The Citizens and the State: The Relationship Between Polity Dynamics and Political Culture

This Section aims at approaching the issues of polity (state) structure, operation, and dynamics from the perspectives of political culture theory and associated research methodologies. The Section is focused on the relevance and utility of political culture as a complex tool for studying the relationship between the individuals (citizens) and polities (state). In the contemporary world context and under highly unstable and volatile political evolutions, polities and their geopolitical contexts need to be approached in their very complexity in order to understand the role individuals as well as whole societies play in polities dynamic evolutions. A key issue in approaching the relationship between the citizens and the state in a democracy basically concerns the ways in which individual citizens achieve and update their political attitudes toward political objects, namely structures, incumbents and policies, which describe state institutional structure, functionalities, and actors. Depending on where these political objects reside and are active in the structural, functional and communication architecture of the state, the political attitudes of the citizens describe their political interest and active participation in the actual operation of the state. From this point of view, the relationship between citizens and the state appears as a two-way relationship as involved in the “upward” (bottom-up) flow of policy making, which addresses the feedback from the society to the state in governance terms, as well as in the “downward” (top-down) flow of policy enforcement, which addresses the state capacity to respond to the social demand and to influence individual behaviours and preferences at the micro-level. A constantly approached research problem has been the identification of the mechanisms and processes which are actually involved in relating the dynamics of the interest and active (individual and collective) political participation with the specific dynamics and evolutions of the state. However, the true challenge has been to prove whether the citizens’ political cognitions, values, beliefs and attitudes have a role to play in the operation of the state, thus explaining the emergence of complex political phenomena, like political instability. Moreover, this challenge becomes even stronger if the real context covers not only democracies with long tradition, but also autocracies of various types. In this case, the complexity of the targeted political scenarios scales up dramatically, thus escaping the causality issue of the classic political culture theory and achieving unpredictable characteristics which are even more difficult to explain though they could only increase the amount of civic, political and scientific interest in this area of research. The fall of communism in the eastern half of Europe in 1989 is one such complex political scenario which has reinforced the interest in political culture theory as a means to explain the political regime change in the CEE countries. This challenge becomes even greater if latest achievements and inquiries in the state studies could be taken into consideration: state-building and state-failure, fragile states and failed states, post-failure state re-construction and state development, conflict management, peace formation, polity disintegration and the emergence of new polities. This Section aims at bringing to the front several matters of political theory and political methodology which could enhance a consistent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach of the relationship between the citizens and of the consequences the dynamics of this relationship could have for both citizens and the state. The Section is organized on four main panel research areas and issues which aim to cover the most interesting aspects from the political culture perspective: Panel Area #1: Qualitative Polity Modelling and Political Culture This panel area suggests the approach on polity modelling as a complex tool for studying polity internal dynamics and operations, polity stability, polity resilience against misrule and various categories of threats, and efficiency in guiding societal development. The literature on qualitative polity modelling approaches also issues in international relations from the classic Westphalian model to the global polity model, power and elite studies. Panel Area #2: State Models, Governance Models and Political Culture Polity modelling has been usually based on the concepts of ‘territory’, ‘power’, or ‘welfare’, trying to explain polity stability or instability associated to political regime change, or polity weakness or resilience against external threat. Current polity modelling paradigms extend the modelling competences and their explanatory power so as to cover the complexity of the relationships between political power and leadership, governance, society and political culture. Panel Area #3: State-building and Democracy-building – Legitimacy and Trust: A political culture approach to political stability in the Eastern and Central European new democracies Political culture has also proved its decisive role in shaping the forces able to drive polity dynamics by means of political participation, collective action, and political attitudes. Intensively employed with the explicit goal of explaining political phenomenology of democratization in Eastern Europe, qualitative research on political culture has got strong arguments for revising its relationship with polity studies in terms of democracy-building processes in former autocratic (ex-communist) polities after the fall of the iron curtain. Panel Area #4: Contentious politics, political violence and political culture Research on various types of political violence as well as state/governmental coercion has been of special interest in the areas of conflict studies, but also in subareas of political culture, like political attitudes, behaviour and leadership and their impact on polity instability, polity failure or disintegration, fragile polities and the emergence of new polities. Panel Area #5: Polity computational and simulation modelling from a political culture perspective Many areas of social and political studies have included during the past decades relevant interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research literature covering sophisticated combinations of sociology, political sciences, or ancient history and archaeology with computer sciences, sciences of the artificial, and sciences of complexity. Political science could not escape the tremendous challenge of employing advanced technologies. In particular, polity modelling has experienced a strong impetus from acquiescing the virtual experiment, that is, a research methodology consisting in computer simulation based on artificial agents.