1 Political Culture in Southern Europe: Searching for Exceptionalism
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Is there a Southern European political culture? Is there something specific and distinctive about the prevailing patterns of political attitudes and values in Greece, Italy, and Portugal and Spain, that in some way distinguishes those cases among Western democracies in general, or among European democracies in particular? There are some reasons to believe that may precisely be the case. Discussions about Italian political culture have long been pervaded by assumptions of a general prevalence – in spite of North-South ‘cultural dualism ’ (Banfield 1958; Putnam 1993) − of a syndrome of attitudes of political alienation, clientelism, particularism, discontent, and distrust (Almond and Verba 1963), which has shown signs of remarkable persistence through time (Inglehart 1988 and 2003). And in view of the literature on the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish cases − even that which is based on modern social-scientific study of political attitudes through surveys of representative samples of the p
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Is there a Southern European political culture? Is there something specific and distinctive about the prevailing patterns of political attitudes and values in Greece, Italy, and Portugal and Spain, that in some way distinguishes those cases among Western democracies in general, or among European democracies in particular? There are some reasons to believe that may precisely be the case. Discussions about Italian political culture have long been pervaded by assumptions of a general prevalence – in spite of North-South ‘cultural dualism ’ (Banfield 1958; Putnam 1993) − of a syndrome of attitudes of political alienation, clientelism, particularism, discontent, and distrust (Almond and Verba 1963), which has shown signs of remarkable persistence through time (Inglehart 1988 and 2003). And in view of the literature on the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish cases − even that which is based on modern social-scientific study of political attitudes through surveys of representative samples of the p
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