About
The Standing Group on Political Culture fills a gap in ECPR’s specialist coverage of political science subfields, since political culture research has been a prominent theme in the discipline for several decades. Nevertheless, since its inception in the early 1960s political culture research has been controversial, not only in respect of its substantive findings (concerning, for instance, political culture’s relationship with democracy), but also its methods, its methodology (the justification of its methods) and its political implications. While the political culture research programme has been pronounced both ‘declining’ and ‘reviving’ several times, numerous currents of research that are closely related to it, investigating topics such as identity, trust, ideology, social construction, social imaginaries or collective memory, among others, have maintained the concept’s focus on subjective or cultural aspects of politics. Hence the field remains a vibrant one, even if the conceptual integration of its components and surrogates remains incomplete. The Standing Group, accordingly, takes an ecumenical view of political culture research and its methods, while at the same time promoting not only intellectual exchange but also theoretical consolidation.
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The Standing Group seeks to promote political culture research of all kinds, and to understand the relationship between political culture and related and cognate concepts or approaches. The concept itself also invites contributions inspired by adjacent disciplines, most obviously psychology, sociology and anthropology. The Standing Group embraces and advances the debate the concept has evoked, which has raised important questions about the very nature of political analysis. Furthermore, it seeks to overcome fragmentation and competitive specialization in the study of the cultural aspect of politics.
The Standing Group on Political Culture (2020), and the precursor Research Network, were founded by Camelia Florela Voinea (University of Bucharest).
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The Standing Group organizes well-populated Sections in the General Conference, as well as Workshops at the Joint Sessions. It has a well-established programme of monthly online lectures.
