Political Culture and Cultural Politics

Political culture was defined by the academics who introduced it into political science as a condition in the background of politics, forming its setting or its context, and thereby determining in some respects its variation from country to country, not active in day-to-day political conflict except in the sense of defining its scope. Political culture was not meant to replace the idea of public opinion, which in contrast was defined as fluctuating rapidly in time, voting intentions and evaluations of leaders, for example, tracking political achievements or failures. Nor was it intended to replace the concept of ideology, seen as a structure of attitudes but one that was distinctively non-consensual, instead providing broad alternative policy orientations which could be promoted or decried by different political parties. This conception, deployed initially in a comparative causal theory of politics and still often used that way, faces a methodological difficulty in that both public opinion and political culture (and ideology, when empirical researchers started to address it) were measured using attitude surveys. It was hard to see how the same instrument could measure such different things as the consensual background and the contested foreground of political subjectivity. The difficulty became more evident, and substantive rather than just methodological, when scholars began to notice, by the end of the 1960s, that a wider range of topics had become politically contested, which many understood as being ‘cultural’ in character. An influential attempt to accommodate this development within a theory claiming that political culture was relatively stable was that of Ronald Inglehart, who in a multi-decade programme of research argued that a slow change to a broader scope of contestation, involving what he called ‘postmaterial values’, was occurring through the mechanism of generational replacement under conditions of growing economic security. Even so, it was plainly conceptually problematic that such ‘cultural’ issues were now to be seen in the foreground of politics, and not only in its background. The conceptual problem grew yet more acute when in the early 1990s the cultural issues started to be defined as ‘culture wars’. Several theoretical formulations of this idea (initially a political rather than an academic intervention, which is a further complicating factor) were advanced, in which the thesis of consensual background political culture was replaced by one of fundamental division in world view, especially in the United States. Critiques of the thesis notwithstanding, by now it has become commonplace to think of culture as a political battleground, perhaps the main one. In this ‘cultural politics’, as it is often called (‘identity politics’ is another common description), culture is very much in the foreground. But this demands what has not yet been provided, a theoretical account of the relationship between political culture and cultural politics. How can these similar-sounding phrases describe such different phenomena, and, more substantively, what is the process by which culture moves between background and foreground of politics? This most challenging theoretical problem of political culture research is the topic of the proposed paper.