Political culture and the problem of the state

TL;DRAbstract

This book is about a type of political culture. This fashionable concept is hard to define. Leonard Schapiro defines it as ‘a kind of amalgam of habits, traditions and attitudes which gives its character to a political system’. Keith Baker, in his introduction to the first volume of a three-volume work which constitutes a major attempt to place the concept of political culture at the centre of historical analysis, has sought to construct a more elaborate definition. Having defined politics as ‘the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make one upon another’, he conceives of political culture as ‘the set of discourses and practices characterizing that activity in any given community’. It is what ‘gives meaning to political activity’, while itself being shaped by that practice. What all definitions agree upon is that the concept of political culture directs attention towards meaning as the foca

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