: social capital is only one of the explaining variables and it can’t explain everything. And this is good news actually because it means that we, human beings, are not robots following the rules of our hard disk called “culture” and because it means that there is no determinism of socio-economic development (a poor country can always do better, it is not conditioned by political culture).

We perceive some inner contradictions in this reasoning. Putnam says that the North/South cleavage in political culture in Italy is very old and that it hasn’t changed so much. He has said that this provokes less performance efficiency and has spoken about vicious circles. But how reconcile that with the idea that the State can change social capital? If it has failed during centuries, how will it make it now?