Robert C. Tucker - Political Culture

Political Culture

Tucker distinguished between “real” and “ideal” culture and between “macro-level” and “micro-level” culture. “Real” cultural patterns consist of “prevalent practices in a society”; “ideal” patterns consist of “accepted norms, values, and beliefs.” A “macro-level” culture is a society’s “complex totality of patterns and sub-patterns” of traditions and orientations; “micro-level” cultural elements are “individual patterns and clusters of them.” Cultural patterns are “ingrained by custom in the conduct and thoughtways of large numbers of people.” More like an anthropologist than a political scientist, Tucker included behavior as well as values, attitudes, and beliefs in his concept of culture.

Tucker affirmed that “a strength of the concept of political culture as an analytic tool (in comparison with such macro concepts as modernization and development) is its micro/macro character.” He studied these four characteristics individually and in various juxtapositions, configurations, and interactions. And he hypothesized that different components of political culture “can have differing fates in times of radical change,” especially in revolutionary transitions from one type of political system to another and from one stage of political development to another.

Tucker corroborated this hypothesis with evidence from the Soviet Union. In 1987, he affirmed: “The pattern of thinking one thing in private and being conformist in public will not vanish or radically change simply because glasnost has come into currency as a watchword of policy. Changing the pattern will take time and effort and, above all, some risk-taking openness in action by citizens who speak up … forsake the pattern of pretence which for so long has governed public life in their country.” In 1993, he elaborated: “Although communism as a belief system … is dying out, very many of the real culture patterns of the Soviet period, including that very “’bureaucratism’ that made a comeback after the revolutionary break in 1917, are still tenaciously holding on.” And, in 1995, he added: “The banning of the CPSU, the elimination of communism as a state creed, and the breakup of the USSR as an imperial formation marked in a deep sense the ending of the Soviet era. But in part because of the abruptness with which these events came about, much of the statist Soviet system and political culture survived into the 1990s.”

As Tucker saw it, the “ideal” and “macro” political cultures of the Communist party collapsed with the Soviet Union, but the “real” and “micro” political cultures of tsarist and Soviet Russia adapted to the emerging governmental, commercial, legal, and moral cultures of post-Soviet Russia. He underscored the impact of tsarist political culture on Soviet political culture and, in turn, their combined impact on post-Soviet political culture. Tucker was not a historical determinist, but he observed that centuries-old statism was alive and well in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.