Democratic Crisis and Political Culture: The Cognitive Dimension

Political culture first emerged into political science in the 1960s as a component of the rapidly expanding ‘empirical theory of democracy’, in Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture. Despite subsequently being applied to a variety of non-democratic regime types, such as Soviet-style communism, the concept's linkage with democracy persisted, though it became more an explanation of democracy’s developing trajectory (as in the work of Ronald Inglehart) than its necessary precondition. But this later and more optimistic view of the ongoing ‘consolidation’ of democracy (an under-explored political-cultural phenomenon itself), has more recently come into question, as threats like ‘deconsolidation’, ‘backsliding’, ‘populism’ and in general democratic crisis have become apparent. In the meantime, the concept of political culture has been much debated, and indeed in some respects has been superseded by more specific conceptual coinages and research foci, such as political trust and polarization. Despite its substantial empirical yield, such parcelization of political culture analysis risks neglecting important aspects of the original more comprehensive concept. One of these is the cognitive dimension, or the aspect of belief. The cognitive dimension has been central to democratic theory since its origins, in that Plato's classical anti-democratic argument itself had a firmly cognitive basis (the incapacity of the demos to acquire true knowledge, and hence the need for an epistocracy). More recent thinkers such as Mill and Tocqueville took a more positive view of the capacity of the populace, eventuating in the theory of ‘cognitive mobilization’, which linked the consolidation of democracy with rising education and more rapid diffusion of information. It was also central to the concept of political culture promoted by Almond and Verba, who (in a still conventional move) conceived of attitudes as falling into three types, cognitive, evaluative and affective, and sought to measure all of them. Moreover, the current crisis has itself stimulated a literature with a seemingly cognitive focus, that of ‘post-truth’. But this idea, for a time a fashionable one among pundits and commentators, has received insufficient theoretical articulation. If anything, there has been a shift of academic focus away from a concern with empirical beliefs and towards values and emotions. The rapidly growing field of ‘affective polarization’ illustrates this, as does ethnographic work such as that of Arlie Hochschild. But there is, evidently, a significant problem in the cognitive dimension, which one might characterize as the erosion of cognitive authority – or to be more precise, its pluralization. The process can be recognized as a consequence of democratization as well as a threat to it, as argued in the author’s 2013 book Hyperdemocracy. This paper will press the argument for a renewed emphasis on the cognitive dimension within political culture research, in part by recovering some of the pioneering arguments of the earliest political culture studies (whose anxiety about democracy has again become plausible), but also by considering the mechanisms of belief formation as a crucial element of the dynamics of political culture, developing the author’s earlier theoretical work on the concept.