• Economic progress, according to cultural modernization theory, causes certain cultural changes, and these cultural changes lead to democracy. The establishment of a "civic culture" is a significant cultural shift. Many people believe that the development of civic culture is a need for democracy's effective emergence and sustainability. The empirical evidence in support of the cultural modernization theory, as we demonstrate, is mixed.

• Some attachments appear to come more from a sense of natural—some might say spiritual—affinity than through social contact for nearly every person, in almost every civilization, at almost every time.” Primordialists believe that culture exists before and after political activity and that it is unaffected by it. To put it another way, culture influences political conduct by giving intellectual rules for collective action, rather than the other way around.

Classical Culture Arguments: Mill and Montesquieu

• In the 1990s, the ideas of Aeschylus would be repeated in what became known as the Asian values debate. Although there have long been hints that some cultures are compatible with democracy, it was Montesquieu in the seventeenth century who was the first to speak in length about the significance of culture to political systems.

• John Stuart Mill similarly claimed that various cultures were adapted to different political institutions in his debate titled "To What Extent Forms of Government Are a Matter of Choice." “No one believes that every person is capable of functioning in every type of institution,” he said.

• However, Mill's views should not be interpreted as evidence that particular cultures are incompatible with political systems such as democracy. Mill, in fact, is a harsh critic of those who argues that culture precludes political actors from “choosing” the institutions they want. Despite his belief that "people are more readily convinced to do, and do more easily, what they are already used to," he believes that "people are more easily induced to do, and do more easily, what they are already used to."

• The statements made by Montesquieu and Mill about culture and democracy highlight a number of possible flaws that still plague some cultural debates today. How would you put Mill's and Montesquieu's statements to the test? What would the hypotheses be like? One of them should be stated in a form that can be tested.

Does Democracy Require a Civic Culture?

• With their book The Civic Culture, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba revived the discussion between culture and democracy in the 1960s. Despite the fact that they understood the necessity of economic growth for democracy, they felt that only culture could supply the “psychological underpinning of democratization,” and that without it, democratic survival was unlikely.

• Political culture, according to Almond and Verba, is formed by how people think and feel about the political system. They thought that studying culture could be done by conducting surveys and asking people how they felt about political institutions, players, and processes; a country's political culture was just the distribution of these survey replies.

7.1

• We are particularly concerned about how political culture influences the birth and survival of democracy in this chapter. Several academics have suggested that political culture has an impact on democracy's overall functioning.

• Putnam used twelve different measures to assess government performance, including cabinet stability, the number of daycare facilities and family clinics, spending on urban development, and the response of municipal bureaucracy to information requests, among others.

• Many policymakers were energized by Putnam's work on Italy. “The building of social capital [and civic culture] has been accepted as a solution for social problems as disparate as encouraging economic growth in Africa and halting urban deterioration in Los Angeles, from the World Bank to city hall.”

Debate over the Direction of Causality

• Inglehart (1990) and Almond and Verba's findings have sparked a dispute in the literature regarding the precise causal link between culture, economic progress, and democracy. Scholars on one side of the argument say that economic development leads to cultural change, which leads to democratization.

7.2

• The Freedom House metrics, which we examined in Chapter 5, are also used to determine the amount of democracy. Inglehart and Welzel investigate if the change in a country's democracy score between 1987 and 1996 can be explained in terms of its level of societal development and self-expression culture.

• We now provide the findings of a reanalysis of the Inglehart and Welzel data, which indicate that things are a little more difficult than this. Remember that cultural values have a part in the tale of value as a mediating variable.

• The findings of our mediation study provide some credence to Inglehart and Welzel's thesis that social evolution impacts democracy through a culture of self-expression.