Political Culture (Research) and Citizenship (Studies) between Functionalism and Constructivism

Political culture is often conceptualised as a factor for the stabilisation of democracy and democratic citizenship. Culture is thus conceived as a functional dimension, but often without critically analysing the design of concrete political cultures in regard to universality and particularity. The questions about "the content what has to be diffused" and "how much of what must be present in a country" (Almond/Verba 1963: 9f.) remain unanswered (Gabriel 2009: 27). In the political practice, the cultural concept of the dominant community prevails as the reference and is increasingly used as an instrument of political governance (cf. Mouritson et al. 2019 on "Leitkultur debates"). However, the particularisation of political culture sabotages the original intention of its system-stabilising functionality. The preference for one group as a reference leads not only to a representational deficit, which promotes mistrust and non-identification of the marginalised, but also to identity- and culturally splitting divisions in political discourse between the 'normals' and the 'others' (in Germany prominent with regard to East Germans and migrants as the 'others': Foroutan/Hensel 2020). In order for political culture to be truly system-stabilising, the reverse view becomes important: the role of citizenship on building political culture. Here, the constructivist paradigm alongside the functionalist paradigm offers at least three advantages. 1) The paradigmatic expansion enables deeper analyses that examine the various instances of the democratic "feedback loop" (Easton 1965: 28) and thus make new understandings possible. Therefore, the hitherto predominant quantitative research needs to be accompanied by a qualitative programme, bringing into focus not only the effects (trust, support) but also their causes. The focus here is on narrative, symbolic, and material communication elements that often trigger heated disputes. 2) The expansion of the empirical perspectives offers conceptual and empirical connections between citizenship and political culture research. On the one hand, citizenship models emphasise various rights as a prerequisite for political inclusion (Marshall 1950); on the other hand, they point out that status, feeling and practice are also constitutive (Osler/Starkey 2005: 10ff.). Therefore, theories of the sociology of emotions and praxis lead to new understandings, e.g. with regard to emotional regimes (Reddy 2001), the relevance of critique (Norris 1999) and the (non-)acceptance of participation and protest forms. 3) Overall, the integration of the constructivist paradigm enables an extensive capacity for interconnection, which can transform the previous multidisciplinary coexistence into interdisciplinary cooperation (Marej 2020). For this purpose, political sociology (Holzer 2020; Kaina-Römmele 2004), political psychology (Brunner et al. 2004) and political anthropology (Shore/Wright/Però 2011; Pajo/Power 2017) are the most obvious options. Constructivist approaches of citizenship studies as well as broader discourses on the connection between culture and politics, can therefore enrich political culture research and strengthen its explanatory and predictive power. As a foundation for the proposed paradigmatic expansion, the ontological premises of homo oeconomicus (Giddens 1984; Lutz/White 1986), homo socio-oeconomicus (Lindenberg 1990) and homo culturalis (Panther/ Nutzinger 2004) are contrasted in order to clarify the social and cultural perspectives on the political and to strengthen the self-reflection of the research field.