Political Culture, Democracy and Democratic Crisis

This paper will examine the extent to which the concept of political culture can illuminate the current democratic crisis. The question arises for several reasons, firstly because the early use of the concept was strongly associated with concerns about the survival and consolidation of democracy, and later with political culture’s role in the improvement and intensification of democracy on the part of increasingly 'critical citizens'. We might therefore ask whether the current crisis of democracy simply invalidates that earlier work, or whether it instead offers incentives to revise it in a productive manner. Secondly, two of the most prominent analytical responses have been made to the signs of crisis have been ‘post-truth’ and populism, and their significance has recently been expressed as follows: ‘post-truth populism involves a transformation of contemporary political culture, with far-reaching effects on key areas of political life’. We might reasonably ask what analytical purchase is offered by the concept of political culture in such a claim. Thirdly and most importantly, treatments of democratic crisis have oscillated between the deployment of general concepts such as 'populism' and 'backsliding', and a focus on particular cases. Since a reconciliation of general with comparative analysis is obviously desirable, we might turn to political culture theory as a basis of this, since it too was marked by a combination of theoretical and comparative empirical analysis. The paper will approach the question it poses, after a more theoretical discussion of the presence of comparative, sociological and ontological elements in existing political culture research, by paying attention to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, which can be seen (as it was by Gabriel Almond) as anticipating political culture research itself. This was indeed not only for the methodological reason that Almond cited, but for the more relevant reason that in _Democracy in America_ Tocqueville sought to derive general theoretical lessons from a specific case study. How he achieved this synthesis will be one focus, but in addition several of his substantive arguments and findings deserve re-emphasis for their relevance to the particular features of today’s ‘post-truth’ and ‘populist’ environment. His discussion of the relationship of law and democracy is one example, offering illuminating insight into current American democratic challenges, as well as other cases. Tocqueville’s discussion of the social sources of belief was also far ahead of its time, anticipating today’s ‘social epistemology’, whose relevance to the phenomenon of post-truth politics will also be addressed in the paper. Through this discussion, a reconciliation and development of the arguments of two books relevant to the paper’s theme, _The Theory of Political Culture_ and _Hyperdemocracy_, which is of interest especially to the present author because he wrote them, and perhaps of more general interest too, will be effected.