The Relationship Between the Citizens and the State in Political Culture Theory. A Methodology Research Approach

Classic political culture theory is based on the idea that, in a democratic political system, the political attitudes influence the polity operation and dynamics: citizens as well as elite are involved in the operation of a democratic polity by means of their political culture, and political participation. In order to transform political culture theory into a theory about how the relationship between the citizens (society) and the state actually works, how can it be explained and how can it be employed in modelling the dynamics of both society and polity, we need to achieve, first of all, a common conceptual and operational background for the citizens’ attitudes toward the state, and for the state itself. In this paper we present a modelling approach of the relationship between the citizens and the state (polity) based on Luhmann’s theory of communicating systems. On this theoretical background an ontology of meaning can be defined. As they communicate and change meaning, the systems develop a structural coupling. Political culture could thus be viewed as a system which generates and dynamically modifies meaning as it communicates with the political system. Both systems share structural subsystems, like the value system. The approach is meant to provide support to the idea that political attitudes and political systems each work with several internal and external models, where by model we mean a subsystem representing some unidimensional projection of the system itself and which internally influences its very operation. Several internal models are defined for political attitudes, such as: value model, belief model, affect model, cognitive model. Several internal models are defined for the state (polity), such as: value model, norm model, power model, legitimacy model. As all these systems and their subsystems generate, communicate, and change meaning, the relationship between the political attitudes system and the state (polity) system is defined in terms of meaning and operates on meaning structure and vectors. The conceptual architecture is simulated and tested with an agent-based system. The preliminary outcomes show that the meaning-based relationship between the political culture system and the political system can be operationalized as a structural coupling which explains how state operation is influenced by mass attitudes. The simulations are aimed at achieving a virtual experimental framework for studying both political attitudes and polities as complex system with self-organization and self-referential characteristics. Further developments regard the study of both political culture and polities as complex adaptive systems with various degrees of anticipatory capabilities. Case studies are developed on Eastern and Western European political systems with the aim of achieving a complex simulation tool for analyzing stability of democratic political systems.