Language, Culture and Political Behaviour

The term “political culture” describes more or less stable individual and group attributes in terms of values, views, and preferences towards political decision-making (Almond 1956; Almond & Verba 1963; Pye & Verba 2015 [1965], Inglehart 1988; Wiseman 2007; Welch 1993). In general, studies analysing the extent to which such attributes influence political behaviour have focused on “nations” as states – e.g. the US, UK, Germany, Italy and Mexico, in Almond & Verba’s (1963) pathbreaking primer. Variation across cultural communities within nation-states, however, has received much less attention (cf. e.g. Lijphart 1979). Language as a particularly obvious – and necessary (Brubaker 2013, 5) – manifestation of culture, and its consequences for politics have equally been the focus of scholarly investigations. Much like nationalism studies (cf. e.g. Zimmer 2003, 8f.), one debate here has been between those emphasising the activating role of political elites in mobilising along linguistic differences, on the one hand, and those who insist on the primordial character of culture and ensuing differences between – in this case – linguistic groups. However, while most scholars agree that one’s mother tongue matters at least on certain issues and at certain times, the reasons why this is the case are less clear (e.g. Wildavsky 1987, Eckstein 1988). Language influences the way we think, who we socialise with, the extent and kind of information we obtain, the cues we seek and follow, and the type of rational calculations we make (Laitin 1977). Yet which of these factors or stages in individual decision-making dominates, how the interact, and what differences and similarities there are across groups within and between states remain to be explored. Few other contexts are as fruitful for the exploration of differences in political culture across linguistic communities as federations. One strand in the literature (Livingston 1952; Erk 2008) even regards federalism as the very consequence of inter-group differences and the need to both protect cultural diversity and create political unity. In turn, federations are said to be unable to actually operate in practice without a corresponding “federal political culture”, by which is meant a combination of tolerance of diversity, higher acceptance of inequality, preference for non-centralisation and willingness to cooperate both horizontally and vertically (e.g. Duchacek 1987, Cole et al. 2004, Burgess 2009, Kincaid & Cole 2010, Brown 2012, Jedwab & Kincaid 2019). What makes a federation – and indeed any kind of political system – work in practice is that citizens accept its basic rules and principles of operation and overtly or tacitly participate in actually exercising them. At the same time, no system of rule will forever remain the same; change is bound to occur both informally and informally (e.g. Dardanelli et al. 2019a, 2019b). That is particularly the case for federal political systems where not only different parties and groups vie for power but also different levels of government and groups with a territorial basis. In this regard, important insights from research at the intersection of federalism and political behaviour are that different linguistic communities have different political preferences. Hence, this section will be devoted to different areas of political culture, behaviour and federalism. Panels and the papers composing them should address at least one of the following questions: • Do citizens speaking a minority language have fundamentally different political values and attitudes compared to majorities, ceteris paribus? Has this changed over time? • In what policy domains (e.g. foreign affairs, social policy, health) do we encounter the starkest differences or similarities and how can these be explained? • Do we find systematic similarities in political values and attitudes across the same language groups from different states (e.g. French-speaking Belgians, Canadians and Swiss?) and why is that so? • How do minority members – both ordinary citizens or political leaders – reconcile the dilemma between demanding centralisation (to ensure redistribution and equality) and decentralisation (to protect cultural diversity)? • Do majority and/or minority language groups perceive territorial autonomy as a threat or an opportunity for the realization of their political preferences?