Lecture 4

• Political Science: Session 4 focuses on societal culture and politics, with lecturer Dr. Ammar Maleki.
• Fish is a subject that can be studied on CANVAS.
• Read/Listen to the international news
• Make summaries for yourself!
• Democracy: definition, criteria, advantages, levels of democracy, models of democracy, measuring democracy, flawed vs full democracy, aggregative(majoritarian) vs integrative (consensual) democracy, forms of authoritarianism.
• Diversity: individuals, group differences, national cultures.
• Culture: as a pattern of behaviors, as a synthesis of a civilization’s elements, societal culture, shared motives, values, beliefs and interpretations that guide the way social actors select actions, evaluate people and events, and explain their actions and evaluations, or simply shared values and beliefs in a given group or software (collective programming) of the Mind.
• Cultural values are durable and change gradually while situational attitudes are transitory and change fast.
• Causes of cultural differences: groups differ in environment, group-wise social structure, moral feelings, learning.
• Culture Matters: cultural values are rarely visible (behaviors and actions are), they have always a hidden influence, especially under stress.
• Hofstede, Minkov, Inglehart, Schwartz, and GLOBE Project are examples of researchers who have measured societal culture.
• National Culture: Beware! is a warning by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1997.
• Dimensionalization of National Culture is done using public surveys, questionnaires and data analysis.
• A real story is a report that appeared in the New York Times claiming that a meeting between the Secretary of States of the USA, James Baker, and the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, miscommunicated.
• Cultural differences often cause miscommunications and conflict, with greater conflict when the two cultures are very different than when they are similar.
• Many Dimensions of Culture are identified by Maleki & de Jong, 2014.
• A war story is a report that appeared in the New York Times claiming that on January 9, 1991, at a meeting where the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, met the Secretary of States of the USA, James Baker, they miscommunicated.
• Democratic models and regime types are success or failure of policy transfer.
• Technically, this difference is called “cultural distance”.
• Cultural Dimension (1) includes Interpersonal ties: Self-perception as individual or as part of a group, Individualism vs. Collectivism, and Content-oriented vs. Context-oriented.
• Culture and Politics: different approaches, approach 1: Cultural relativists, each culture is unique and cultural values and social practices cannot be compared and classified; reject any cultural explanation for variation in politics, e.g anthropologists, approach 2: Culturalists, (mainly or only) culture matters in human development and political democracy; good vs bad culture, approach 3: Constrained relativism, stand between relativists and culturalists.
• Cultural influence on Politics: societal culture may affect or co-explain consolidation of, transition to, and support for democracy, concept of Political Culture and Civic Culture, Political Culture: The sum of individual and group values, beliefs, attitudes, norms and expectations regarding politics and government, Political communication and behavior, Opting or adopting different institutional setting.
• Samuel Huntington, Amartya Sen, Max Weber, and Ronald Inglehart are skeptics who argue that democracy is not feasible in certain cultures.
• In a society where laws cannot be respected, they should be changed.
• Max Weber's theory is based on the idea that “a country does not have to be considered fit for democracy, rather it has to be fit through democracy”.
• Secular - Rational values include respect for tradition, national pride and religion.
• Democracy can take root only in specific culture/civilization according to skeptics.
• Contestation in democracy can be aggregative or integrative.
• Participation in democracy can be spectative or participative.
• Democracy as a universal value is advocated by universalists.
• Most people can be trusted.
• Democracy is only feasible in Protestant countries according to Weber.
• A country does not have to be considered fit for democracy, rather it has to be fit through democracy according to Sen, 2000.
• Social capital refers to human social networks and contacts that facilitate interpersonal trust and cooperation within and between individuals and groups.
• Amartya Sen, a universalist, argues that democracy can exist in all cultures.
• Individualism is a core value for having democracy according to Lipset.
• Political culture is defined as a culture in which “most people accept the obligation to participate in politics while acknowledging the authority of the state and its right to take decisions”.
• Democracy is feasible in different cultures.
• Political trust is trust in political institutions and powerholders.
• Democracy is not feasible in Islamic countries according to Huntington.